Some coverage of two map books published earlier this year by Bodleian Library. First, Atlas Obscura interviews Kris Butler, whose Drink Maps in Victorian Britain looks at how the temperance movement used maps to fight excessive alcohol consumption. They were, apparently, directly inspired by John Snow’s cholera map. From the interview:

Drink maps were specific to targeting the U.K. magistrates, to try to get these lawmakers to stop granting licenses. So it had a really specific legislative, regulatory goal. […] In one case [in 1882, in the borough of Over Darwen in Lancashire, England], after looking at a drink map, the magistrates decided to close half of the places to buy alcohol. Their rationale was, even if we close half of these, you still don’t have to walk more than two minutes to buy another beer, which I just think is the most beautiful rationale I’ve ever read. It was challenged, and it held up on appeal.

Meanwhile, the Bodleian’s own Map Room Blog (no relation) points to Debbie Hall’s Adventures in Maps, a book about maps and travel and exploration. From the book listing: “The twenty intriguing journeys and routes featured in this book range from distances of a few miles to great adventures across land, sea, air and space. Some describe the route that a traveller followed, some are the results of exploration and others were made to show future travellers the way to go, accompanied by useful and sometimes very beautiful maps.” I reviewed Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room (also no relation) in 2016.

Adventures in Maps by Debbie Hall: Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler: Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

See also: Map Books of 2024.

Maps and what we do with them cannot be defined universally. Ideals and ideas about maps frequently clash with the reality of how and why maps are used. By bringing together my own research studying map users in London, and the work of others who have researched mapping practices around the world, I want to show how uses of maps are shaped by different cultures, communities, contexts and technology. […]

In my work there are several overlapping themes that chart how maps have become tied to culture and society. I want to do more than identify maps that have changed the world, or lay out the history of maps and society. Instead, I want to show that all maps have the potential to change the world and shape society. It’s just a matter of where you look and whose world you are interested in.

Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop

This is not a list of recommendations: what’s here is mainly what I’ve spotted online, and there’s probably a lot more out there. In most cases I haven’t even seen what’s listed here, much less reviewed it: these are simply things that look like they might be fit for gift giving. (Anyone who tries to parlay this into “recommended by The Map Room” is going to get a very sad look from me.)

Atlases

2023 saw the release of a new edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, widely seen as the granddaddy of all world atlases. At The 16th edition came in October in the U.K. and is scheduled to launch in North America next Tuesday, so there should be time to get it in your hands by Christmas. At £175 /$260 it’s not exactly a stocking stuffer;¹ if you’re looking for something more modest in size, weight and cost, consider another entry from the Times Atlas line, or the Oxford Atlas of the World, which gets a fresh update each year. Also new this year: the National Geographic Atlas of Wild America.

• National Geographic Atlas of Wild America by Jon Waterman. $65. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
• Oxford Atlas of the World, 30th edition. $95. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
• The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, 16th edition. £175/$260. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Other Kinds of Map Books

Either it’s been a really thin year for new map books, or for various reasons news of them is not reaching my ears. Books of interest to a general audience (as opposed to academic monographs or GIS manuals) that came out in 2023 include the following:

• The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft by Peter Bellerby. £25/$30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
• The Lost Subways of North America by Jake Berman. $35. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
• Dublin: Mapping the City by Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson. £30/$45. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
• Atlas of Imagined Cities: From Central Perk to Kanto by Matt Brown and Rhys B. Davies. £25/$35. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
• A History of the World in 500 Maps by Christian Grataloup. £35. Amazon (UK-only).
• Buffalo in 50 Maps by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. $24. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
• The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World’s Oceans by Laura Trethewey. $32. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

More books are listed on the Map Books of 2023 page.

Calendar

A shoutout to the GeoHipster Calendar, back again in 2023.

Alternative Guides

Once again, Evan Applegate has assembled his own gift guide featuring everything from prints to globes to mugs. “Today you can support great mapmakers making hand-painted globes, cartographic dishware, watercolor street maps, letterpress landscapes and more. No affiliate links, just a gallery of great map material culture.”

Also be sure to check out gift guides from previous years: items listed on the 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2016 gift guides may still be available (in 2020 I focused on map stationery, which ditto).

