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."
featured
All Stories
In 1937, Nicaragua and Honduras almost went to war… over a stamp.
Geography was my favourite subject in school; physics the one I disliked the most. If only I’d known about this Map of Physics! This spatial representation of the subject, dating […]
A closer look at the cartography of the famous Disney ride
There are many ways to look at Europe other than as a collection of nation-states. Plenty of other imagined communities lurk beneath the surface of the standard political map. Check […]
Maybe it’s because the country’s shape tends towards a square, but Poland’s borders give it a solid, anchored appearance on the map of Europe. And yet those borders are relatively […]
The massive southern continent was a supposed to be a counterweight for the lands of the northern hemisphere
These specially-made relief maps showed blind children were sensitive to the geo-distributive aspect of maps
Remember that guy in the Truman Show who pretends to be the protagonist’s best buddy [1]? Who takes him out for a few brewskis on the beach when Truman starts […]
In Celtic legend, the island was almost perpetually shrouded in mist, and visible only for one day every seven years
See children’s roaming rights shrink dramatically, in just three generations
The fictional island has all the attributes necessary for a classic adventure story – including a bunch of intriguing place-names
In the two decades since German reunification, the German government has spent up to €1,6 trillion on upgrading the defunct economic infrastructure of the communist East to match that of […]
George Soros last Sunday blamed Angela Merkel for the euro crisis – and gave her three months to fix it. Speaking at the 7th Festival of Economics in Trento (Italy), […]
Abandoning circular growth, the Russian capital has started sprouting limbs across the surrounding countryside
An angelic lady from the pre-raphaelite school of femmes fatales is stretched across a map of Europe. Her raised hands clutch a sketch of the late-19th-century European rail network at two of […]
Just before Rip Van Winkle falls into his thirty-year slumber, he encounters the ghostly spectacle of a handful of ancient Dutch colonials playing at ninepins, the thunder rolling across the […]
The average human lives at 24 degrees north or south from the equator
GPS technology is opening up exciting new hybrid forms of mapping and art. Or in this case: cycling, mapping and art. The maps on this page are the product of […]
In a dream-like scene from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, the titular tyrant [1] gently plucks a large globe from its standalone frame, holds it longingly in his arms and […]
Scandinavia is ground zero for heavy metal, but the genre crops up in less obvious places as well…
One of Earth Platinum’s 31 copies could be yours for a mere $100,000
The incredible (and indeed untrue) story of President Taylor’s APE
I’m still not sure what Pinterest is for [1], but scrolling a recommended collection of maps on the site, I couldn’t help but notice that the number of cartographic tattoos […]
Why travel all the way to Italy when you can visit a place much closer by that is shaped like Italy? That is the alluring ruse proposed by this poster, […]
A satirical take on the financial crisis of the 1720s
Their paths were similar, but the outcomes were far from the same