Frank Jacobs
Journalist, writer, and blogger
Frank Jacobs is Big Think's "Strange Maps" columnist.
From a young age, Frank was fascinated by maps and atlases, and the stories they contained. Finding his birthplace on the map in the endpapers of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings only increased his interest in the mystery and message of maps.
While pursuing a career in journalism, Frank started a blog called Strange Maps, as a repository for the weird and wonderful cartography he found hidden in books, posing as everyday objects and (of course) floating around the Internet.
"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".
A remit that wide allows for a steady, varied diet of maps: 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.
A variation on post #10 in this blog, done by Alexander Cheek and to be found on this page of his website. The differences between these two maps indicate that […]
This parody map shows the world as Ronald Reagan (US president 1980-1988) might have imagined it. Even as parody, it indicates an interesting duality: on the one hand, it presents […]
The application of the suffix -stan (Persian for ‘home’) generally refers to countries in central Asia – in fact, the formerly Soviet states that occupy Central Asia are sometimes referred […]
They could have made it more complex, but they would have had to try very hard
n Russell Richards is an artist who (as far as I can tell) lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia. I like his work, very funny and direct. In my mind, […]
This isn’t a political, but a commercial world map: it specifies the six distinct global ‘DVD regions’ of the world. DVD is short for ‘digital video disc’, the successor to […]
The The once sang about Great Britain being the ’51st State of the USA’ – a comment on the culture and foreign policy of the United Kingdom, which were then […]
Not so much strange as just darn purty, this map of Newfoundland on a postage stamp, probably dating from before 1949, when it became a province of Canada (this happened […]
Double taxation without representation? No wonder this grey area declared its independence.
If you crave adventure, you couldn't wish for a better alien planet on which to crash-land
Finland gained independence from Russia right after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. A civil war ensued, along the lines of the post-revolution conflict in Russia itself: ‘Reds’ against ‘Whites’. The […]
Now one of the smaller states, it once covered half the continent
Funny how something as arbitrary as map orientation can skew the perception of countries. On this map, from the vaults of the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of […]
‘Volkstaat’ is Afrikaans for People’s state – the people in this case being the white South Africans who identify themselves as ‘Afrikaners’ (mainly descendents of Dutch settlers, speaking a language […]
I don’t remember where I got this map from, but the context seems quite straightforward. The two figures in the foreground are saying “ein Geschwür!” (literally: “an ulcer”) and “Da […]
All results of a nationwide election in the US can usually be translated into a ‘binary’ map, divided into red states (Republican, mainly in the middle) and blue states (Democratic, […]
This map is yet another dissection of Europe, this time focussing on the north-south divides in the continent. Some of the boundaries here were already present in one or both […]
Beyond the pale is an English expression for anything beyond the limits of the law or of accepted morality. The aforementioned ‘pale’, far from being a symbolic separator, at one time […]
Post #12 shows a map identifying three core areas of Europe with transition zones in between. This map here has a different approach to European cultural diversity. On the one […]
One last map by Leopold Kohr, also an addendum to his book ‘The Breakdown of Nations’ (1957). Kohr probably realised that dividing Europe into rectangular, US-style states would clash with […]
Leopold Kohr, who championed the principle 'small is beautiful', also applied it to geopolitics
Had Franz Ferdinand not been assassinated in Sarajevo, he might have pushed through this plan, and the empire might have survived
At 8.511.965 km², Brazil is the 5th largest country on earth, the larger ones being Russia, Canada, the US and China (in that order). The country conjures up mostly images […]
I was alerted to these maps by a Turkish gentleman, who posts them on his website. They are a reaction to the map of the Middle East, re-drawn as it […]
Belgium sits astride one of the main cultural fault lines of Europe, consisting roughly of a northern half that speaks Dutch and is oriented towards the ‘anglosphere’ and a southern […]
Cornwall is the southwesternmost county of England. As with other ‘extremities’ of the British Isles, it was one of the refuges of the original (partially romanized) Celtic inhabitants, fleeing before […]
An interesting look at the religions and language groups that are elements of division (and union) in Europe. The mapmaker wanted to make a point by indicating three ‘core areas’ […]
The British tried their hand at subduing Afghanistan in the 19th Century, when the Empire was at the top of its game. Their troops were massacred (with one man left […]
Any and every American city is built up out of Avenues and Streets, most of them numbered. A much nicer way to describe a city is by mapping its neighbourhoods. […]
What would Europe have looked like, had Imperial Germany won World War One? This image is taken off a French magazine at the start of the war, painting an exaggerated […]