By Nick Crane
A real atlas for the shelf: twelve regions of the world, one to a spread, with painted maps, fold-outs, and a pull-out wall map, written by a working mapmaker.
This is the one that actually behaves like an atlas. It covers the world in twelve regions, a spread each, and the maps are painted by hand rather than pulled from a database, so they look warm and still do the job of a map. It opens with where the Earth came from and how people first started drawing maps, then works its way around the world region by region, with separate pages for the oceans. There are fold-out flaps, small booklets tucked into the spreads, and a pull-out map for the wall. Nick Crane makes maps for a living and works as a geographer, and the thing he keeps coming back to is how the land a group of people live on shapes how they live there, so the numbers he picks to print are things like what each region burns for energy and what it will have to change.
Everything else on this shelf teaches a place through mood and pictures. This is the one that answers a question. If your child asks where Mali is, or which way the Mississippi runs, or what's south of Paris, this is the book that tells them, laid out to be looked up rather than read straight through. Crane's angle keeps it from being a bare list: he's always asking what the land lets people do and what it stops them doing, which gives each region a reason behind its borders instead of a set of names to memorize. The fold-outs and the pull-out map carry a lot of the load with a child who won't sit still for a full page of print.