It's a BIG World After All

Tom Paradise Contributes to the biggest atlas in the world

Earth is a lavish atlas, as bold and ambitious as the name suggests. Weighing in at 62.2 pounds, nearly two feet tall, costing around $4,800 for a leather-bound edition and featuring spectacular photography, this atlas may stand as a testament to a publisher’s faith in the endurance of books.

“Most atlases are about space. We created a book about place — in this case, the place is a planet,” says Tom Paradise, one of 45 major contributors to the volume, which contains 154 detailed maps and more than 800 photographs.

Paradise, director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies in Fulbright College, wrote most of the section on North Africa.

Besides its weight and cost, what makes Earth unique is how the many facets of a place are integrated into one volume: physical features, foods and language, agriculture and natural resources, economics and politics, people and culture, climate and geology.

“No other atlas has been able to capture all of these aspects in such an informative, accurate and beautiful manner. Already it’s being called the ‘must-have Atlas,’” Paradise says.

The biggest atlas in the world, the volume is being billed as the ultimate book about Earth. A team of more than 100 photographers, cartographers, geographers, and oceanographers took eight months to compile the 576-page atlas, which represents an evolution from a conventional collection of facts and maps to an attempt to capture the diversity and intricacies of an entire planet.

Featured are biological, physical and human landscapes, topographies of all Earth’s regions, and full-page profiles of every country in the world.

“Geographic accuracy, spatial visualization, artistic composition and color, high-resolution and fine photography, and regional expertise in describing countries and places have all come together in one extraordinary atlas,” says Paradise, who has provided expert advice and help on cartography for numerous atlases, in addition to having authored three himself.

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