Finally, note that while Evan’s guide doesn’t contain affiliate links, mine certainly does (as have previous versions); I receive a cut of the purchase price if you make a purchase via these links.

Some of the changes since that 15th edition are listed on the publisher’s page, and a lot of them deal with updating place names:

• New country names for Eswatini (formerly Swaziland)¹ and North Macedonia (previously the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia)
• More than 8000 place name changes with names comprehensively updated in Kazakhstan and Ukraine
• Addition of Māori names in New Zealand and restored indigenous names in Australia, the most notable being the renaming of Fraser Island in Queensland to its Butchulla name K’gari
• Administrative boundary updates in Ethiopia, Mali and Kazakhstan
• Added road, railway and airport infrastructure across the globe including the 4km-long Dardanelles Bridge (Turkey), the Fehmarn Belt road/rail tunnel alignment (Germany/Denmark) and the Sandoy Tunnel (Faroe Islands)

Each round of Times atlases has its own cover design language: from this Comprehensive and next year’s announced Desktop we can see that this round of atlases combines dark relief backgrounds with bright title and spine colours. Neon green is an unexpected choice for the Comprehensive, especially given how restrained the 15th was. I wonder what the bookmark looks like.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

See the Guardian’s interview with Berman (thanks, Michael); the Strong Towns interview focuses specifically on Los Angeles.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

Alejandro Polanco’s latest Kickstarter project, Astronomy Atlas 1899, does for 19th-century astronomy atlases what his previous Geography 1880 project did for school atlases of the era: create an anthology of the best maps, drawings and diagrams from the books available to him.

In my library, in addition to the collection of geographical atlases from the 18th to the 21st century, there is a whole series of old books on astronomy, and of all of them, the ones that attract me the most are those published between 1880 and 1930. This was a time when science was developing at an astonishing rate and astronomy was changing radically. […]

In total there are twelve astronomical atlases in this library, mostly Spanish, French and English, published between 1880 and the early 1930s. From these I have selected the most interesting engravings and drawings, arranged them chronologically and given details of the original source. I have also supplemented many of them with other engravings from the Biblioteca Nacional de España and similar sources.

Digital (€18), softcover (€45) and limited-edition hardcover (€90) versions will be produced.

The 38th volume of the Esri Map Book (Esri, 5 Sep 2023) came out earlier this month. Like the NACIS Atlas of Design (previously),¹ it’s a showcase of maps presented at a conference—in this case, maps from the Map Gallery exhibition of Esri’s International User Conference. The Esri Map Book website has a gallery of maps presumably from this volume, and given the number of pages in the book (140) and the number of maps in the gallery (65), it may actually be complete (assuming a two-page spread per map). $30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Peter Bellerby, of bespoke premium globemaker Bellerby & Co. fame, has written a book: The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft (Bloomsbury) is out today in hardcover in the UK, and in North America on October 17; the ebook is available worldwide as of today. From the publisher: “The Globemakers brings us inside Bellerby’s gorgeous studio to learn how he and his team of cartographers and artists bring these stunning celestial, terrestrial, and planetary objects to life. Along the way he tells stories of his adventure and the luck along the way that shaped the company.” £25/$30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Kent previously co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography (Routledge, 2017) with Peter Vujakovic (previously), and co-authored The Red Atlas (University of Chicago Press, 2017) with John Davies (my review).

This means that all five volumes that have been published to date can be downloaded for free (here). The remaining volume—volume five, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century—is in preparation. When that final book is published, it will close out a project that has taken more than four decades to come to fruition.

Previously: Forty Years of the History of Cartography Project; The History of Cartography’s Fourth Volume, Now (Almost) Out; History of Cartography Project Updates.

Previously: La Carte de Cassini.

