Strange Maps
A special series by Frank Jacobs.
Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more. "Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle."
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All Stories
n Korea as a tiger: what a beautiful map. The peninsula’s shape is rendered in the image of the local big cat , also known as the Siberian, Manchurian or Altaic tiger (Panthera […]
. . Is spanking an acceptable way of disciplining children? . Opinions differ (1). Some consider it barbaric and a definite no-no, others think it merely old-fashioned but quite handy […]
n . n The Spanish title of Jorge Volpi’s most recent book of essays, translates as Bolivar’s Nightmare – Four untimely essays on Latin America in the 21st century. The […]
. Dell Books, the American series of pulp fiction books, spanned many genres, featured most of all the ‘classic’ detective story. Prominently featured were the maps on the back cover, […]
Marge Simpson probably is the world’s best-known octodactylous (1) housewife. With her distinctive blue beehive hairdo, she is an instantly recognisable fixture on The Simpsons, the animated sitcom now in […]
“This is a scan of the cocktail napkin for The View, the rotating restaurant/cocktail lounge at the top of the Times Square Marriott,” says Liam Flanagan. The 360-degree map on […]
The secessionist project hit its stride at exactly the worst time possible
Despite centuries of Anglo-French tension, Stratford’s favourite son is as popular in Paris as he is in London
Despite the levelling force of the Revolution, France is still very diverse – often in weird and surprising ways
Did this far-out story of lizards below LA father the conspiracy theory of world-ruling reptilians?
Where we are determines who we are – and what we drink
Sprinkled throughout the city – but often poorly indicated – are dozens of Privately Owned Public Open Spaces
This satirical exercise in dissuasive cartography painted Ireland as the ‘Emerald Desert’
Don’t think of it as the smallest county, but as a huge island.
1. Asphalt Maine n n Looking down upon the patched-up surface of an unnamed street, J. David Lovejoy couldn’t help noticing a remarkable example of accidental geography. The patch bears […]
n As discussed before on this blog, electoral maps have a strange tendency to transmit more than the results of a political horse-race. They often serve as quirky memorials of […]
Festive cheer is upon us, and some of it is even permeating this blog. But what does Christmas have to do with cartography? Well, there is Christmas Island – three […]
n n At the beginning of this new year, hardly any map could be as appropriate as this one of Calendria, a place made out of time. This wondrous world […]
This map was taken from the August 2, 1919 edition of the US news magazine Literary Digest, and originally appeared in the London Sphere. It details the projected break-up of the […]
Take the length of the equator on this map, double that distance and you have the width of a human hair. For this is the world’s smallest world map, with […]
The Vikings set foot in America just over a millennium ago, but credit for the discovery generally goes to Columbus, who only stumbled upon the New World almost 500 years later. […]
n So it’s 2010, and we’re not living on Mars, nor even zipping through the sky in flying cars. But neither do we have to bow to our new insect […]
n The rapid spread of the Great Fear was one of the weirder episodes in the early, confusing days of the French Revolution. This combination of a riot, a brush fire and […]
Prester John as virtual as he was virtuous, the legend literally too good to be true.
The Maine Solar System Model recreates the relative distances between the sun and planets along a stretch of U.S. Highway 1
A few miles northwest of the small town of Minden, in the seemingly endless Nebraska plains, lies a field shaped like the state itself. By intelligent design or as an accident of agriculture? […]
This cartographic predator was born in 1583, and would be cut in half barely 65 years later
The German polymath Sebastian Münster (1488-1552) also was a cartographer, and one with a penchant for strange maps. He produced an anthropomorphic map of Europe as a queen (#141) for […]