The world - made by human hands

In the 1950s, if your parents wanted you to have all the advantages to do well in school, the family had a set of encyclopedias and a globe.  A set of encyclopedias was expensive, but it was like having the world at your fingertips - organized alphabetically.  If it wasn't in the World Book, it didn't exist.

CityLab 
By Linda Poon, August 27, 2015
A Look at the Painstaking, Intricate Art of  Globemaking

There are only a few dedicated artisanal globemakers left in the world—and there’s good reason for that.

To be an artisanal globemaker, you’ve got to be patient and stubborn.

Ask Peter Bellerby, one of the few people left who still makes globes by hand. Nowadays, globes are mostly made by machines, and Bellerby says he knows why. “It’s horrendously difficult. You have to retrain your body to work in a much slower and guarded way,” he says. “They’ve got to want to do it and not be beaten by the process.” It took him more than a year to learn the art.

Bellerby, 50, founded Bellerby & Co. Globemakers—one of the world’s only handcrafted globe making studios—in London in 2008 when he couldn’t find a quality globe for his father’s 80th birthday. They were either too cheaply made or too expensive and fragile. So he decided to make one himself. How hard could it be?