You can’t put that in a text,” he says, adding that letters offer a slower cerebral whirring. “I’ve just written and posted a condolence card to a friend who just lost his step-father. He thinks a letter, as opposed to email and text, is special - it has far more personality than words on a screen. Quite literally, Garfield is a man of letters. “It made me quite sure I lacked the skills,” he says Talking to those designers made Garfield realise how much devotion goes into each letter, and so he didn’t attempt to create a typeface himself. I could just explore all the faces and designers I admired, and a few I didn’t.” All the fonts I love are in my book,” says Garfield. “When I was writing the book I bought some software that turns your handwriting into a typeface and, surprise surprise, it was equally illegible. But it certainly doesn’t tell you any kind of story the way old maps do.”Ī year before On the Map, the prolific author wrote Just My Type, an enjoyable book that examines how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world, and why the T in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters. “I use all the navigational technology I can get. He might have written a book about maps but, Garfield confesses, his own sense of direction is terrible.

“My car satnav is hopeless but gives me security, and Google Maps is infinitely great,” he says. Even Garfield uses a satellite navigation system in his car and when walking around. But the digital revolution has transformed mapping - maps that folded many times are now being replaced by phone maps.

Maps are as much about imagination as power they are sources of inspiration as well as guides. These days, Garfield has a large collection of framed old underground maps in his hallway, though he still hasn’t made it to Ongar or Theydon Bois. “Only later did I discover that the map itself was famous - Harry Beck’s iconic diagram from the early 1930s.” “It gave me enough time to think about all the adventures one could have travelling to the far-flung reaches of the map - places with exotic-sounding names like Ongar and Theydon Bois,” says the author of On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does, which was published in 2012. It was only one stop, but one of the longest passages on the whole network, between Golders Green and Hampstead. British author Simon Garfield’s obsession with maps took hold when he was eight and travelled to school via the London Underground.

To the Letter by Simon Garfield