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
Tilt your map 90 degrees to the right, and the elephant reveals itself
Europe’s most powerful country is annexed out of existence by its neighbours
The Jews have another Israel. It’s in Siberia – and it was their first official home.
The map was made by James Mazzeo, a long-time associate of Neil Young
Because of eurocentrism. But probably not for much longer.
In its most recent issue, The New Yorker magazine revisits one of its most famous covers ever. Saul Steinberg’s cartoon on the front page of the 29 March 1976 issue […]
nn “I was contemplating the logo and slogan of `The Hospitality Industry`, the vaguely named corporation that apparently makes foil/paper wrappers for hamburgers, wondering just what `Special World` they were […]
nn PERTINI DANCE (by S.C.O.R.T.A., 1984) n “What a superstar to be, is the best you can see. n Yes this is a brave man, oh. The first Italian man, […]
For such a small country, Liechtenstein sure has a lot of exclaves (or was that enclaves?)
n A – “Now you’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s Old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center […]
n The constellations visible in the northern hemisphere, including the twelve signs of the Zodiac, owe their names to the Babylonians and the Greeks. Only during the last few hundred […]
nn nn Rarely is the question asked: What if Italy had won the Second World War? The more frequently asked question is: What if Germany had won the war? Italy […]
n nn According to Barack Obama, “there are no blue states, no red states, only the United States of America”. That is the rhetoric one should expect from a president-elect, […]
This map, showing the surface and population of selected world cities, is outdated by over two decades. It was published in the Dallas Morning News on 9 June 1983, since […]
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 […]
