Hendrik Willem Van Loon is much better known in his native Netherlands I think than in the rest of the world. He was a prolific author and, in some cases illustrator, mainly of books for children and young adults. Today I picked up a copy of his 1932 book The Home of Mankind. The Story of the World We Live In. It's a delightful book and similar in style and idea to his more famous The Story of Mankind. But he illustrated these himself and, because this book is a mixture of geography and geology, a book about The World, there are these wonderful maps. The style is so fabulously naive, it looks like a child has coloured in a printed map with their felt tips, but they work so well. I was charmed by them.