Three books that have come out or are coming out this year that deal with maps of early modern Europe:

Navigations: The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance by Malyn Newitt (Reaktion, 24 Apr). “Navigations re-examines the Portuguese voyages of discovery by placing them in their medieval and Renaissance settings. It shows how these voyages grew out of a crusading ethos, as well as long-distance trade with Asia and Africa and developments in map-making and ship design. The slave trade, the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews and the intercontinental spread of plants and animals gave these voyages long-term global significance.” £25/$40. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World by Meredith F. Small (Pegasus, 6 Jun). A book about the famous Fra Mauro map. “Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith F. Small reveals how Fra Mauro’s mappamundi made cartography into a science rather than a practice based on religion and ancient myths.” $29. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Frames that Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps by Chet Van Duzer (Brill, 25 May ebook, 19 Jul print). I’ve been following Van Duzer’s work on horror vacui, the lack of empty spaces on maps, for some time (1, 2); that work seems to be taken up by at least the first chapter on this new book on cartouches, which is available for free as an open-access download. “This lavishly illustrated book is the first systematic exploration of cartographic cartouches, the decorated frames that surround the title, or other text or imagery, on historic maps. It addresses the history of their development, the sources cartographers used in creating them, and the political, economic, historical, and philosophical messages their symbols convey. Cartouches are the most visually appealing parts of maps, and also spaces where the cartographer uses decoration to express his or her interests—so they are key to interpreting maps. The book discusses thirty-three cartouches in detail, which range from 1569 to 1821, and were chosen for the richness of their imagery.” $144. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

More: Map Books of 2023.

I’ve mentioned the Atlas of Design series before, but it’s worth introducing it properly. Published every two years since 2012 by the North American Cartographic Information Society, the Atlas of Design is powered by volunteer editors and contributor submissions. Nobody’s getting paid for working on or appearing in these volumes—though it must be said that many of these maps are commercial ventures (posters available for sale at the mapper’s website) or works for hire (National Geographic and the Washington Post are represented in volume six), so the mapmakers aren’t doing this just for the exposure.

All the same, the production values are, if volume six is any indication, pretty close to first-rate.¹ Which is to be expected when this much graphic design firepower is brought together in one place. The maps—32² of them in volume six—are reproduced marvellously. Many of the maps are large and detailed, so closeups showing that detail often accompany a reduced-size full look at the map; this is absolutely necessary in some cases, such as Jug Cerovic’s transport map of Takamatsu, Eric Knight’s panoramic map of the Alps, or Alex McPhee’s map of Alberta.

More than a few of these maps are familiar, having been shared widely online, and some of them have even been featured on this website. Not for the first time have I found in print form something that I see as a kindred spirit to what I’m trying to do here on The Map Room. Indeed, what I appreciate most about the Atlas of Design is its commitment—one that I share—to covering the full diversity of what constitutes maps and mapmaking.

What I mean about that is this. I’ve often noticed that when people are passionate about a thing, what they really are is passionate about a subset of that thing—without really being aware of it. Ask someone if they’re into music, generally, and they’ll say yes, generally, even if there are entire genres they have no interest in: for example, most of the guys who are really into vinyl records (and yes they’re generally guys) seem to be mainly into classic rock or electronica. The same is true of other cultural fields: avid readers rarely read every genre avidly. The rest of the field is kind of a blind spot.

Is this also true of maps? You’d expect some siloing of interests to occur: people who collect 16th-century maps aren’t necessarily interested in the latest turns of the geospatial industry. And yet I’ve found that people who are interested in maps are interested in all kinds of maps, at least to some extent. (The Map Room wouldn’t still be a going concern after 20 years if they weren’t.)

And the Atlas of Design provides some evidence in support of that point, because if there’s one thing you can’t say about the maps contained therein, it’s that they’re all the same. This is by design; as the editors wrote last year during the submission period, “There are no restrictions on subject matter, geography, or language. And if you want to send us a map of planet Qo’noS written entirely in Klingon, we’d love to see that, too.”³ There are maps that are hand-drawn and maps that are data-driven, maps that are deeply personal (including a couple of lockdown maps and a map of a canoe trip) and maps that show a single data layer. There are transit maps and panoramic pictorials and fantasy maps, population maps, and there’s Kenneth Field’s iconic map of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, done in screws and butcher block.

