Professor Arno Peters, 1916-2002, German historian and cartographer, published the Peters World Map in 1973. It has since become one of the best-selling of all world maps. Why is this?

As the only totally correct representation of the earth is a globe, cartographers have to distort the sphere in order to print it on flat paper to produce world maps. In the process true scale, distance, or area, or a combination of these, are rendered imperfect.

Traditional world maps such as the Mercator often exaggerate the scale towards the poles, giving an erroneous picture of the relative sizes of different countries. For example Greenland looks as big as South America whereas it is in fact one ninth the size.

The Peters World Map preserves equal area and retains a rectangular grid of latitude and longitude. Thus all countries are the correct size in relation to one another. On this projection it becomes much easier to understand the relationships between countries or to plot thematic data. However, a price is paid in the distortion of shape - countries are progressively squashed towards the poles and stretched across the equator. Only at 45 degrees north and south are the shapes correct.

Availability: Oxford Cartographers are worldwide agents for the Peters Map outside the USA and Canada. The map is obtainable in the UK from the New Internationalist (www.newint.com) and from Neish Training who stock the standard size 590 x 840 mm, and for the first time in the UK the larger wall map 890 x 1260 mm, both folded to A4.

In North America it is available from www.odtmaps.com. Free resources, like black & white outline maps and sample PowerPoint files, are available for download from www.odtmaps.com. For special applications such as website or book use contact Marcus Ambler for world rights, or for North American rights contact BAbramms@aol.com.

The Peters World Atlas

Following the success of the Peters Map, Arno Peters conceived a World Atlas in which all land areas of the world would be shown at an equal scale. The Peters World Atlas was first published in 1989 and a fully revised second edition was published in 2002. It remains the only atlas of its kind in the world and has been translated into six languages. All 43 double spread maps are at the same scale, which reveals in a startling way the relative size of different places. While Europe comfortably fits into two spreads, the Antarctic requires four spreads.

The Atlas also contains 246 world thematic maps including many topics never before mapped, such as child labour, prostitution, the status of women, or direction of writing. All the maps are presented in simple colour-graded categories to make the information easy to read.