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
n “(…) for the last two years, I’ve been taking pictures of Britain on world maps,” writes Ben Terrett, graphic designer and blogger at Noisy Decent Graphics. Well, not too bad, if that’s […]
The calls of this bird vary regionally, as do the names people give them
The short-lived state “belongs more to the obsessions of bourgeois France than to the politics of South America”
An April Fool’s prank that had lots of Guardian readers fooled – except those who knew their typography.
Is the Line evidence that Northern culture is advancing deeper into the South?
If most maps are like meat and potatoes, these are like fruit and dessert
Satellite navigation…. decades before the first satellite
n n Global warming is a complex phenomenon – so much so that some scientists still dispute it’s even happening. One indication of this complexity is the fact that its […]
It will be some days yet before the Summer Games of the XXIXth Olympiad in Beijing draw to a close, so the medal count is still not complete. Host nation […]
Dear all, n Blog posts of the “I am sorry I haven’t been posting any messages of late” kind are annoying and redundant, a bit like going round someone’s house […]
n It took the hero of Jules Verne’s 1873 novel ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ exactly that amount of time to circumnavigate the globe. Phileas Fogg leaves London on […]
Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain are a pair of young Brazilian artists, working in their home country and in France. Some of their work explores fonts and maps. Typography meets […]
China is the world’s most populous nation (1). That much anybody knows. But even if we know a bit more (that the number of Chinese is around 1.32 billion, which […]
The map of the Bay Area has been in your hands all along
Now that Russia has recognised the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the improbable phantom nation of Transnistria (1) might be gearing up for its own fifteen minutes of geopolitical […]
Genetically speaking, Finns and Italians are the most atypical Europeans. There is a large degree of overlap between other European ethnicities, but not up to the point where they would […]
Independent from Denmark for a week every year, the kingdom of Elleore has acquired a fair number of quirks since its founding in 1944.
This conspiracy map shows a world in which all national armies police places far from home, as a way of enforcing World Government.
n n “I was watching TV and noticed an informercial for cure-all vitamin supplement with a unique map background,” writes John Deal, who immediately grabbed a camera and took a […]
The fledgling state managed to elect a Miss Absaroka 1939 before disappearing into the dustbin of history
n n (click on image to enlarge) n The Zeitgeist of the mid ‘fifties probably wasn’t shrinkwrapped in quite so many layers of irony and political correctness as today’s is, […]
n n What is it with airlines and maps? Which part of ‘atlas’ don’t they understand? You’d think that, being the business of transportation, they’d get their distances and directions […]
nMississippi is the fattest state in the Union, with 30.1% of Mississippians being obese. That’s almost one in every three inhabitants. Not that the Magnolia State (in red on this […]
n n In 1989, Swedish author Herman Lindquist published Rapporter från Mittens Rike (‘Reports from the Middle Kingdom’). The title of the book is ambiguous, as it refers to the well-known […]
Spain, now a fully integrated member of the European Union, once was considered so alien to the rest of Europe that Alexandre Dumas is known to have remarked that “Africa […]
Cannibalism is the ultimate yardstick for barbarity, and the ideal excuse to subjugate the accused
This crazy scheme would have restored the prehistoric land bridge between the UK and the Continent
The Toscanelli map grossly underestimated the Earth’s circumference (and left out America)
n n I first encountered the term ‘galoshes’ in the same Russian novels that also introduced me, albeit equally theoretically, to the samowar*. Subsequently, I’ve always thought of galoshes (also […]