Miscellaneous Monday - The Magic of Maps!

Andy Gladstone

I admit, I have been facinated by maps since I was a young child. There has always been something magical and majestic about maps. They could be the key to finding lost treasure, or just the key to not being lost.

But even more than showing us where we may be going, they have the ability to show us where we have been. 

My children have also been bitten by the map bug. We have the 2013 and 2022 editions of the National Geographic Concise Atlas of the World in our house, and whenever you pass the kids sitting in the living room one of them will almost always have their nose in an Atlas.

When I started travelling overseas for business one of the first things I looked for was a European Map. Having lived in the United States my whole life, North America was always the center of the map, and I wanted to see one produced by Europeans. The store, Reisboekhandel Pied à Terre, and the map that I shipped back to the US both did not did disappoint!

Even my first Community related meme was map oriented!

(Kudos to @Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_ for the photo and @Fun Man Andy for being the prop)

A few miscellaneous facts about maps I found interesting and wanted to share with you too!

• Modern cartographers often include fake towns and places into their maps on purpose. The fake towns are called phantom settlements, paper towns or bunnies. Therefore, when they come across a map with a similar phony town, they will know it is a copy!
• Interestingly, maps always have different projections since the Earth is spherical, whereas the maps are flat. Hence, there is no accurate map of the world, so the predictions change depending on its purpose.
• The Mercator projections have some shortcomings. It is inaccurate for direction, meaning land area and distance are often distorted. The forecast shows Europe and North America bigger than actual size, and Greenland and Africa appear identical, even though Africa is fourteen times larger.
• The best map collection in the world is in Paris in Bibliotheque Nationale de France, followed by the Library of Congress in the US and British Library.
• The best place to purchase maps is the Netherlands. The yearly European Fine Art and Antiques Fair in the Netherlands are considered the world’s ideal place to shop for modern, classic, and antique maps.

Here is your CTA (Call to Action) today: When leaving a comment about your experience/love/hate/otherwise relationship with maps, tell us what city and country you are located in so we can build a map of the respondants on this post!

Don't forget to reserve your spot for sharing a Miscellaneous Monday post - signup for January-March 2024 is now live.

Have a great week ahead!

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John Funk

Nice post @Andy Gladstone !!  I, too, am fascinated with maps - even from when I was a kid. I could spend HOURS looking at Google Earth. 

I am located in Dubai, UAE.