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Loading... Strange maps (2009)by Frank Jacobs
None. Jacobs' Strange Maps blog is a treasure trove for map lovers, and his book gives his eclectic collection full credit. Imaginary lands, cartographic misconceptions, political maps, parodies, geographic oddities and, well, simply 'strange' maps all find a place here. Discover the world's most intricate enclave system (sporting the only occurrence of a counter-counter-enclave known to man), explore how major religions envision a soul's path through life and beyond, learn why gerrymandering is called like that and shiver through Hitler's world domination maps all between the covers of this atlas of extremes. (  ) timtom | Feb 28, 2011 |  in a world where geography - in its plainest form the position of countries realtive to each other - is often not taught, this is a a blast of interesting air. incidental history, graphic art, and humour must surely make it more interesting to the general public!!! (  ) dieseltaylor | Sep 23, 2010 | Terrific collection of -- just as it says -- strange maps, from the eponymous website. A few are deliberately offbeat, but most appear to be entirely serious in intent.. The mapped regions go from Manhattan to the largest moon Saturn, and the topics mapped from straight (sort of) geography to French kisses. Any map devotee will love this one, and it will also appeal to devotees of the unusual. Great Xmas gift for the right person. ( ) annbury | Apr 26, 2010 | Being in the real estate industry, I am a big fan of maps. I like how they help visual the world around us. There is the physical sense of the objects around us and how to get from one point to another. But maps can also help us visual information in many different ways. That is what interested me in Strange Maps by Frank Jacobs. I first heard about the book from an interview on the Freakonomics blog: Maps: Fighting Disease and Skewing Borders. I encountered the book and the Strange Maps blog at the same time. Although, it took a few months for the book to surface in my reading stack. (The blog was being published before the book.) As you might expect, the book is very blogish. Each page has a map and a narrative about the map. There are some great ones, some mediocre ones and some so-so ones. You take the hits with misses. In the end there is lots of interesting visuals and interesting information. After reading Strange Maps, you won’t view a map the same way. (  ) dougcornelius | Jan 26, 2010 | Exquisite. All the character and curiosity of the blog, but with rich and beautiful maps in print. A feast.Some netcentrisms made it past editing: "Moving your mouse cursor over any département" (p.181) didn't work so well for me. And for some of the more creative maps, it would have been helpful to have a sidebar providing context against a standard map. But no matter: this is a delightful book and a valuable addition to any cartophile's library. (  ) EdSantiago | Dec 30, 2009 |
As carriers of the latest scientific knowledge, maps also require leaps of imagination, and many (or most) have been crazily wrong. The historic and modern examples in Frank Jacobs’s engrossing anthology, several of which appeared originally on his popular blog (www.strangemaps.wordpress.com), include geographic blunders (California as an island), literary fantasies (Thomas More’s map of his Utopia), counterfactual propaganda (Europe, if the Nazis had triumphed) and a slew of other forms that blur the line between drawings and graphs, diagrams and photographs. Mr. Jacobs demonstrates that almost anything can be plotted and traced — Neil Armstrong’s moon walk or a breakdown of the states where Ludacris boasts of bedding women in his rap song “Area Codes” — and thus in a most entertaining fashion, he has expanded our sense of what maps have been as well as what they can be.
References to this work on external resources.
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