Don’t Get Lost

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

The Underground Electric Company in London published this series of posters in 1925. The set was designed by Kathleen Stenning. Each bold image promotes catching the Tube to escape the predictably unpredictable English weather.

 

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the first cut is the deepest

Posted on July 21, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

The impressive artwork of Joanathan Bessaci includes maps cut out and layered to form images.

I presently work with old Michelin maps dated from roughly 1920 to 1970. I use old French Michelin maps because I like their color and texture but also because for me, they symbolize the roads that various family members have taken to get to France. My maternal grandmother emigrated to France from Vietnam and my paternal grandfather emigrated to France from Kabylia (Northern Algeria). I myself moved to Washington D.C. from Paris in August, 2016.

I was also drawn to old French Michelin maps because I have been surrounded by objects like them since I was a child. Both my father and grandfather have stands in Lyon’s largest flea market and I spent long hours there as a child and adolescent. Many of the maps that I use come from Lyon’s flea markets and others throughout France.

My work presently consists of cutting portraits and other images into several maps. I chose my maps very carefully and try to integrate their geography, including lakes, rivers, oceans, roads, highways, parks and city centers into my images to highlight certain visual elements. Each of my pieces is made up of multiple maps which I cut out and layer on top of each other in between pieces of glass to create depth and texture.

It’s amazingly well done. Bessaci’s maps often form images of animals, or people in motion; motorways intersect at locations on the body that evoke a circulatory system. The effect is even more dramatic in his anatomical works, where the map layers draw out hidden bones.

Here’s a time-lapse video of Bessaci creating one of his works:

 

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Everyone wants to see it

Posted on July 20, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

Like millions of other people, seeing the aurora borealis had long been on my list of travel goals. I was overjoyed eight years ago to finally experience the Northern Lights in Iceland after visits to Norway, Alaska and Iceland. Surprisingly, I was able to see the mesmerizing green and purple lights from the deck of my rental apartment in the heart of Reykjavik for three nights in a row in late September.

According to maps.com, there’s nothing boring about the aurora borealis. As charged particles from the Sun interact with Earth’s magnetic field, some of them travel along field lines and collide with other atoms in the magnetosphere. Excited by these collisions, the atoms release energy in the form of visible light. The molecular composition of the atmosphere and the altitude of these collisions can produce a vibrant array of greens, yellows, purples, and reds. It truly is a remarkable sight, and seeing an aurora is often considered a bucket list experience.

That’s exactly the case for Harry Kuril, a cartographer and outdoor enthusiast with a background in geophysics from Cambridge and MIT. But Kuril knows auroras are fleeting. Seeing these ephemeral whisps of light comes with no guarantee. In addition to the presence of charged particles waxing and waning with the solar wind, other environmental factors can enhance or impede one’s view of the night sky. To better his chances, Kuril turned to his experience as a cartographer.

Using data from NASA, NOAA, and others, Kuril first mapped the average energy flux to estimate the strength of the aurora for a given time range. He then mapped average cloud cover to determine the conditions that might be typical for the season. Finally, a map of light pollution helps filter out locations too washed out with artificial lighting. By combining all these data, Kuril produced a metric to identify which areas offered the best chance to see the aurora. This aurora score, once mapped, provides a chart to the areas with a strong aurora, clear skies, and low influence from the cities below.

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How Amsterdam Was Built

Posted on July 19, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

I have visited hundreds of cities over the decades, but Amsterdam is the one place that I have returned to over and over. If you have been there, it’s probably one of your favorite cities too. And, if you haven’t visited yet, it’s probably on your top ten list of destinations. Either way, we’ve all seen wonderful films and videos set in the one of the world’s best travel destinations.

Amsterdam’s most memorable feature, its canals, were created not to look fetching on influencers’ socials, but in fact, as The Present Past host Jochem Boodt puts it in the video below, their construction was “a matter of life and death.” Too marshy for farming or home-building, the swampy ground beneath the city on the river Amstel had to be drained; when drained, it became subject to floods, which necessitated building dikes and a dam.

NB: if the video fails to load please click here.

That thirteenth-century engineering project of damming the Amstel protected the city, and also gave it its name. The Amstel itself is, in fact, a huge canal, and the rapid expansion of the settlement around it necessitated digging more and more auxiliary canals to assist with drainage, which defined the space for islands on which to build new districts atop hundreds of thousands of poles driven into the sea floor). As shown in the OBF video, this distinctive urban structure dictated the shapes of the city’s houses, with their universally narrow façades and their depths reflecting the wealth of the families within. Now, four centuries after it took its current shape — and having survived numerous crises inherent to its unusual situation and form — the center of Amsterdam is looked to as a paragon of urban planning, sometimes imitated, but without similarly “impossible” original conditions, never replicated.

