Growing up in rural Wangaratta in north-eastern Victoria, Damien Saunder spent many a wintry day listening to music on the family’s record player. Just beneath the stereo was a Reader’s Digest atlas. “Anytime we put on a record, I’d get out the atlas,” Saunder recalls. “It was like a gateway to the world – a way to dream, explore and let your mind wander.”
Decades later, music and maps have come together again, this time in a coffee table book: Maps on Vinyl, a world-first survey of the cartographic influence on album sleeve design; an atlas of album cover maps. It’s the book most music fans – and map-makers – never knew they needed.