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Anyone who’s ever dreamed of pulling together a book has to face the daunting subject of what to include….and more specifically; what to leave out!

As I gradually assembled the permissions to reproduce the transit maps of the world it dawned on me that there was a lot more historical material for some cities than for others. My friend Mike who had been a tower of support since the beginning of the project suddenly gained a new role: he would be my editor.

Mike helped me to focus on the subject matter; what was it about the maps that made them interesting to designers. How were they similar – and why were they different. I began several months of thorough investigation about the nature of the maps and diagrams of subways. One aspect that I began to understand a lot better was why many transit maps have adopted the schematic solution as opposed to using maps that are true to the geography of their cities above.

This has had the added benefit of not just being the most effective way of depicting the complex system of tunnels beneath our feet but also has inspired designers because when well done they are often very beautiful in their own right. The London diagram is one of the greatest examples of this as it evokes a sense of balance and clarity. This is one of the reasons why Harry Beck’s original design for the London Tube has both stood the test of time and been emulated round the world by other transit operators. It has also inspired artists to play with the design concepts and come up with pieces like "The Great Bear" - now on display at London’s Tate Gallery

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So the book had a subject, a publisher and a date….but the content – transit maps from all over the world had yet not been approved for use!

With a decision taken to include the official maps of something like 150 cities, a list of the transit operators began to look like the invitations to some kind of international transportation conference! From Atlanta to Zurich, Berlin to Yokohama letters needed to go out – in the local language – to request permission to reproduce their maps.

This as you might guess turned out to be the Achilles heel of the book! Though I could get away with writing in English and my dreadfully amateurish French to over half the cities, Hindi, Korean and Russian were not in my fluencies. I managed to track down German, Spanish, Greek and even Portuguese speakers among my extended circle of friends…but some of the more exotic languages were a stumbling block. So I turned to the multi-cultural restaurants of London and began walking round with an English letter in one hand and a huge leap of faith in the other.

(CAPTION: A letter asking for permission to reproduce their maps - courtesy of a London Chinese restaurant!)

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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.

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One question most writers get asked is; “How did you come up with the idea for your book?” Considering my offering is a collection of other people’s maps I can’t help but feel a slight tinge of embarrassment about this line of enquiry. I always want to remind people that I’m enormously grateful to the many thousands of cartographers and designers who’ve slaved away crafting and re-drawing their maps of the world’s subway systems. It was these people; and specifically a man called Paul E. Garbutt who must have had the earliest influence over my spark of interest in the subject.

For it was he who was responsible for re-drawing the classic maps of one of the worlds most celebrated designers, in the era when I would have become aware of them the first time; the mid 1960’s.

At this time I was a somewhat annoying and fidgety child being brought up by incredibly tolerant and liberal parents in West London. Most weeks, my mother would painstakingly haul my smaller sister and I on a tortuous journey across fields (yes we had real fields in the outskirts of London), to the breezy stop of the number 140 bus (which never seemed to arrive until we threatened the invisible vehicle that we’d walk off) and eventually down clunky escalators onto the London Undergrounds’ Central Line at fifties style ‘Northolt’ station.

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Mark Ovenden is our guest blogger during the week of December 3rd. If you have any questions for Mark Ovenden, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about Transit Maps of the World:

Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth. Using glorious, colorful graphics, Mark Ovenden traces the history of mass transit-including rare and historic maps, diagrams, and photographs, some available for the first time since their original publication. Transit Maps is the graphic designer’s new bible, the transport enthusiast’s dream collection, and a coffee-table essential for everyone who’s ever traveled in a city.

About Mark Ovenden