Maps! We’d be lost without them. But look too closely and you can lose yourself in them quite easily. Cartomania is an infectious condition and Frank Jacobs — the compiler of this bizarre and delightful atlas — is a paid-up cartomane who runs a wildly popular blog (strangemaps.wordpress.com), a gallery of lost and found maps for similarly afflicted people for whom the map is the territory.
In an introduction titled ‘Not for Navigation’, Jacobs makes it clear that his inclination is for imaginative and imaginary geographies; real atlases, he says, bore him. Of course, this is not uncharted territory either. Strange Maps recalls another recent volume: Katharine Harmon’s You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. Jacobs’s book is not nearly as beautiful as Harmon’s (though it includes some of the same maps) and I can’t help wondering if this isn’t down to its Internet origins. Cartomania is close to bibliomania, but if you are a serious paper-fetishist, You Are Here is what you want.
Yet, in this changing world of Google Earth and net navigation, Strange Maps has its own charms, which will draw you inexorably into cyberspace: to Jacobs’s wonderful blog and elsewhere. There’s a typographic world map of top-level domain names (Internet country codes), which had me wildly googling to find the distinction between TLDs and FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) datacodes (.bs belongs to the Bahamas in one and the ephemeral coral reef of the Bassas da India in the other). Another world map — an overlay of the continents as antipodes — led me to discover that India’s only terrestrial antipode is Easter Island (on the other side of the world from the Jaisalmer/Barmer district boundary). See www.antipodemap.com.
Other favourites include a map of the first moonwalk and the satellite image of a Nebraska-shaped field in Nebraska. Actually (and fittingly), this one is on Jacobs’s website. It’s one of those loopy paradoxes that took me straight to Borges’s conundrum of infinite regression: a perfect map of England drawn on a field in England, which must contain an image of itself. Oh dear, now I have to go to Google Earth and see if I can zoom in on myself zooming in on myself. Maps are strange indeed. Buy this book. It’s a real waste of time, in the best way.