Atlas der maritimen Geschichten und Legenden • Cyril Hofstein

I love books about the sea and I love bibliophile, beautiful editions—and when both come together, I’m pretty much always in. I stumbled upon the Atlas der maritimen Geschichten und Legenden by chance while on vacation, when I wandered into a bookshop in a small town near the Baltic Sea. It was on display and immediately caught my eye because it reminded me at once of Judith Schalansky’s Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln. That’s probably no coincidence, since the presentation and the content concept are strikingly similar—which is a good sign, because I love these atlases and have several books of this kind on my shelf.

Many myths surround the sea and seafaring, and there are countless tales and legends, yarns and stories; this atlas gathers a selection of them and presents them to the reader in short chapters. They’re grouped by region: “Seas and Coasts of the Occident,” “From the Baltic to the Far North,” “Seas and Coasts of the Orient,” “The Caribbean,” and “From the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.” Each chapter runs one to three pages and introduces very different stories and legends. You’ll find a wide variety of episodes: expeditions into the polar sea, shipwrecks, stories about wrecks like the Vasa—a ship built in Stockholm that sank still in the harbor on her maiden voyage—the legend of the Flying Dutchman, an affair involving a great sailing ship, how a vessel brought the plague to Europe, or the stranding of the schooner Grafton, which became the inspiration for Jules Verne’s novel The Mysterious Island. A colorful bouquet of stories, in other words.

On the right-hand spread of each entry there’s a map showing the scene and its precise geolocation. A tiny inset map in the upper left corner indicates where the map section sits on the globe. Each entry also has a subtitle that offers a small teaser for the text (for example, a nod to Jules Verne).

I found the short chapters very entertaining, and it’s a pleasure to read the book and drift from story to story. The variety ensures it never gets boring—you just want to keep reading. Shipwreck and stranding in particular always spark my fascination. I found especially interesting the story of the wreck of the Vrouw Maria, which sank in Finnish waters in 1771 with some waterproof-packed paintings belonging to Catherine the Great. The wreck was only found in 1999, and now both Finland and Russia lay claim to it. Finland guards the ship around the clock; it likely won’t be raised, and the secret of whether the paintings remain intact may be kept forever. Equally gripping is the expedition of the Erebus and the Terror, launched to find a Northwest Passage through the polar sea. And of course the chapter about Jules Verne’s Grafton is fascinating. Overall, it’s a fine selection of stories, and I never felt the atlas even remotely aims at completeness.

The book’s production—with its quarter cloth and color-matched ribbon bookmark—is wonderfully bibliophile. The typefaces are carefully chosen, the layout is clean, the endpapers are colored, and the maps have a coherent style. The white space of the individual entries is filled with illustrations reminiscent of elements from nautical charts. And the book is thread-sewn. It sits very well in the hand and is a true gem for the bookshelf. Content-wise as well as haptically, it’s a delight to read.

There are, however, a few points that bothered me, which I don’t want to leave unmentioned. First are the short pull quotes, printed large and scattered throughout the entries. That’s really a device I only know from magazines, meant to motivate the reader to dive into an article. In a book, I find it somewhat out of place; I stopped reading those large excerpts because they appear in the body text anyway. Such a thing simply doesn’t belong in a book. In the details of its design, the book can’t quite match the first and most beautiful, Schalansky’s Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln (Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will). The maps, the illustrations of chart elements, and the interleaved section openers for the maritime regions struck me as a touch too minimal and modern—likewise the sans-serif main text. And an endpaper printed with a map would have been nicer. The little round globe that marks, for each entry, where the map section lies on the world is hard to make out because of its small size. It is undeniably a beautiful book, but not perfectly so. Overall, though, this is quibbling at a high level; the reader is getting an absolutely high-quality, very successful book.

Verdict: With the Atlas der maritimen Geschichten und Legenden (Atlas of Maritime Stories and Legends), DuMont shows that despite the number of atlases of this kind, it’s still possible to publish a gorgeous and worthwhile atlas about the sea. I enjoyed the book very much; the many short, varied stories about the sea and seafaring were entertaining, and I devoured it quickly. With its bibliophile trappings and handsome presentation, it’s a showpiece for the bookshelf and also makes an excellent, unusual book gift. The perfect read for a relaxed evening—and a book I will certainly pull off the shelf again.

Book information: Atlas der maritimen Geschichten und Legenden (Atlas of Maritime Stories and Legends) • Cyril Hofstein • DuMont • 136 pages • ISBN 9783832169015