But there are some caveats to this diversity and (in the secular sense) catholicity. One, obviously, is that these are recent maps made by working (or at least living) cartographers and artists who took the time to submit them for consideration. Another is that regardless of whether they were produced digitally or with pen and ink (or butcher block and screws), these are static maps. They’re being reproduced in the pages of a book. So you’re not going to get screencaps of an ArcGIS story map or dashboard, or any other sort of interactive map. But honestly, the point of most interactive maps is the data rather than the presentation; the point of these maps is very much their presentation. This is, after all, a showcase of map design: look, it’s right there in the title! And it’s fascinating to see just how much range there is out there in mapmaking land.

It’s just as true if you look back at the sample maps from previous issues: see volumes one, two, three, four and five. And it’s just gotten a lot easier to own the complete set. It was announced last week that the first four volumes of the Atlas of Design are being reprinted; there’s a discount for a couple of the volumes if you pre-order before May 15 (that’s Monday!), as well as if you’re a NACIS member. Which is to say that all six volumes are (back) in print and available for order. That might be something to consider.

From last November: MapLab on volume six of the Atlas of Design.

Previously: David Nuttall’s Maps of Fictional Places; Atlas of Design, Volume 3.

Pre-order links:

• Rand McNally 2024 Road Atlas: 100th Anniversary Edition
  Amazon (Canada) | Bookshop | Rand McNally
• Rand McNally 2024 Large Scale Road Atlas: 100th Anniversary Edition
  Amazon (Canada) | Bookshop | Rand McNally
• Rand McNally 2024 Midsize Easy to Read Road Atlas: 100th Anniversary Edition
  Amazon (Canada) | Bookshop | Rand McNally

Alejandro Polanco’s latest Kickstarter, Geography 1880, is in the vein of some of his previous ones: restoring and reprinting works from the late 19th century. This time he’s looking to create an anthology of maps from family and school atlases of the era.

The idea is to give shape to a new atlas that brings together maps forgotten in time that were once enjoyed again and again, by the light of a fire or gas lamps, from the great era of family atlases. To this end, I am undertaking a process of scanning the atlases of the period between 1860 and 1900 that I have in my library. Alongside this material, the book includes maps from various map libraries around the world (from USA, Spain, UK and Germany), with the corresponding attribution. All this forms an atlas full of authentic 19th century works of art that I hope will spark the imagination of my backers just as it was in the 1880s. Alongside the maps and illustrations of the period, my descriptive commentaries include details of the graphic styles, cartographers and geographical curiosities that appear on each page.

Hardcover, softcover and PDF versions will be produced, the hardcover in a 100-copy limited edition that has already been spoken for.

Previously: A Project to Restore a 19th-Century Treatise on Hand-drawn Mapping.

Once again, I’m a bit late with my annual gift guide. The idea of which is, if you have a map-obsessed person in your life and would like to give them something map-related—or you are a map-obsessed person and would like your broad hints to have something to link to—this guide may give you some ideas.

This list is a long way from comprehensive. Be sure to check out gift guides from previous years: see, for example, the 2021, 2019, 2018 and 2017 gift guides (in 2020 I focused on map stationery). Much of what’s listed may still be available. And even more books are listed on the Map Books of 2022 page.

Please keep in mind that this is not a list of recommendations: what’s here is mainly what I’ve spotted online, and there’s probably a lot more out there. In many cases I haven’t even seen what’s listed here, much less reviewed it: these are simply things that look like they might be fit for gift giving. (Anyone who tries to parlay this into “recommended by The Map Room” is going to get a very sad look from me.)

Finally, this post contains affiliate links; I receive a cut of the purchase price if you make a purchase via these links.

The Quarantine Atlas

The Quarantine Atlas (Black Dog & Leventhal): edited by Laura Biss, this is a book-length distillation of CityLab’s COVID-19 mapping project that includes 65 maps submitted by readers, plus essays by divers hands. Given the subject matter, probably something to be gifted with care. See previous entry. $32
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

The Cartographers

Peng Shepherd’s novel The Cartographers (William Morrow/Orion) is both a murder mystery and a fantasy novel that incorporates all kinds of map tropes. As I said in my review for Strange Horizons, “I have encountered many works of fiction that incorporate maps and map tropes into their storytelling, whether as paratexts or as plot elements, and I have never encountered a story, at any length, as thoroughly encompassed by maps as The Cartographers.” See previous entry. $28/£15
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

The LEGO Globe

While there have been third-party LEGO globes before, LEGO’s own globe, which came out early this year, has 2,585 pieces and is 40 cm (16 inches) tall when assembled. See previous entry. $230/£200/230€
Amazon (Canada, UK) | LEGO.com

For the Coffee Table

The term of art for books like these is “lavishly illustrated”: books with pages and pages of beautiful maps. At least two were published this year: The Atlas of Atlases (Ivy), in which Philip Parker explores the most important atlases in history; and Maps That Made History (Lannoo), in which Martijn Storms presents 100 maps, covering a thousand years of history, from the collections of Leiden University Libraries.

