{"id":8878,"date":"2022-09-06T12:28:28","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T10:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/?p=8878"},"modified":"2022-09-09T14:34:13","modified_gmt":"2022-09-09T12:34:13","slug":"atlas-der-maritimen-geschichten-und-legenden-cyril-hofstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/2022\/09\/atlas-der-maritimen-geschichten-und-legenden-cyril-hofstein\/","title":{"rendered":"Atlas der maritimen Geschichten und Legenden \u2022 Cyril Hofstein"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I love books about the sea and I love bibliophile, beautiful editions\u2014and when both come together, I\u2019m pretty much always in. I stumbled upon the Atlas der maritimen Geschichten und Legenden<\/em> 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\u2019s Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln<\/a>. That\u2019s probably no coincidence, since the presentation and the content concept are strikingly similar\u2014which is a good sign, because I love these atlases and have several books of this kind on my shelf.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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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\u2019re grouped by region: \u201cSeas and Coasts of the Occident,\u201d \u201cFrom the Baltic to the Far North,\u201d \u201cSeas and Coasts of the Orient,\u201d \u201cThe Caribbean,\u201d and \u201cFrom the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.\u201d Each chapter runs one to three pages and introduces very different stories and legends. You\u2019ll find a wide variety of episodes: expeditions into the polar sea, shipwrecks, stories about wrecks like the Vasa<\/em>\u2014a ship built in Stockholm that sank still in the harbor on her maiden voyage\u2014the 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<\/em>, which became the inspiration for Jules Verne\u2019s novel The Mysterious Island<\/em>. A colorful bouquet of stories, in other words.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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On the right-hand spread of each entry there\u2019s 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).<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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I found the short chapters very entertaining, and it\u2019s a pleasure to read the book and drift from story to story. The variety ensures it never gets boring\u2014you 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<\/em>, 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\u2019t be raised, and the secret of whether the paintings remain intact may be kept forever. Equally gripping is the expedition of the Erebus<\/em> and the Terror<\/em>, launched to find a Northwest Passage through the polar sea. And of course the chapter about Jules Verne\u2019s Grafton<\/em> is fascinating. Overall, it\u2019s a fine selection of stories, and I never felt the atlas even remotely aims at completeness.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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The book\u2019s production\u2014with its quarter cloth and color-matched ribbon bookmark\u2014is 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\u2019s a delight to read.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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There are, however, a few points that bothered me, which I don\u2019t want to leave unmentioned. First are the short pull quotes, printed large and scattered throughout the entries. That\u2019s 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\u2019t belong in a book. In the details of its design, the book can\u2019t quite match the first and most beautiful, Schalansky\u2019s Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln<\/em> (Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will<\/em>). 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\u2014likewise 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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Verdict:<\/strong> With the Atlas der maritimen Geschichten und Legenden<\/em> (Atlas of Maritime Stories and Legends<\/em>), DuMont shows that despite the number of atlases of this kind, it\u2019s 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\u2019s a showpiece for the bookshelf and also makes an excellent, unusual book gift. The perfect read for a relaxed evening\u2014and a book I will certainly pull off the shelf again.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Book information: <\/strong>Atlas der maritimen Geschichten und Legenden<\/em> (Atlas of Maritime Stories and Legends<\/em>) \u2022 Cyril Hofstein \u2022 DuMont \u2022 136 pages \u2022 ISBN 9783832169015<\/p>\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love books about the sea and I love bibliophile, beautiful editions\u2014and when both come together, I\u2019m 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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Atlas der maritimen Geschichten und Legenden \u2022 Cyril Hofstein”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":{"title":"Atlas der maritimen Geschichten und Legenden \u2022 Cyril Hofstein - lesestunden","description":"Ich liebe B\u00fccher \u00fcber das Meer und ich liebe bibliophile und sch\u00f6ne Ausgaben und wenn beides zusammen trifft, dann bin ich eigentlich immer dabei. \u00dcber den Atla"},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","category-nonfiction"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/atlas_der_maritimen_geschichten_und_legenden_1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}