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
Not merely a nice flower, but also a political tool
California’s varied landscape has stood in for half the world in Hollywood movies. Here is Paramount Studios’ 1927 map of international filming locations, all set in California.
We’ve discussed the Ancient Greeks’ snowglobe vision of the Universe(#288), tackled the far-out theories of the Hollow Earth (#85), and yet managed to be surprised by the absurdity of the square […]
n “China’s internet is open.” n (PRC government spokesperson responding to a question on Google’s announcement to stop filtering its Chinese search engine, citing concerted hacker attacks on the e-mail […]
Washington DC as a big, red heart, pumping life-blood through the arteries of the nation’s body? Few Americans will view their oft-reviled capital as favourably as this metaphor suggests. However, […]
“I have been seeing this image almost every day for years, but only a few days ago did I realize that it was actually a map,” writes Julien Nègre. It’s […]
Even old New York / Was once New Amsterdam / Why they changed it I can’t say / People just liked it better that way – They Might Be Giants: […]
Is there such a thing as collective guilt? Or if not that, then at least some kind of national responsibility for past state crimes? Was the Nazi period a freak of history, […]
n . n Strange Maps is partial to a nice bit of comparative geography, as demonstrated by earlier posts like #101, #131, #377 or #390. The list is non-exhaustive, and […]
. (click on the map to view it without the annoying sidebar) . Great stories are rarely isolates. Even though Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are founding epics of ancient Greece, […]
n Korea as a tiger: what a beautiful map. The peninsula’s shape is rendered in the image of the local big cat , also known as the Siberian, Manchurian or Altaic tiger (Panthera […]
. . Is spanking an acceptable way of disciplining children? . Opinions differ (1). Some consider it barbaric and a definite no-no, others think it merely old-fashioned but quite handy […]
n . n The Spanish title of Jorge Volpi’s most recent book of essays, translates as Bolivar’s Nightmare – Four untimely essays on Latin America in the 21st century. The […]
. Dell Books, the American series of pulp fiction books, spanned many genres, featured most of all the ‘classic’ detective story. Prominently featured were the maps on the back cover, […]
Marge Simpson probably is the world’s best-known octodactylous (1) housewife. With her distinctive blue beehive hairdo, she is an instantly recognisable fixture on The Simpsons, the animated sitcom now in […]
“This is a scan of the cocktail napkin for The View, the rotating restaurant/cocktail lounge at the top of the Times Square Marriott,” says Liam Flanagan. The 360-degree map on […]
The secessionist project hit its stride at exactly the worst time possible
Despite centuries of Anglo-French tension, Stratford’s favourite son is as popular in Paris as he is in London
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 […]