Atlas of the British Empire Book

I'm going to go ahead right about now and make what would seem to the casual reader an extremely picayune complaint about this atlas. And here it is.

The type in this book is too goddamned small.

Now, I realize that I'm no longer 18 years old and that, over the years, my eyesight has dimmed to the point where even reading your average Roy Lichtenstein painting makes me squint. Still, though, with the aid of reading glasses, I've learned to lead a semi-normal life, and can often get myself dressed and waxed without any help from the nurses. But this is an atlas, dammit, and when you can no more read the annotations on the maps than you can the actual text, it suggests that the problem is probably less one of presbyopia than with a publisher who's too cheap to print a book at a size that becomes it.


Look, if I wanted to read an atlas off of microfiche, I would. But I found this book so physically challenging to read that I eventually wound up skipping the maps that didn't look interesting, which is too bad, because there's a lot of cool history here to be told. At least, I think there is. I could be wrong. I don't really know. BECAUSE THE GODDAMNED TYPE IN THIS BOOK IS THE SIZE OF ANT-MAN'S PENIS.