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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Entertainment
Elissa Blake

From Madonna to New Order and Oasis, one man’s odyssey to make an ‘atlas of album cover maps’

Cartographer and author of Maps on Vinyl, Damien Saunder, at his home in Bendigo, Victoria.
Cartographer Damien Saunder’s love of music and maps have come together in a coffee table book titled Maps on Vinyl. Photograph: Steve Womersley/The Guardian

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.

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