Destination: The World
Book: Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities by Frank Jacobs (Pub. date 10/29/09)
My name is Vera Marie and I am addicted to maps. What is more, I do not want to be cured.
What traveler does not love to thumb through an Atlas, or twirl a globe? Come on, admit it. Somewhere in your house you have a drawer full of road maps. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I even love an old book of historic maps that show me what the boundaries of Europe and Asia looked like from the Roman era to World War II.
Frank Jacobs has cleverly played to the weakness of the mapoholic in a blog, and now a book, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities. Resistance is futile. You WILL either ask for this book for a Christmas present, or buy it for someone near to you so that you can surreptitiously thumb through the pages. Just do not try to use these maps to get from here to there. A travel guide, it is not.
Some of the maps at the beginning of the book are of the “Where dragons be” variety. They were created back in the day when fanciful cartographers drew maps that led gullible mapoholics like Columbus and Magellan to venture beyond the known world. But most of the fanciful maps in this book go beyond geography as we know it.
The beautiful creatures of the Aleph maps that created anthropomorphic maps of European nations. Or maps of the world as someone wished it were divided, like a 15-state USA, or divided the way it might have if the Great War turned out differently.
And what a shock to learn that when I dug in my back yard as a child and found a rubber band, my father’s explanation was wrong. He said I had dug all the way to China and found the rubber band from a Chinese pigtail. The Antipodean map shows that I would have struck salt water–not a Chinese pigtail, because none of the United States lies in a straight line through the globe to China.
But stop me before I thumb through the 229 pages of this book and 100+ images and tell you about every single one! (Disclaimer. The publishers sent me a copy of this book, making them an enabler in therapy talk.)