Give the Gift of Map Books

The holiday shopping season is rapidly approaching. Here are two recently published books of interest to that cartophile on your shopping list:

The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography by Katharine Harmon

In a sequel, of sorts, to her previous book on map art, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, Harmon promises to lead her readers to:

different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists' maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike.

You Are Here featured previously on Cartophilia:
Happy Father's Day to Me
On the Road to...?
Be My Cartographic Valentine

Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities by Frank Jacobs

Jacobs has been publishing his hugely popular Strange Maps blog since 2006, where he "collects and comments on all kinds of cartographic curiosa". As has become a blogger custom lately, he has collected over one hundred of his strangest maps into this handsome soft cover coffee table book. Includes his extensive commentary.

UPDATE 11/13: The Freakonomics blog has an interview with Frank Jacobs (HT to The Map Room).

Interestingly, both books feature upside-down/inside-out maps on their covers.

Tell them Cartophilia sent you.

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