What? by Mark Ovenden:

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In the previous Blog, details were revealed about that perennial question, ”Why did you do this book?” Today we’re looking at “What” goes into putting a book like this together. If you’re coming up with your own material, based on real-life or fiction…..you’ve got yer job cut out to get those experiences over in the most entertaining way. With non-fiction you’re in a different ball park.

It was 2001 and my space oddity was to be filled with other peoples work! I’d decided to pull together a compendium of the maps to every subway system on earth. Issue number one to tackle: how many are there? This it turns out is less a question of counting than the more thorny issue of editorially deciding what does or what does not constitute a “subway”, “metro”, “u-bahn”, “underground” or “T”. In fact there are almost as many collective nouns for the worlds urban rail systems as there are types of system. For instance there are “subway” systems which include sections that run on elevated track. There are “Els” that pass into tunnels for part of their route. There are also Metro’s that turn into trams and trolleybuses that pass into U-Bahn tunnels! The choice of what to include and what to leave out became a daunting one!

By 2002 I’d got several reliable - though at times conflicting - lists of what should constitute a “proper” subway system and I’d collected the required official maps of about 80% of them. The next few tasks though would form the deal breaker of the first publication of this collection.

In no particular order were these jobs:
• Find a publisher
• Locate the best quality (high resolution maps) from every operator
• Secure permission to reproduce the maps

You might think that tracking down a publisher for your own bizarre specialism would be the toughest prospect; oddly this turned out to be the easiest of my chores. There was a UK publishing house who were already quite well known for producing books on rather obscure aspects of public transportation – they had already produced one of the great inspirations for my book and looked like the obvious home for it. As far back as 1994 a north-west London company called ‘Capital Transport’ had printed a book all about the London Underground diagram called “Mr Becks Underground Map”. The beautiful and informative hardback by Ken Garland had been a favorite of mine since I’d first acquired it in about 1995.

Seeing my book as a natural compliment to this impressive work, I decided to approach the publishers. This turned out to be run by an affable transport fan called James Whiting. He agreed to a meeting so I hurriedly took (yet more) weeks off work to prepare my presentation to him.

By this time I was working for a fledgling UK telly channel called txt.me but much to the chagrin of the boss I spent little of my time in those last few weeks actually doing much work for them. I’d decided to propose to Jim a rough layout of how the book might look so that that he would immediately understand what I was getting at. Having nothing more at my disposal than a knackered old scanner, Microsoft Word and some low resolution versions of the maps I’d pulled off the internet, I began to assemble a rudimentary layout of this book that had been buzzing around in my head for over a year.

The result that I presented to Mr Whiting in 2002 was a really rather poor and disheveled assemblage of landscape A4 pages, cobbled together with images and text in this most basic of layouts. When I look back at some of those sheets now I cringe because they were so far removed from the book I’m so proud to have been reproduced by Penguin.

Luckily to Jim's eternal credit he saw the potential through the Scotch-taped together pages and immediately commissioned me to get on with the job. Over the next few months I took more and more time off work to pull the first draft together, finally leaving the telly job in 2003 to finish the compilation off. The biggest task would prove to be getting the permissions to reproduce the maps – and this is the subject of the next blog: “How”.

View more information on Mark Ovenden's Transit Maps of the World

Mark Ovenden

Transit Maps of the World

transit

maps

history

graphic design

subways

transport

traffic

architecture

Penguin Books

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