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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."


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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 […]
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 […]
n China has land borders with 14 other countries – a world record*. And yet you should not think of China as particularly well-integrated with its neighbours. In fact, as […]
The title of Daniel Mansfield’s email was ‘Cheese Map of Canada’, so I immediately thought it would be a variation on the bread map of France (described earlier on this blog […]
To the right of this postcard, a romantic Germanic warrior (if that isn’t an oxymoron) anachronistically admires a postcard-romantic German village from what looks to be around the 18th or […]