• The Atlas of Atlases ($40/£28): Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
• Maps That Made History (79€): Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

For the Cartographer

Kenneth Field’s Thematic Mapping 101 (Esri), published in ebook in 2021, came out in a paper edition earlier this year. $72: Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

The 6th volume of NACIS’s biennial Atlas of Design has just come out. I’ve been sent a review copy, and a review is forthcoming; let me say right now that the examples of mapmaking in these pages are both diverse and stunning. See previous entry. Order here. $25

The GeoHipster Calendar is back for another year as well: order at Lulu.

(Be sure that the cartographer in your life doesn’t already have these: chances are good.)

For the Correspondent

I ordered map stationery from Pepin Press when one of my favourite pen stores got it in stock. I haven’t had a chance to review it or use it yet—I’m kind of reluctant to spoil it, I guess—but look for something along those lines in the future. See the 2020 guide to map stationery for more information and other options.

• Historical Maps A4 Notepad ($22.50/17.50€): Amazon (Canada, UK)
• Historical Maps A5 Notepad ($15/13€): Amazon (Canada, UK)
• Historical Maps: Labels, Stickers and Tapes ($15/13€): Amazon (Canada, UK)
• Maps Letter Writing Set ($34/25€): Amazon (Canada, UK)

(C6 and DL-sized envelopes are also available separately.)

For the Transit Geek

The Toronto Transit Commission gift shop has a number of transit-map tchotchkes, including laptop skins, pillows, a puzzle, an umbrella, a cap—and, get this, subway map skateboard decks. Also, don’t miss Cameron Booth’s gift guide at Transit Maps.

To Put Up on the Wall

When it comes to map prints, globes, puzzles, art, swag and other tangible materials, it’s often best to buy directly from the artist. Evan Applegate has assembled a very comprehensive gift guide linking to many artists’ stores.

World Atlases

While the Oxford Atlas of the World saw its usual annual update, and some of the not-quite-flagship atlas lines saw new editions, such as the National Geographic Concise and the Collins World Atlas: Essential Edition, this is the first time in years that there hasn’t been an update to the Times Atlas line, which is kind of concerning. See the 2021 gift guide for links to the various Times atlases, plus a guide to other flagship atlases that didn’t necessarily get new editions this year.

• Oxford Atlas of the World, 29th edition ($90): Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
• National Geographic Concise Atlas of the World ($30): Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
• Collins World Atlas: Essential Edition ($18): Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

Previously: Emma Willard’s History of the United States; Women in Cartography (Part 3).

Previously: The History of the Netherlands in 100 Old Maps.

To mark The Quarantine Atlas’s release, editor Laura Bliss has a piece in Smithsonian adapted from the book’s introduction and generously illustrated with maps. Bloomberg, which absorbed CityLab a while back, features twelve quarantine maps from the various calls for submissions. Update: Plus an adaptation of David Dudley’s foreword.

The Quarantine Atlas
by Laura Bliss
Black Dog & Leventhal, 19 Apr 2022
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Apple Books | Bookshop

The clock system was an attempt to solve a specific problem: well into the 20th century, farmhouses in the United States lacked proper addresses. Without a street number or even a street name, navigating to a given farmhouse could be a real challenge. Plato’s solution, invented while he was trying his hand at farming in Colorado, was to assign each farmhouse an identifier based on its clock position, with the clock centred on the nearest town. The clock system saw its greatest uptake in upstate New York, where Plato relocated shortly thereafter and started his business selling the maps and directories based on his system. In a marketing turn worthy of Phyllis Pearsall, Plato cultivated his previous status as a farmer, citing as his inspiration a sale lost because his buyer couldn’t find his house.

