José Luis Gonzáles Macías acknowledges that he was not the most obvious person to write a book about lighthouses. “I grew up a long way from the sea and had no personal connection with the world of seafaring,” he says. “My professional life has been more centred on books than coastlines.”
As a writer, designer, illustrator and publisher of books and graphic materials for museums and other cultural institutions, he had always dreamed of creating a personal project that would put equal emphasis on images and text, but the fascination with lighthouses came later. He had been commissioned to design an album cover and came up with the image of lighthouses floating on asteroids. As he was researching designs, gazing at picture after picture of lighthouses, he says, “a strange attraction unexpectedly took hold of me, and it was as if I found myself trapped in my own isolated lighthouse”. This combination of “curiosity, and a fascination with the unknown”, together with a childhood love of maps, resulted in the idea for the atlas.
