Maps Still On My Mind

It has been pointed out to me that I haven't been posting here very often. I've been so busy I hadn't noticed!

But that doesn't mean I'm not still loving the maps. Right now, I'm excited because I finally got my hands on a copy of Ken Jennings' new book, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks:

"Geography Wonks?" 

Guilty as charged.

 BTW, yes that is THE Ken Jennings. You know, the guy who won all those Jeopardy games.

Handy Mappy Christmas

Happy Christmas to me! Young Miss Cartophiliac gave this book to her old man:

From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association by Kris Harzinski, of the Hand Drawn Map Association. A collection of hand drawn maps available from Princeton Architectural Press.

"From Here to There celebrates these ephemeral documents—usually forgotten or tossed aside after having served their purpose—giving them their due as artifacts representing stories from people's lives around the world."

I have been waiting for months to get my hands on this book. Aside from being a delightful collection of mappish fun, Yours Truly has a page dedicated to his own hand drawn map of Quastolia.

HDMA Previously on Cartophilia

Song of Ice and Fire

J.E. Fullerton has created beautiful maps depicting places in George R.R. Martin's series of Fantasy books, The Song of Ice and Fire. The maps employ a medieval style, including heraldry.



This map depicts a region of Westros known as the Trident (because three rivers come together here). Many key events of the most recent book in the series, A Feast for Crows take place her.

Via The Map Room

Mystery Bottle

Mystery Bottle by Kristen Balouch:

A boy in Brooklyn receives a package from Iran. When he opens up the mysterious bottle that lies within, a great wind transports him over the oceans and mountains, straight into the arms of his grandfather. Despite being separated by politics and geography, the boy and his Baba Bazorg can share an extraordinary gift, the bond of their love.

Nearly every page of this delightfully illustrated children's picture book uses maps in the background; from Brooklyn, to the Atlantic Ocean, to Iran.

This book received the 2007 Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Award

Queequeg

In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick,Captain Ahab sets himself on a quest to find and kill the White Whale. His obsession leads to his own destruction and the death of nearly all his crew. Matt Kish also has a quest. Fortunately, this one is likely to be less destructive to himself and his colleagues. (Which is a good thing, as we both work at the same library!) He has set out to create an original piece of art, an illustration on found paper, for each page of this monumental tome.

I'm working my way through the whole book in order, beginning with page 1 and ending with page 552. I'm not working ahead or jumping around to the pages I might like the most. If all goes well, I should complete this some time in March 2011. We'll see about that.

On page 20, we are introduced to the mysterious Queequeg. Initially, this harpooner from a fictional South Pacific island causes much consternation to our hero, Ishmael. Soon, however, they become fast friends.

Matt has rendered his Queequeg on a page from a discarded book that includes a map of some islands of the South Pacific and South China Sea.

Follow Matt's quest at his blog, One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick

Read a recent interview with Matt on The New Yorker's Book Bench blog.

Thar' She Blows!



UPDATE 5/27: Here is another Moby-Dick/Queegueg map from Matt's gallery:

From Here to There, Hand Drawn Maps Are Every Where

Kris Harzinski, of the Hand Drawn Map Association, has a collection of hand drawn maps coming out soon, to a book store near you.

From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association will be published by Princeton Architectural Press this fall.

"From Here to There celebrates these ephemeral documents—usually forgotten or tossed aside after having served their purpose—giving them their due as artifacts representing stories from people's lives around the world."

Pre-orders now available from Amazon and Princeton Architectural Press

HDMA Previously on Cartophilia

#575

Lost States on Wall Street

Lost States author, Michael Trinklein, has been getting some great press lately, including reviews in newspapers and on interviews on National Public Radio.

Today, the Wall Street Journal, offers a two page feature spread. The WSJ Online includes an interactive map:



Read more about Trinklein's book at the Lost States Blog

Lost States, previously on Cartophilia:

Lost States Revisited

Lost States

UPDATE 4/20:As has been noted by many, the WSJ blew it on their map and made Michigan's Upper Peninsula part of the Canada... The map has been corrected... sort of. Now they have misdrawn the proposed State of Superior, to leave out Northern Wisconsin.

See: Lost States Blog

See: State of Superior

Mappy Books and Magazines

Just a collection of some recent mappy looking book and magazine covers:

Atlas of Unknowns by Tania James "A poignant, funny, blazingly original debut novel about sisterhood, the tantalizing dream of America, and the secret histories and hilarious eccentricities of families everywhere."

