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 Safe, neutral, boring Switzerland is a strangely fertile source of curious cartography. Previously, this blog has zoomed in on wartime contingency plans for a Schweizer réduit (#109), Jules Verne’s […]
If extraterrestrials were monitoring American television, here’s what they would be watching. In the Fomalhaut system, for example, maybe everybody’s crazy about Miami Vice.
Centuries of isolation left the Japanese with limited knowledge of world geography
Some places exert a morbid attraction on the terminally disenchanted – like light pole 69 on the Golden Gate Bridge
An obscure but ancient branch of loom art, weaving current events into carpets
Plato’s fabled continent, as depicted by Kircher in the 17th century, looks a bit familiar…
Portugal’s inferiority complex leads to a very curious comparison
America’s demographic centre of gravity has been moving steadily eastward for over 200 years
The Farto was just one of over three hundred ships to meet its end on this obscure, crescent-shaped wandering sandbank
A decade and a half later, the plan sounds even more improbable than at its inception
The king of this country of giants thought of humans as vermin
n A pene-enclave is almost an enclave in the same way that a peninsula* almost is an island. But only on a strictly lexical level. If we descend from the […]
A humorous, cartography-centred look at the course of World War II, as devised by cartoon artist Angus McLeod. Thanks to Luka Rejec and Chris Medcraft for finding it here on […]
n Some maps capture the imagination and inspire so much imitation that they become icons. Harry Beck’s 1930s map of the London Underground is one of the best examples (here […]
n Despite the quip about American beer being like making love in a canoe, the US produces a multitude and a variety of brews that belie the homogenised tastes of […]
n “The American Geographical Society Library has acquired an extremely rare and unusual map, The Man of Commerce, published in 1889 in Superior, Wisconsin. The highly detailed 31″ x 50″ […]
n “Thanks to Unicode and OpenType, modern fonts are overcoming thelimitations of traditional European typography. The size of the countries on this map does not correspond to their geographical area, […]
n What a great way this map is to present global levels of wine consumption (red wine, 2006). A shame there’s no legend to provide context (by way of litres […]
n n Endtime prophecy is not the province of the religiously excitable alone. Even the die-hard materialists of the Russian intelligence service FSB (formerly the KGB) dabble in apocalyptic musings – although […]
A youngster in breeches and an elderly man with a scythe, both white and together looking rather vulnerable, are playing dice against a team of unreliable-looking Asians. The object of their […]
The original map of Treasure Island was lost – if it still exists, it must surely be worth a fortune now…
Long dead and gone, the Rochester Subway lives on in the imagination – and on this map
In the end, the Dutch went for the less ambitious drainage scheme of Cornelis Lely
“The man of breeding never appears to abandon himself completely to his pleasures; even his manner of enjoyment is detached. It is the rustic boors who take all their pleasures […]
a stark illustration of the West Bank’s ongoing fragmentation
This map excerpt of the environs of Jerusalem is strangely reminiscent of this one, showing Belgium partially submerged along ethnic lines. Both maps solve the seemingly intractible disputes inherent in […]
Perhaps the least-known of the four national saints’ days on the British Isles
