New Zealand: Geographx, a cartographic company, will release world’s biggest atlas, Earth Platinum, in December 2011. According to the company’s press statement, it measures 1.8m x 2.8m when open, weighs 150kg, and has 128 pages of maps, text and photographs. The pages are so large that the atlas has to be printed in Milan, Italy, one of the few places capable of printing and hand binding a book of this size to the required standard. Just 31 copies of Earth Platinum will be published; each copy costs USD 100,000.
Until now the world’s biggest atlas has been the Klencke Atlas published in 1660 which is 1.75m x 1.9m when open and has 39 pages.
Roger Smith, Director of Geographx said, “This has been a major project for our team. We coordinated and worked with dozens of cartographers in six different continents to make the maps. We were also responsible for developing the relief mapping, the colour and textural backgrounds, oceans and seas for the entire atlas.”
“We also did a myriad of what we’d call ‘little jobs’ but they weren’t really! This included helping to source data and there was some major innovation – our Kiwi No 8 wire abilities were very much to the fore. Absolutely nothing in Earth Platinum was straightforward. The IT challenges were the most significant; the file sizes were massive as they contained a great deal of data and complex relief images.”
“The publication of Earth Platinum has been a truly international effort. The editing, checking, proofing and correction processes were carried out by teams of different people in different countries – a major coordination project in itself. These final stages took almost 12 months to complete, it really was a marathon effort by all concerned,” Smith added.
Source: Geographx
