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
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 […]
This extraordinary map, dating from 1675, details The Road From LONDON to the LANDS END Comencing at the Standard in Cornhill and Extending to Senan in Cornwall. It was made […]
I just love allegorical maps like these, if only for their delightfully straightforward semiotics. This map of the Road to Success depicts an actual road, winding up to success signified […]
n In September 1578, while sailing near Greenland’s southernmost point at Cape Farewell, captain James Newton of the Emmanuel recorded in his log the first sighting of an island “seeming […]
The Wheel of Mainz is an essential element of the heraldry of the German city and archbishopric of Mainz. It is a regionally prominent symbol in Rheinland-Pfalz (the Rhineland-Palatinate, one […]
Whether out of financial prudence or budgetary necessity, the annual summer vacation has been a “staycation” for millions of families during this recession year. Local attractions have had to do, […]
n At 404 inhabitants per square kilometre (1,040/mi2), the Netherlands is one of the most densely populated nations in the world (1). The country’s population density, over 23 times the […]
n The German language describes the difference between two main types of federal states aptly and concisely as being between a Bundesstaat (1) and a Staatenbund (2). The European Union, […]
n It was recently revealed that the recently deceased Michael Jackson thought he might have “cured” Adolf Hitler of his evil ways if he’d had an hour or so alone […]
With a society prospering in splendid isolation and a population smaller than one-thousandth of the EU total (1), Iceland until recently had little incentive to be subsumed by the Brussels […]
Like Russia or the UK, Turkey is the successor state to a once dominant world power. And much as in those other countries, nostalgic memories of Empire (the Ottoman one, […]