In the past decade, Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Snedeker, and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro—aided by local writers, artists, historians, urbanists, ethnographers, and cartographers—have compiled three stunning atlases that have radically changed the way we think about place. Each atlas provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of a city—San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York—as experienced by its different inhabitants, replete with the celebrations and contradictions that make up urban life.
“Maps have many powers. One is the capacity to captivate and delight. Another is something we give them that perhaps we shouldn’t, a trust or faith in what they tell us about place, the way we take them for reliable or even objective statements and meet their sins of omission with our own. Our trilogy is a testament to what maps can do, and to why cities matter and what we have loved in them, though we have tried to scrutinize the brutalities they also include. We have tried to see these cities as intersections of broader forces.”
—Rebecca Solnit, from her new essay “Mapping the Invisible,” which appears in the boxed set Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlases—San Francisco, New Orleans, New York
Collected together for the first time, this boxed set is a perfect treasury of imagination and insight, a rich people’s history of these infinite cities. Here’s a peek inside this stunning collection.
Included in the set are the original, gorgeously designed atlases—which The New York Times calls “things of beauty”—for Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas; Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas; and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas.
Bonus materials include a new and thoughtful essay by Rebecca Solnit reflecting on the project nearly ten years after the publication of the first atlas.
In addition, there are three new and updated, full-color, fold-out posters for each city, including the wildly popular “City of Women” map of New York—updated to now include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s name among the many other extraordinary women featured.
