The Globemakers

‘A book as beautiful as the craft it describes, The Globemakers is an inspirational story of a craftsman’s dogged pursuit for perfection. It’s written with the intricacy of someone who can capture the fine details of our vast planet in something small enough to sit on your desk’ * Rebecca Struthers, author of The Hands of Time *
‘The untold story of the globe, this book is a glorious spyhole into a forgotten art’ * Lara Maiklem, author of Mudlarking *
‘Absolutely fascinating from beginning to end - an adventure like no other!’ * Alice Loxton *
‘The Globemakers is a lovely object, beautifully conceived and skillfully executed. With its digressive text boxes, sketches and photographs, it encourages the reader to linger and explore. In that sense the rectangular book echoes the round object it chronicles…Globes are like other anachronisms that reflect the way things were: solid, durable, based on a knowable past instead of an uncertain future. A beautiful globe in a handsome library is the essence of romance. In this sense, it is right that a book should be the medium to commemorate Bellerby & Co’s unlikely success. Yet artisanship of this type does something else: It rewards a desire for tactile engagement in a digital era, when so much daily ephemera comes and goes with our hands never touching it. Mr. Bellerby captures this basic human impulse by reporting what many visitors to his studio request. After admiring a globe and then tentatively stepping closer, they often ask—to his delight—’May I spin it?’” * Wall Street Journal *
‘Beautiful…Bellerby’s love of globes is contagious…Interspersed with Bellerby’s account of his progress are interesting factoids about the planet, the heavens, the need to update maps, the tilt of the earth, the role of the equator in both the earth and on globes, and many other tidbits’ * Washington Independent Review of Books *
‘The Globemakers brings us inside Bellerby’s gorgeous studio to learn how he and his team of cartographers and artists bring these stunning celestial, terrestrial, and planetary objects to life. Along the way he tells stories of his adventure and the luck along the way that shaped the company…an enlightening exploration of globes and their ability to show us ourselves and our place in an infinite universe…As fascinating as it is informative’ * Midwest Book Review *

Peter Bellerby is a world-renowned globemaker and founder of artisan globemakers Bellerby & Co., the only truly bespoke makers of globes in the world. After a successful career in television, in 2008 Peter began his search for a special globe for his father’s 80th birthday. Not finding what he wanted, he set about making a globe himself by hand, which was the start of an arduous and fantastic journey that led to the founding of his company in 2010. Bellerby & Co. Globemakers have won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the international trade category twice, in 2018 and 2021.

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