Thoughts please

[hawkeye13]

Hi folks,

I'm currently working on publishing a small reference atlas and would like some opinions. It has always been one of my life goals to publish some type of book and since geography and cartography plays such a large part of my life, I figured this would be a good place to start. It also helps that I have access to most of the programs and data I need at work. I understand that I probably will not sell many of these and honestly if I’m the only one that ever buys a copy I will still be happy for attaining one of my goals, but at the same time my name is going to be attached to this thing forever so I want something I can be proud of, and this is where you guys come in...

I am planning on a simple kind of reference atlas that would be a useful addition to a house or office and appropriate for middle-high school students. Due to the cost of publishing this type of book I would like to ideally keep it to 20 - 25 pages including title page and references. So far I have finished a map of the world showing countries and another showing elevation and certain well known features. I also have a map of North America showing the elevation and other major features such as highest points, major rivers, glaciers etc. and a map of the provinces and states of Canada the US and Mexico.

So I ask you, what would you like to see in a reference atlas? I would like at least 10 of the maps to be at the State/Province level and for the information to be easily attainable for all of the maps. Otherwise any thoughts or ideas would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

[Navig8tor]

Sweet goal!

I have a bit of a map fetish so this sounds interesting. Since you are in Canada I am guessing you would do individual provinces, maybe combining some of the smaller ones. You could then break out the states by geographic area. New England states, South West and so forth. This would cover Canada and the US. Not sure how much you can cover in 20 -25 pages.

Good luck and be sure to let us know how it turns out.

[proxymoron]

I'm thinking the world's a lot to cram into 20-25 pp. If it's just a personal project why not make it fun and specific? You could do something like a 'Power of 10'-type atlas of your life. You could start at you and work outward (e.g. house, neighborhood, county, province, country, Commonwealth), somehow relating each new order of scale to your own life.

If you only sold ten copies to family and friends, it'd still be a fun ten copies.

[C Reed]

My step-mom is the only person I have ever seen use a reference atlas, she looks up locations in movies or books or when some one has returned from a trip. Hers has a street level detail of major world cities and there are marks for all the places I have lived in NYC and London with dates.