Governing Broke and Broken By Rob Gurwitt "Legislatures won't just be grappling with a shortage of money this year. They'll also be wrestling with government systems that simply don't work."

The Power of Place by Harm De Blij "What Carl Sagan did for the cosmos, Harm de Blij is doing for geography." --Bill Moyers

Time The Five Keys to Health Reform's Success or Failure By Karen Tumulty and Kate Pickert with Alice Park "Will it work? And how will it work? A guide to what the new law will mean for costs, Medicare, doctors, the states — and you"

Lost States Revisited

Back in 2008 I was excited to tell you about a little book about states the might-have-been. Michael Trinklein's Lost States: Real Quests for American Statehood was a small but amusing soft-cover collection of maps and stories about almost-ran states like Franklin, Lincoln and Jefferson (why should Washington get all the love?). Alas, that book is now out of print (sure to become a collector's item). Fear not cartophiles, the author has a new edition of the book, expanded with new maps and new stories, in a beautiful hard cover from Quirk Books.*

Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made it



The cover unfolds into a map poster!

Among the stories told - the proposed State of Navajo:



While the intent was to give the people of the Navajo Nation greater representation, one of the biggest drawbacks would be the elimination of the Four Corners!

Some folks have different ideas on how to divide the Minnesota Territory:



Wiser heads prevailed. (What a barren wasteland West Dakota might have been...)

When rivers change their course, it sometimes takes decades for nations to sort out their borders, creating opportunity:



These stories and maps and more can be found in Lost States. I would love to scan and post more of these maps, but I'm sure Mr. Trinklein and his publisher would object... fortunately, they have started a new Lost States Blog to promote the book, reproducing more of the maps.



More videos from Lost States.

*Full disclosure, the publisher sent a review copy to me, but I would have most certainly purchased a copy if they had not.

Why There Is No Jewish Narnia

C.S Lewis' Narnia stories are based on Christianity. J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth were influenced by Norse and other Northern European mythologies. In the Jewish Review of Books, Michael Wiengrad asks Why There Is No Jewish Narnia? Why are there so few fantasy novels based on Judaism?

So why don’t Jews write more fantasy literature? And a different, deeper but related question: why are there no works of modern fantasy that are profoundly Jewish in the way that, say, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is Christian? Why no Jewish Lewises, and why no Jewish Narnias?

In the course of this discussion, Weingrad reviews two examples of "Jewish fantasy" novels, The Magicians by Lev Grossman and Ha-Mayim she-bein ha-olamot (The Water Between the Worlds) by Hagar Yanai. The latter novel, written in Hebrew, includes a map of an alternate-history Europe and Middle East dominated by the Babylonian Empire.

On the Map

BBC Radio 4 has a new radio programme debuting today, featuring Mike Parker, author of Map Addict (previously discussed on Cartophilia).

On the Map will offer ten 15-minute reviews of modern maps and map making. In the first episode, Parker will explore the maps he fell in love with as a teenager - Ordnance Survey maps. The series is scheduled to air on BBC 4 at 15:45 GMT (11:45am EDT). You can listen live online, but I cannot yet tell if they will archive the programmes for future listening. I will update this post if I learn more.

UPDATE: BBC 4 has a "Listen Now" link for the first episode, The Map Makers, that is supposed to be good for seven days.

Additional details about the programme at Collins Maps.

Some Recent Magazines and a Book

For your amusement, a smattering of recent magazine and book covers using maps as an element of their design.

From The Nation: President Obama must decide on future American involvement in Afghanistan.



Stores Magazine suggests that Vietnam, Indonesia and Mexico (VIM?) are the countries to watch for new muscle in emerging markets.



Time believes that California, in spite of being "an apocalyptic mess of raging wildfires, soaring unemployment, mass foreclosures and political paralysis," is still the future of American innovation and growth.





Finally, in his book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, Ethan Waters maps out the way the United States shapes the expression of mental illness around the globe.

MapMarks Transit Blog

This week is Transit Map Theme Week at Cartophilia!

In the last several weeks I have either happened across, or had links to interesting transit maps sent my way. So many in fact, I don't want to cram them all in to one post.

Today, I will introduce you to a new blog by Transit Map maven, Mark Ovenden: MapMarks. Mark promises to share with us about "maps, metro's, cartography, transport and a handful of other nonsense."

Mark Ovenden is the author of two recent books on transit maps:

Transit Maps: The World's First Collection of Every Urban Train Map on Earth
Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and Design of the Metro UPDATE 1/12: This book just got a review in the NewYorker.

