Sometimes life can seem like a lot of drudgery and sorrow.  These days we don’t only have to deal with the troubles of our own life, but we have instant access to troubles all over the world.  It’s easy to start feeling oppressed and depressed.  It’s easy to forget about the wonders of the world amid so much bad news.  You might even go days and days without really looking up, seeing the sky and realizing what a miraculous planet we live on.

Twice in the past month, when the conversation got too dreary, I took out the book Cosmigraphics and showed it to friends.  Even the cover made them gasp a little.  The wonders inside turned the conversation from the earthly to the cosmic.

Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, by Michael Benson, Abrams Books, 2014, is the story of how people have both imagined and documented our creation, the structure of the universe, and the earth’s place in the cosmos.  Benson is a photographer, writer, and filmmaker.  In the last decade he has staged a series of increasingly large-scale exhibitions of planetary landscape photography. He lives in Boston and Ljubljana, Slovenia

He works from the intersection of art and science, and tells the story of how we perceive the universe using illustrations, graphs and maps.  He has gathered beautiful works of art from the world’s great science libraries. 

The book take you on a journey through more than 1000 years of images, through humanity’s ever-expanding understanding of the size and shape of space.  From before the telescope was invented and people believed the earth was flat, to the most sophisticated maps and supercomputer simulations, all the beauty of our understanding comes to light. 

This book is a literary gem, too.  Benson’s writing is lyrical and accessible, making clear the story of human thought and beliefs.  Chapters are divided into Creation, Earth, The Moon, The Sun, The Structure of the Universe, Planets and Moons, Constellations, the Zodiac and the Milky Way, Eclipses and Transits, Comets and Meteors, Auroras and Atmospheric Phenomena.  Each chapter starts with an essay from Benson on how our beliefs and thoughts about space have changed through the centuries.  Benson says:

He opens the first chapter on Creation with a quote from The Tao Te Ching:

He begins the last chapter, Auroras and Atmospheric Phenomena, with a quote from Robert Burns’ Tam O’Shanter:

They flit ere you can point their place.

I can’t overstate how beautiful this collection of graphics is.  Almost every page reveals a breathtaking look at the universe – from illuminated maps and manuscripts that illustrate early belief system, to a 2009 supercomputer simulation of a sunspot:  

The book is too big for me to scan pictures for you, but just Google the title and you’ll see what I mean.  That’s how I got pictures for this post.  This book has been praised in the New York Times, and hundreds of other sites, including Brain Pickings, one of my favorite book and culture sites, so you don’t have to take my word for it.  The publishers say this book “will be a revelation to space-struck Earthlings, art lovers, and readers interested in the history of science, the visualization of information, graphic design, and mapping.”

I’m a big library user, but this is a book I feel you should own.  If for no other reason than to look at it with your depressed friends and take a little flight away from the tyranny of bad news into a universe of stunning mystery. 

Or for a stolen moment, when gravity seems to have you glued to the ground, to take a trip through space and time, and come back elated.