When Peter Bellerby couldn’t find the perfect handmade globe for his father’s 80th birthday, he took matters into his own hands. He decided he would create two globes from scratch—one for his father and one for himself.

“After all how difficult can it be to make a ball and put a map on it?”, he wondered.

But making a globe is extremely difficult, as Bellerby found out. Correctly applying the little strips of the map, called gores, onto the spheres itself took eighteen months to perfect. Some of the poorly constructed models Bellerby found had overlapping gores that wiped out entire countries, or had latitude lines that were drawn straight across the map with a ruler. Bellerby wasn’t prepared to settle on such poor quality finish. Today he runs Bellerby & Co Globemakers out of a London Studio. They are one of only two workshops in the world that still make modern hand-painted artisanal globes.