Who needs Google Maps when you have a globe?
In 2008, Peter Bellerby decided he would seek out a special gift for his father’s upcoming 80th birthday. No socks or ties this year. Not even a bottle of nice gin. He would buy him a handmade globe. What he discovered, to his surprise, was that there seemed to be nobody, anywhere in the world, making globes by hand. A man prepared to accept a challenge, Bellerby resolved to make one himself. ‘How difficult can it be to make a sphere,’ he asked himself, ‘and put a map on it?’ He soon had an answer. It would be very difficult and very time-consuming.
As the subtitle of his book points out, globemaking is ‘an ancient craft’. Celestial globes, depicting the heavens, existed in at least the 2nd Century AD and probably earlier. The oldest surviving terrestrial globe dates from the 15th Century and was made by Martin Behaim in Nuremberg. It is known as the Erdapfel, literally the ‘Earth apple’.
The Erdapfel omits much that we would expect to see on a globe today. Since Behaim was making it around 1492, when Columbus was still sailing the ocean blue, there is no sign of the Americas. However, as Bellerby acknowledges, bearing in mind the limits of knowledge at the time, ‘its resemblance to the world we know
is quite remarkable’. Globemaking, Bellerby soon learned, ‘takes patience, persistence, determination and stubbornness’. Luckily, he seems to possess these qualities in abundance.
He had plenty of setbacks. There were problems with the digital map he paid a company to license for his own use. Countries were missing, towns and cities misspelled. ‘Some place names even seemed to have been made up.’
He also found out that globemaking is a political minefield. ‘In India,’ he writes, ‘I could go to prison for selling a globe that shows its border with Pakistan following the line that the government of Pakistan believes is correct.’ China won’t accept any map or globe that treats Taiwan as an independent country.
Despite all the obstacles he had to overcome (paper that wouldn’t stretch, glue that wouldn’t stick, techniques that needed thousands of practice runs), Bellerby persisted. His father finally got his globe in 2010. ‘So that’s what you’ve been working on,’ he remarked.
By that time Bellerby had created a new business, and orders for globes were coming in from around the world. The first attempt to ship one to the
USA ended in disaster when Customs smashed it apart then put it together again with the north of South America aligned with southern Africa. Other transactions were more successful. An article in House & Garden magazine led to a request to make four globes for a scene in the Martin Scorsese film Hugo.
By 2018, Bellerby & Co was producing up to 400 globes a year. The smallest start at £1,290 but the largest will set you back upwards of £89,000.
This is a beautifully illustrated and designed book, although captions would have been a bonus. It also tells the story of how, in Bellerby’s words, ‘my simple idea to pass some time in relearning an ancient craft evolved into a company’. His journey was clearly challenging but worthwhile. As he notes, ‘Google Maps might inform, but a globe inspires’.