Last weekend’s Guardian magazine was particularly good, with an interview with Sir Ian McKellan, a piece about Britain’s overflowing libraries and, most pleasingly, an article on maps of London.

My love of maps started when I was young—probably as far back as early childhood, when, in the days before sat nav and online maps, my parents would go to “Triple A” (the American Automobile Association) and get printed “TripTiks” before we went on vacation somewhere. I liked to trace our progress along the strip maps in the TripTik book, and there was always some ceremony and celebration when it came time to flip to the next map (we even had a page-flipping jingle—we still use it today).

Later, when I was 13 or 14, I had a map of the British Isles on my wall, and I would pore over it, tracing the contours of the coastline and whispering the fabulous and mysterious placenames like a mantra. It was as if having the map brought me closer to this place I had never visited but was desperate to see, as if just by touching my finger to Caernarfon or Killarney or Inverness on the map, I could create some link to those places in real life.

These days, when I’m far away from the people I love, looking at a map of where they are makes me feel closer to them. It’s completely irrational, but I like to imagine that if I could delve deeply enough into the map—zoom in enough, as it were—I would be able to actually see the people I’m missing (and frankly, with the satellite images on Google Maps, that’s almost true).

Maps feel like more than just the representation of a place. Like a photograph, it’s as if they can capture the soul of a place to the point where they actually come to embody the place they portray. This is part of what gives maps their power for me, and part of why I’m so fascinated with old maps—because they revive ancient worlds, restore long-lost cityscapes and bring history to life.

That’s why I was excited about the article in the Guardian, which is actually just a taster for a recently released book called Mapping London, which I promptly added to my Amazon wishlist. The one thing the online version of the Guardian article doesn’t include are reproductions of some of the old maps discussed. To see a few of those maps, I recommend checking out the British Library site, and in particular, the pages which the library set up to accompany the wonderful special exhibition it organized at the start of the year called “London: A Life in Maps”. There’s a really nifty virtual exhibition on the site which incorporates Google Maps (and there’s a book to go with the exhibition as well).

London fascinates me, and maps fascinate me, and this new book about London maps sounds like it’s right up my alley (har har).

“For most citizens, London is still a place of disjointed monuments and random familiarity, linked by no man’s land. Its maps suggest a place able to embrace all humours and absorb all peoples. They give meaning to chaos. They are what London is.”