A world map without national borders and 1,642 animals
A self-taught artist-cartographer and outdoorsman spent three years on an obsessive labor of love with few parallels.
In July 2020, his universe shrunk to a two-bedroom apartment on a rattling train line. Anton Thomas got one H pencil and opened a portal to the world.
His days of solitude were immediately filled with New Zealand’s native birds; dolphins, turtles and whales bouncing around; and polar bears on ice floes. Three years, approximately 2,602 working hours and 1,642 animal species later, ‘Wild World’ a hand-drawn map of our planet that both inspires and celebrates wonder.
Mr. Thomas, an exuberant New Zealander living in Melbourne, Australia, initially expected to spend less than a year on the project. But as the months passed and he sank deeper into the “possibility of spiritual escape and not going crazy,” he said, the scope of the task expanded. It was sometimes quite a task to drag herself away at the end of the day.
As a hiker and outdoorsman, Mr. Thomas longed as a child for a world where nature predominated. His card represents the “idealistic planet I wanted,” Thomas, 34, said. “I looked out at Wellington Harbour,” in New Zealand’s capital, “and saw all the houses, and imagined what it was like before people showed up.”
To create each creature with sufficient detail, he usually drew under a magnifying glass, using sandpaper to sculpt his pencil ends into fussy points.
Almost as time-consuming was the research that guided his hand. Should a South Atlantic archipelago be written as the Falkland Islands or Las Malvinas? Did it matter that the thylacine, also called the Tasmanian tiger, is probably extinct? Was a fighting bull Spain’s most iconic animal?
Therefore, Mr. Thomas set guidelines for himself. Animals must be native to their location and not domesticated or extinct. The names of places should, where possible, be those preferred by their inhabitants. Man-made boundaries are non-existent. (In practice this meant that both names appeared; the thylacine did not; and a Cantabrian brown bear replaced the toro.)
Used the card a natural earth projectionand the center passes through 11 degrees east of the Greenwich Meridian, just past Oslo, partly to give New Zealand and Fiji a more harmonious placement.
Despite his commitment to ‘neutrality’, Mr Thomas acknowledges that any inclusion or omission will provoke debate. “Anyway,” he said, “you have a conversation.”
Mr. Thomas spent his early years in Nelson, a small port city in New Zealand. For him, the mountains and rivers were a paradise that far eclipsed the fantasy world of children’s books or video games.
The son of an artist, from his earliest childhood he had no formal training other than drawing maps, some of which are also illustrated with cheerful animal life. Then as now, he said, he understood cartography simply as representational drawing at a distance.
Illustrated maps like Mr. Thomas’s are powerful in part because they mimic how the human brain perceives the world, says John Roman, an artist-cartographer in Boston and author of “The Art of Illustrated Maps.”
“We don’t see the latitude and longitude lines on maps,” he said. “We see the world, in our heads, through icons.”
For Mr. Thomas, this amounts to a kind of “emotional geography,” where features with greater emotional weight — the New York City skyline or the Golden Gate Bridge, for example — can take up more space.
“There are animals the size of mountain ranges on my map,” he said. “But you know what? If we want to draw an emotional map, the African lion should tower over Kilimanjaro.”
Almost as special as Mr. Thomas’s maps, says Tom Patterson, a retired cartographer for the National Park Service, is the way he explains them. “His enthusiasm for his work just shines through,” he said.
Mr. Thomas did not set out to become an artist-cartographer. After high school, he worked in the kitchen of a politically themed pub in Wellington, while working as a gigging musician.
At 21, dreaming of rock stardom, he left his homeland for two years of “high jinks” in North America.
The music career did not progress. But the continent’s stunning topography “supercharged” his passion for geography as a child, he said, and he began drawing maps compulsively. “I went to sleep just thinking about the way the Sierras turned into the Cascades,” he recalled, “or how vast the Mississippi Basin was.”
Two years later, while working as a chef in Montreal, Mr. Thomas found himself at a personal and professional crossroads. “I still hadn’t gone to college and still hadn’t made a career plan,” he said. “I was quite worried at the time, like, ‘What the hell am I going to do?’”
Mr. Thomas found his way out of the kitchen through a refrigerator.
A roommate had painted an old refrigerator white and he asked Mr. Thomas to decorate the doors. For six weeks he sketched America, complete with cityscapes and forests (though no animals), which attracted an audience of passing guests, who told him of their own travels as his fountain pen traveled from British Columbia to the Chilean coast.
“I loved it,” he said. “And the other thing I noticed was that everyone else loved it too.”
Later, when he moved to Australia, Mr Thomas honed his skills as an illustrator and cartographer, eventually spending five years a multi-layered, color map of North America.
When the coronavirus hit, he was about to send printouts of that card to clients, and it wasn’t until July 2020 that he was able to start work on “Wild World,” armed with a new easel and magnifying glass, and with a blank schedule. stretches out in front of him.
On July 28, 2023, with the pandemic long over, Thomas added the finishing touches to his map: six final creatures, including a golden-breasted songbird, a bat weighing less than half an ounce, and a bristly arachnid. In the staple-bound logbook in which he had recorded his work, he concluded in a biro scribble: “FINISH WILD WORLD!!!”
Since then, he’s been in “small business mode,” preparing to ship copies of “Wild World” worldwide. But the cartography – and the open track – beckon, and for his next project he hopes to combine the two.
For Mr. Patterson, the former Park Service cartographer, Mr. Thomas’s work stands alone: done entirely by hand with no digital backups or erasing tools and with a level of detail that inspires the viewer to turn his nose ever closer to the page to place.
Is any other map maker doing something similar? Mr. Patterson paused. “No,” he said.