The plate
Presentation renders; photographs follow with the first printing.
The Shatterbelt
The Balkans — where empires’ edges grind and sparks carry
Printed to order; dispatches in 2–3 working days. $9.95 flat US shipping. A plate damaged in transit is reprinted free.
The pattern
Where the reach of great powers overlaps a region that mountains have broken into small, intermixed peoples, local quarrels stop staying local. The Balkans sat where Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian ambitions ground against each other; in 1914 a pistol shot in Sarajevo pulled every wire at once and four years later twenty million people were dead. The plate outlines the two states at the centre of the storm. And yet a shatterbelt is not a life sentence — the same peninsula has spent two decades quietly knitting itself into a larger union.
This pattern also governs
- The Caucasus — three empires’ edges, forty languages, and wars that reignite
- The Levant — every power’s road to everywhere — nobody’s uncontested home
- The Horn of Africa — the Red Sea door surrounded by fragile states and foreign bases
- Ukraine — the current belt — where two systems’ edges grind today
The living map
Every printed plate carries a small engraved code in the colophon corner. Scan it and the plate opens as a living map — the story, the interactive atlas, the daily challenge — at cartogram.earth/p/shatterbelt. Prefer a clean margin? Reserve with the no-mark option and the code ships on the colophon card instead.
Shipping & returns
$9.95 flat US shipping. Prints are made to order at the press’s US fine-art plant and ship flat or in a rigid, double-walled tube, dispatching in 2–3 working days. Framed plates are made in the press’s English framing works — solid wood, glass glazing — and ship boxed with corner protection; allow up to two weeks door to door. A plate damaged in transit is reprinted free, from a photo — no return postage, no argument.
The edition
The Pattern Index is an open edition, printed to order. A cased Portfolio Edition of 250 — all fourteen plates, numbered, with a fifteenth key plate — follows the singles.
