Notebook: 12 November 2015 | INFOGRAPHICS Archie Archambault describes himself as a designer and inventor. He’s an American who lives in both Portland, Oregon and Brooklyn, New York. He makes his own special ‘mental diagrams’ of cities – simple but rather beautiful maps that he prints by hand on a 19th century letterpress printer. Whereas a traditional map will be full of information, Archie strips away any unnecessary detail so that the map becomes a series of districts defined by circles and linked by straight lines – much in the same way that a resident would picture it – a mental map that comes from the his head through his own city wanderings and from the heads of locals. You can look at Archie’s maps here on his website. Most of his maps are of US cities but he’s produced one of Amsterdam that reduces the ring of canals to simple concentric circles. He’s never been to London and so he’s never had the opportunity to walk its streets and travel on the underground to map it, but if he did …

Notebook: 5 October 2015 | INFOGRAPHICS How Ray got from A to B before satnav Ray had been a navigator in the RAF during the latter stages of WWII, in Wellington and Liberator bombers, seeing action in the Mediterranean and then, at the end of the war, helping transport troops and POWs back from Italy and Germany to Britain. He later worked for the Ordnance Survey. He had a great sense of direction and a real knack of finding his way from A to B, whether it be navigating an aircraft from Munich to Cambridgeshire or driving his Ford Capri across London. The stars would guide him at night time and he’d note the sun’s position and landmarks during the day, and of course he had a large range of maps to help see him home as well. A favourite was The Reader’s Digest AA Book of the Road published in 1966 which featured ingenious ‘continuity flaps’ that allowed east-west/west-east routes to be followed from page to page without the reader losing their position. But trying to …