Via The Map Room

Why Don't We Do It On The Road?

Jennifer Hunt and Dan Baritchi claim to offer "The Best & Most Popular Love and Sex Advice Column on the Internet Today..." So what do you these days, when you have a popular website? Publish a book! (Whatever happened to the Internet replacing the printed word?) Their new book, 1,001 Best Places to Have Sex in America: A When, Where, and How Guide, purports to offer tips to broaden the reader’s "horny horizons".

A careful examination of the cover (which is the extent of the book review you are going to get here) reveals that the best places to have sex are in Georgia, on a desert mesa, on the Golden Gate Bridge, on a water tower, in the Statue of Liberty, on a Ferris Wheel, and at a Drive-In theatre. (Hmm, two out of seven for me...TMI)

I'm not sure I want to know what they do with "hot spot stickers."

Via Breakup Girl

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.

#495

Leviathan

Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld, is a young adult steampunk novel set in an alternate-history Europe. The Great War is coming, but instead of the Allies vs Central Powers, it is the Clankers vs Darwinists. The Clankers have developed great steam powered machines, and the Darwinists have bred giant beasts as their weapons.



The map illustration is intentionally reminiscent of the "allegorical maps" of the period.

Via boing boing

The Scrambled States of America

What if all the states decided to try living in another part of the country?

In The Scrambled States of America, Uncle Sam narrates a story written and illustrated by Laurie Keller.



From Publishers Weekly:

"Keller endows each of the 50 states with a unique personality and, as all of them develop a case of wanderlust, she presents geography lessons as clever quips exchanged across state lines."

Not surprisingly, the states eventually decide they like it better in their "regular" spaces (Florida was too cold up north, and California found itself allergic to Wisconsin's cheese!)

This story is also available as a video and card game. Later, the states got back together to put on a talent show.

Children's books previously on Cartophilia:
The Little Man in the Map
Roxaboxen
Weslandia
There's a Map on my Lap!

Map Addict

I just finished reading Map Addict by Mike Parker.

"My name is Mike and I am a map addict. There, it's said!"

Like me, Mike has loved maps since he was a wee tyke. He became addicted the Ordinance Survey, the official map set published by the British government, covering every square inch of the island nation. Today he is a travel writer and television and radio personality.

In his book, he not only shares the story of his personal journey with maps, but he also includes chapters on the history of British cartography, how they won the Prime Meridian competition, the most interesting and boring maps, and wages a one-man war against the "moronic blandishments of the Sat Nav age."

Not too surprising, I enjoyed this book immensely. My only complaint is that for a book about maps, there are relatively few illustrations.

So, as if the fact that this book is about a map addict, one who is more of a fanatic than me (hard to believe), wasn't enough to recommend this book... When I finished, I browsed the Bibliography and found in the "Blog and Discussion" section, several map blogs with which I am familiar... and this!

Cartophilia "great blog, newsy and always thoughtful"

Sweet! I have been acknowledged in print! I am somebody.

The Little Man in the Map

The Little Man In the Map: With Clues To Remember All 50 States, by E. Andrew Martonyi, is an engagind little book with friendly illustrations that is designed to help school-age children learn the names and locations off all the states. Learning all 50 U.S. states is easy when you learn from The Little Man In the Map! Asked by their teacher to find clues for memorizing the states, students begin to see images: a hat, a shirt, a pair of boots formed by state boundaries. When they put some of them together, they're amazed to find the outline of a man standing in the middle of the map.

Excited by their discovery, they draw a face and arms on him and create The Little Man In the Map, whom they nickname MIM. Their imaginations bring MIM alive, and with his help they discover the surprising roles all the states can play. Soon they can spot the elf, the playful dog, the spooky head, and all the others.

Using rhyme and mnemonics, the narrator tells a story about states in each region and how they interact with each other. It has apparently been used in classrooms with great success.

Indiana is Michigan's sleeve... that's cute.

As a child, I was already in love with, and studying maps. I suspect I would have quickly become annoyed with this approach... but then I don't pretend I was a "normal" child when it comes to geography.

UPDATE 6/10/10: Just came across this YouTube video related to the book. Enjoy!



#445

Beach Reading

Next week I'll be on the beach! Location and maps will be blogged, to be sure...

But in the meantime, I know you're all dying to know what I'll be reading on the beach:



(Feel free to purchase from Amazon through these links to help keep Cartophilia solvent. Thanks!)