It’s tempting to think of the clock system as the what3words of a century ago: a proprietary navigational aid promising to make wayfinding simpler. And apart from the considerable curiousity value of an obsolete but unusual (and therefore interesting) system, the story of Plato and his system is pure American hustle: the rise and fall of a business from patent to product to collapse in the face of the Great Depression, to an unsuccessful attempt at restarting in Ohio. The indefatigable Plato even persisted with his system while working for the federal government in various capacities during the 1930s. Meanwhile, after Plato’s patent had expired, a modified compass system—using compass points rather than hours on a clock face—persisted in upstate New York until 1940.

Apart from his system, and the maps and ephemera it produced, Plato left few traces in the historical record, which makes him a challenging subject for a biographer. Monmonier gamely reconstructs what he can from patent filings, tax rolls, employment records and news coverage. Lacking more verbose evidence, Monmonier even resorts to producing maps of Plato’s life from those records, which seems appropriate given the subject matter and even helps illuminate several points. The end result is necessarily fragmentary and inductive, but a portrait of Plato nevertheless manages to emerge: a restless man who after dabbling in many things, changing gears and relocating many times, hit upon an idea that was kind of neat and tried to ride it for all it was worth.

I received an electronic review copy of this book from the publisher.

Clock and Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a Real Address
by Mark Monmonier
University of Iowa Press, 12 Apr 2022
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Apple Books | Bookshop

North American Maps for Curious Minds

The series is a spinoff of the Brilliant Maps website, and can be seen as an attempt to render viral map memes in book form: if this book is any indication, the maps themselves are the sort that tend to get shared across social media platforms. One I recognized right away was no. 8: the first country you’ll reach going east or west from every point on the coast. Their appearance between hard covers is to be honest a bit unexpected, and to be honest, the translation from screen to page doesn’t always work.

Partly that’s because of the limitations of the media: a book’s page is a fixed size. Maps on paper can’t be interactive, but they also can’t be too crowded or too empty, and to be honest the latter problem is more at play here, with choropleth and pictorial maps that are, to be blunt, too simple, particularly the country-level choropleth maps: when such a map has Canada and the U.S. on it, there’s a lot of undifferentiated colour (for example, no. 23 on head of state salaries, no. 27 on military expenditure per capita, nos. 80 and 81 on average height, no. 96 on the unbanked). Such maps would be fine in Instagram-sized proportions, but they don’t scale up. In fact, these country-level choropleths are fine examples of maps that don’t need to be maps: they’d be easier to understand, and take up less space, as graphs or tables.

Which is not to say that they’re all like that. The best of them go deeper than country or state/province and offer some real detail. These include the climate maps (nos. 31 and 32) and the supervolcano (no. 38), glacial maximum (no. 39), dark sky (no. 40) and solstice (nos. 43-46) maps—basically, most of the nature chapter. Add to that the county-level maps: second homes (no. 70), language (no. 73), commuting (nos. 94 and 95) and internet access (no. 100).

The county-level maps, like slightly more than half of the total maps—53 out of 100—focus solely on the United States (another two look specifically at Alaska or Hawaii); more than a few of the others include Canada and Mexico but are very much centred on the continental U.S. via the usual Albers projection. Basically, the U.S. is in every map, the rest of North America in some of them. To be sure, some of the subjects being mapped are quintessentially American, like the number of Waffle Houses by latitude (no. 76). In other cases the limitation no doubt stems from where the data being mapped comes from, though a more continental focus would be possible in a few cases: I can see no reason to exclude Canada, for example, from the maps of indigenous homelands (nos. 74 and 75). It’s possible to use more than one dataset in a map.

In the end, these are basically low- to medium-effort maps that present reasonably interesting, but unchallenging, factoids in a pleasant enough format at the intersection of choropleth and pictorial maps. In that, plus its lack of an overarching point other than “isn’t this interesting,” North American Maps for Curious Minds is a bit insubstantial. Like a map meme that goes viral, a quick sugar hit of popular cartography, but not much more than that.

I received a review copy of this book from one of the authors.

North American Maps for Curious Minds
by Matthew Bucklan and Victor Cizek
The Experiment, 30 Nov 2021
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop