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
“How can we possibly be giving £1 billion a month to Bongo Bongo Land when we’re in this kind of debt is completely beyond me”, Godfrey Bloom said in August […]
All maps tell lies, but this one does it better than most.
Oceans and deserts are on opposite ends of the humidity scale, yet at some weird level, the extremes are interchangeable. Rolling desert dunes are reminiscent of ocean waves, and as […]
Remember Syria? It’s the war everyone was talking about before the one about to erupt over Crimea invaded our screens. Turkey hasn’t forgotten, though. Syria’s northern neighbour has seen a […]
Who in history was clever enough to have made these maps?
The man who coined the country’s name was expelled from it, and died in exile
The best argument against German Unification came from French writer François Mauriac: “J’aime tellement l’Allemagne que je préfère qu’il y en ait deux”. It takes an American to propel that […]
This just in from Ukraine: President Yanukovych has sacked the country’s armed forces chief, has agreed a ‘truce’ with the three main opposition leaders, and wants to start ‘negotiations’ to […]
“Ladies, take special notice. Afghanistan is a heavy duty male chauvinist trip, so try to remember what your dear old Grandmother said about acting like a lady”
Truth is stranger than fiction. Especially if that truth is caused by fiction. Consider the strange case of Agloe, a place name that started appearing on maps of New York State in the 1930s.
Dear Strange Maps, This really is the strangest, or perhaps most curious, map I’ve ever seen: Spam is almost as smart as chimpanzees these days. It gets harder and harder […]
Call me a quitter. But I never did finish Moby Dick. Herman Melville’s writing is magnetic – in both senses of the word: attractive for its beauty and passion, and […]
Many things puzzled the British student, on exchange somewhere on the Continent: what people ate, how they dressed, why they drove on the right. But nothing more so than the […]
The second map adds the crucial third dimension
Memories triggered by smell are more emotional than those triggered by sounds, pictures or words
This looks like a pretty standard map of a bit of Denmark. In fact, it is no such thing. For there isn’t really a town called Köbstad in Denmark, […]
Does it reveal the location of the doldrums?
A victory for common sense, a setback for sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll
When I was 15, my geography teacher almost ruined maps for me. He stubbornly avoided what fascinated me about cartography: the why and how of those borderlines that cut and […]
Archie Archambault, that’s who! The philosophy graduate turned printer struck upon the concept of circular maps after moving to Portland. In Oregon’s biggest city, he felt something that must have […]
Put a pair of newborn rabbits, a buck and a doe, together in a pen. Assume it takes them a month to start reproducing, and another month for the female […]
Five score and seventeen years ago, the United States was a boxy, silver-coloured dog with a chunky tail of dark gold. That bizarre image, embedded in the familiar outline of […]
The conflict is too complex for a single map.
The rising tide of evil, the relative safety of a few sanctuaries: these are the two main vectors of zombie cartography. In the first category, the epidemiological map shows the […]
Just our luck… the only part of the UK with tight border controls. The picture on the front page of Private Eye shows a long line of cars queueing to […]
If you’re a cartography nerd, you’re probably also a bit of an election geek. Because nothing beats election night on TV. Exit polls, voting patterns and the results of previous […]
Judas was often portrayed as a redhead. But now the gingers are fighting back
If you think that trawling the internet for cartography is a harmless endeavour, you are sorely mistaken. Think again. If you still can, that is. The relentless perusal of maps […]