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“If you don’t like a place, maybe you don’t know enough about it”

Posted on July 18, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

As I have previously mentioned, the always popular American travel writer is one of my personal heroes. Many years ago I had the good luck to have run into Rick when our paths crossed in Italy and we got to hang out for an afternoon in a small town on Lake Como. Rick was kind enough to support a travel project that I had going at the time, giving it a boost. I recently heard a great interview with him on National Public Radio and thought I’d share the video that accompanied the radio show with you. (see below)

In the video Rick reflects on his career as a ‘travel teacher’. There are lots of nice little nuggets about tourism and traveling, like his distinction between ‘escape travel’ and ‘reality travel’: “[With reality travel] I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful, a better citizen of the planet.”

NB: if the video fails to launch, please click here. 

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it’s not too late to find that perfect summer read

Posted on July 17, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

 

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The hardest season

Posted on July 16, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

I was saddened yesterday to read of the passing of the American poet Andrea Gibson at the young age of 49. Here is A lovely, beautiful, and uplifting obituary of poet and activist Andrea Gibson. “One of the last things Andrea said on this plane was, ‘I fucking loved my life.’”

“I wish you were here autumn is the hardest season the leaves are all falling and they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground and the trees are naked and lonely I keep trying to tell them new leaves will come around in the spring but you can’t tell trees those things they’re like me they just stand there and don’t listen I wish you were here I’ve been missing you like crazy I’ve been hazy eyed staring at the bottom of my glass again thinking of that time when it was so full”

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Odds and Ends

Posted on July 15, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

Regular visitors to TBTP know that I love my coffee but I’m not sure this is a good idea. 

Vampires are typically depicted as being weakened or even incinerated by sunlight.  Now the Department of Computer Science at the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences has developed a unique “vampire mode” that allows the undead in Zurich to navigate the city while staying out of the sun. Vampire mode may also prove useful for other city dwellers looking to avoid the intense daylight heat during the summer months.

Mend is a project based in Syracuse, NY that publishes the “creative work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people as well as individuals who have been impacted by the criminal justice system”.

“To create is to live twice.”
– Albert Camus

A list of bans and fines travelers may encounter in Europe this summer. / TravelPulse

Craig Mod explains how overtourism and TikTok are hurting small businesses in Japan. / Ridgeline

Both images were entries at NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day (November 5, 2024 and July 2, 2025).  Relevant discussion at each link.

 

 

 

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Bookshop.org’s 100 Bestselling Books of 2025 (So Far)

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

The online bookseller bookshop.org recently released a list of their bestselling books of the year (so far). The list is quite a bit different than what you might see from larger booksellers and looks more like what your local bookstore has on their bestseller list. I was somewhat surprised to find that I’d only read eleven of the books on the list, and that they were all older issues. Here are the top five:

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. “Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

 

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. “An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.”

 

 

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. “As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances.”

 

 

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. “In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable’ books may be unmatched.”

 

 

We Can Do Hard Things by Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle, and Glennon Doyle. “When you travel through a new country, you need a guidebook. When you travel through love, heartbreak, joy, parenting, friendship, uncertainty, aging, grief, new beginnings — life — you need a guidebook, too. We Can Do Hard Things is the guidebook for being alive.”

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Rediscover Your Childhood Reads

Posted on July 13, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

The books that we read in our childhood often guide us through the world all of our lives. They make us reflect upon our actions and how they can impact those around us; and, perhaps most of all, they outline the values of our shared culture. And, like all literature, these books have evolved throughout time. At my alma mater, the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature traces that transformation, encompassing some of the world’s finest examples of what is now affectionately referred to as children’s literature.

The Baldwin Library offers more than 11,000 titles to explore online. The digital database encompasses everything from a 1950 edition of Little Red Riding Hood to a 1875 version of Aladdin. Books range from the 19th to the 20th centuries, and, in addition to lesser-known gems, gather such classics as Cinderella, Rip Van Winkle, Gulliver’s Travels, and Sleeping Beauty, among countless others. Each entry features information about the volume’s subject, genre, date, and place of publication, and a PDF file, reproduced with stunning clarity, of the book itself.

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries contains more than 115,000 volumes published in the United States and Great Britain from the mid-1600s to present day. The Library also has small holdings in manuscript collections, original artwork, and assorted ephemera such as board games, puzzles, and toys. The Baldwin Library is known for comparative editions of books, with special emphasis on Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Library also has the largest collection of Early American Juvenile Imprints of any academic institution in the United States.

Other strengths and distinctions of the Baldwin Library include: alphabet books, marginalia and inscriptions, nonfiction from the 20th century, Little Golden Books, religious tracts, and illustrated editions from the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Scholars worldwide use the Baldwin Library for research in morality tales and religious tracts, conduct of life, gender roles, comparative editions, and toy and movable books.

For more information on the collection, please contact lib-baldwin@uflib.ufl.edu.

 

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