How are globes made by hand?

A handmade globe is a map wrapped around a ball, and the whole craft turns on one problem: a flat map cannot cover a sphere without creasing. The globemaker’s answer is the gore - a tapering, almost petal-shaped strip of printed map, wide at the equator and pointed at the pole, many of which are pasted side by side to clothe the sphere. I watched Jonathan Wright work at Grandeys Place, and the thing that stays with you is the patience of it: a wetted paper gore eased into place by hand, stretched and smoothed so the coastline meets its neighbour exactly, one segment at a time around the whole world.

Globe-making is the building of terrestrial globes (the earth) and celestial globes (the sky, mapped as if from outside the star-sphere) by hand. It is a hybrid craft - part model-making in the forming of the sphere, part cartography in the map, part the delicate paper-and-paste work of laying the map on. The maker is not drawing the map freehand onto the ball; they are taking a printed map designed in gores and fitting it to a three-dimensional surface without distortion, wrinkle or gap.

That is what separates a real handmade globe from a moulded plastic one with a printed film shrunk over it. The hand globe is built up in layers, the gores individually placed, the seams reconciled by eye and thumb. It is closer to upholstering a sphere than to printing one.

A gore is one tapering segment of the printed map. A calotte (or polar cap) is the small circular piece that finishes the very top and bottom, where the gores converge and would otherwise pile up. The sphere is the ball itself, formed and finished smooth before any map goes on. A terrestrial globe shows the earth; a celestial globe shows the constellations. The whole sits in a cradle or stand, often turning on an inclined axis to match the earth’s tilt, sometimes within a meridian ring.

First the sphere is made and finished - turned, smoothed and sealed so it is perfectly round and ready to take paste. The map is printed as a set of gores, each one calculated to taper exactly so that, curved onto the ball, it covers its share of the surface without overlap or gap. The maker wets each gore so the paper can stretch, pastes it, and lays it onto the sphere, working it down with the fingers from the centre to the edges, coaxing the paper to follow the curve.

Gore by gore the world is built up, each new segment registered against the last so that rivers, coastlines and lines of latitude run continuous across the seams. The poles are closed with the calottes, and the finished surface is sealed and often hand-tinted or varnished, then mounted. A single globe is hours of patient placement, and a misjudged gore cannot simply be peeled off and redone without harm to its neighbours - which is why the craft rewards a steady, unhurried hand.

The archive documented globe-making with Jonathan Wright, one of the makers who has brought the craft back from the edge of extinction, met during a morning at Grandeys Place, the heritage and craft centre near Much Hadham where several makers work under one roof. Globe-making had all but disappeared as a hand trade in the twentieth century, overtaken by mass production; its survival now rests on a handful of people who learned to lay gores again.

Hand globe-making is a small, specialist, commission-led craft. There is genuine demand - a handmade globe is a serious object, priced accordingly - but the number of people who can actually build one to a high standard is tiny, and the skill is held in the hands rather than written down. It is the kind of craft that is one workshop closure away from a real gap, and equally the kind that a single dedicated maker can keep alive and even grow.

It is learned by doing, ideally beside a working maker. The archive’s Learn a Craft directory and Jonathan Wright’s own subject page are the places to start.

What is a gore on a globe?
A gore is one of the tapering, almost petal-shaped segments of printed map that are pasted side by side onto a sphere to cover it. Because a flat map cannot wrap a ball without creasing, the map is split into many narrow gores, each wide at the equator and pointed at the poles.

How is a globe made by hand?
A sphere is formed and finished smooth, then the printed gores are wetted, stretched and pasted onto it one by one, eased into place so the seams meet and the geography lines up. Polar calottes finish the top and bottom, and the globe is sealed and mounted in its cradle or stand.

Are globes still made by hand in England?
Yes. Hand globe-making had nearly died out but has revived; a small number of makers in England now build globes to commission, and the archive has documented the globemaker Jonathan Wright.