Leading geographer Denis Cosgrove provides a series of personal reflections on the complex connections between seeing, imagining and representing the world geographically. In a series of eloquent essays he draws upon pictorial images including maps, sketches, cartoons, paintings, and photographs to explore and elaborate upon the many and varied ways in which the vast and varied earth, and at times the heavens beyond, have been both imagined and represented as a place of human habitation. The essays include reflections upon geographical discovery; urban cartography and utopian visions; ideas of landscape and the shaping of America; wilderness and masculinity; conceptions of the Pacific; and the imaginative grip of the Equator. Extensively illustrated, this engaging work reveals the richness of the geographical imagination as expressed over the past five centuries.