A Wallbook is a large printed

book A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physi ...

that is designed also to be mounted on a wall. For example, its design may be

concertina A concertina is a free-reed musical instrument, like the various accordions and the harmonica. It consists of expanding and contracting bellows, with buttons (or keys) usually on both ends, unlike accordion buttons, which are on the front. The ...

folded so it can be read like a book or hung on a wall.

Etymology

The name was coined by Christopher Lloyd (world history author), creator of the 2010 ''The What on Earth? Wallbook'' which claims to be the first ever attempt to illustrate the entire history of everything from the Big Bang to the present day on a single

timeline A timeline is a display of a list of events in chronological order. It is typically a graphic design showing a long bar labelled with dates paralleling it, and usually contemporaneous events. Timelines can use any suitable scale represen ...

Design and contents

Reviewing the book for the ''Telegraph's'' Family Book Club, the writer Christopher Middleton encapsulates the work as a "7-foot, six-inch-long chart, which starts out some four billion years ago, with the explosion that triggered the Earth’s birth, and ends just a matter of months ago, with the election of

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...

and the

financial crisis of 2007–2008 Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fi ...

". ''The What on Earth? Wallbook'' is notable for its use of a

logarithmic time In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of computer time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by t ...

scale. At the beginning of the timeline 1 cm represents the passage of 1 billion years but by the end of the timeline the same space accounts for just five years. A total of 12 changes of scale accounts for how the whole of the past can be graphically represented on a single piece of paper. The wallbook’s 1,000 pictures and captions are arranged into 12 streams of colours which provide the backdrops along which the major events of

natural Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...

and

human history Human history, also called world history, is the narrative of humanity's past. It is understood and studied through anthropology, archaeology, genetics, and linguistics. Since the invention of writing, human history has been studied throug ...

unfold. The section, "Space, Earth, Sky, Sea, Land and Humanity" accounts for the story of

evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

while

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an are ...

, the

Middle East The Middle East ( ar, الشرق الأوسط, ISO 233: ) is a geopolitical region commonly encompassing Arabia (including the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain), Asia Minor (Asian part of Turkey except Hatay Province), East Thrace (Europ ...

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

, the

Americas The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. Along with th ...

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

and

Australasia Australasia is a region that comprises Australia, New Zealand and some neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. The term is used in a number of different contexts, including geopolitically, physiogeographically, philologically, and ecologi ...

convey the rise and fall of human civilisations. At the top of the timeline is a series of globes that start by showing the movement of the world’s continental plates but later chart the rise and fall of major human

empire An empire is a "political unit" made up of several territories and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the empire (sometimes referred to as the metropole) ex ...

Distribution

''The What on Earth? Wallbook'' was launched exclusively through

The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was f ...

newspaper on Saturday 4 September 2010.

Nomenclature

Since the launch of the ''What on Earth? Wallbook'' the word ''wallbook'' has been defined in ''Macmillan's Open Dictionary'' as a new noun meaning: "a large printed book which can be mounted on a wall".

References

{{Reflist Book design Books by type