If you’ve read Edward Tufte’s stuff, you’ll know that the Japanese used to be good at cartography. So were the British, the Dutch, the Swiss…, but since WWII the Americans have made the running in terms of technological and graphical innovation, as well as putting together some wonderful resources–just think of the University of Texas’…
Someone has just suggested something that would make everyone’s life very much easier: that Mr Colom was neither Genoese, Catalan, nor Norwegian, but an invention of Mr Tolkien.