In 1960, feeling he might not be long for this earth, John Steinbeck decided to travel across the length and breadth of America for one last time. The celebrated writer of East of Eden, Of Mice and M...
To be or not to be Scandinavian, that might be the question soon enough for Scotland, if it decides to become independent. For the time being, Scotland is still a part of the United Kingdom, as it ha...
Where is this? The question is simple enough, and in a non-metropolitan environment, the answer may be correspondingly unambiguous. But in large cities, where the flow of human traffic is fast and va...
Surprise meeting with an old acquaintance in the Whitechapel Gallery - Grayson Perry’s Map of an Englishman (discussed in #241). “It’s the work that draws the most people, and gets the most laughs”, ...
Last April, this blog discussed a map, dating from 1875, that showed the lower 48 states of the US in the shape of a hog: [T]his must be the world’s finest - and possibly only - example of sus...
What a strange concoction this late-18th-century French map is. Centred on the northwestern part of America, it is an eclectic mix of geographic fact and fiction. Some continental contours are instan...
Happy 2012! By now, you’re probably still in the earnest stage of your New Year’s resolutions. If one of those is about your determination to cut back on drink, this might not be the be...
An apple a day keeps the doctor away. But eating that apple is not enough. Where you eat it matters almost as much. At least it did in the mid-19th century, as demonstrated by these two maps.&#...
Philip K. Dick never found the source of the mysterious messages he received during his ‘mystic episode’ in early 1974. The science fiction writer had a few theories, though: Soviet sci...
If you’re in the north of England and you’re in a town ending in -by, you’re in former Danish-ruled territory [1]. If the toponym starts with beau- or bel-, it was probably named...
The second dip of the worldwide recession is a bit like that scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where two guards stupidly stare at a horseless knight approaching in the distance. &...
How is your tache hanging? As Movember [1] is drawing to a close, this might be a good time to examine the tenuous, yet undeniable and intriguing overlap between cartography and facial hair. &#...
Finding maps that are sufficiently strange and beautiful is only half the joy of making this blog; the other is writing up the story to go along with them. But sometimes, fascinating maps are resista...
Legend has it that hardly anyone turned up for the opening night of Jean Giraudouxs (1) play La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu. Taking the billboards for the play too literally, Parisian thea...
What a joy these maps are to behold. It’s as if someone took one of those composite satellite maps - you know, impossibly showing the whole world at night, the darkness broken by hubs and stri...
The maps discussed on this blog are rarely of any hard, practical use. This one does have real-world relevance - especially if you’re a globetrotting, It’s-Tuesday-so-this-mu st-be-Belar...
The plural of Texas? My money’s on Texases, even though that sounds almost as wrong as Texae, Texi or whatever alternative you might try to think up. Texas is defiantly singular. It is the Lon...
Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) was one of the world’s most important mathematicians, and certainly a candidate for the most prolific: his collected works would fill up to 80 quarto volumes. E...
There’s something wrong with this map. Can you see what it is? Take a few seconds. Yes? No? It might help you to know that this map of Ireland and the UK was cropped from a movie poster (repro...
As an architect, Cedric Price (1934-2003) was such a visionary that he inspired the Centre Pompidou in Paris and anticipated the London Eye rather than actually design those things himself. ...
Wine maps are appreciated mainly by the select few who are both cartophiles and oenophiles. Those who are either or neither face a formidable obstacle to cartographic enjoyment, inherent in viticultu...
The Eurovision Song Contest is a resounding success in at least one respect. Set up as a laboratory of European harmony - musically, audiovisually and politically - its first edition [1] featured a m...
A body of running water may be called any of many different names, the most generic being stream, the most common being river. A river can be defined as ‘a natural stream of water of usu...
Transcript of an extract from BBC Radio 4 entertainment interview show Chain Reaction (first broadcast on 26 August 2011). Intersperse with a good deal of [live studio laughter]. Kevin Eld...
“[This is] really a most imaginative way not just to map, but also to empower,” writes Thomas Theis Nielsen of the HarassMap, which plots the incidence of various types of sexual harass...
Modern tourism is born of the Grand Tour. From the 17th century onwards, the brahmins of Britain travelled across the Continent for the twin purposes of education and entertainment. The Tour, an itin...
You’d think that in the world of global cinema, the US is the dominant force. You’d be wrong. Think New Zealand, India and Iceland. Of course these cartograms (i...
The St. Michael Alignment is arguably the most prominent and intriguing of the many ley lines that criss-cross Britain. It runs in a straight line between Lands End, Englands southwestern extremity, ...
"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell", said George Bernard Shaw [1]; in fact, just the odd few weeks of summer vacation may be near enough unbearable - what with all the ...
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