Strange Maps
 The blog Strange Maps has only been around for a year. But what a year it's been. In the 365 days since it first appeared, it has attracted an enthusiastic readership (us included). It now draws dozens, if not hundreds, of comments for each post. And its consistent unearthing of the most obscure, eyebrow-raising, and whimsical diagrams has left no doubt how intimately maps reflect the way we look at our world.
When we contacted the mastermind behind Strange Maps, he agreed to tell us why he's remained anonymous, how he fell in love with cartography, and what some of his most favorite geographic diagrams are... You don't include your name or any biographical information anywhere on the site (or not that we saw!). Is that for privacy reasons? My name isn't on the site—nothing wrong with your eyes! It wasn't a conscious decision at first, but I've come to like the anonymity. For two reasons, one more frivolous than the other: It helps me deflect accusations of geographical and cultural bias ("Ah, but you would say that about country X, seeing you are from country Y."), and it provides me with a Secret Identity to slip in to after my mundane day job… which is a cool thing to have, even if this particular Secret Identity doesn't come with the power of flight, or even a nice suit. Have you always been besotted by cartography? As long as I can remember and maybe before I was able to read "proper" books, I've been crazy about maps and atlases. I can completely relate to those 19th-century explorers who were drawn to Africa because of the blank spaces in their school atlas. Not that there were many blank spaces left when I was a kid, but I could spend hours poring over place-names, border lines, and mountain ranges from Kamchatka to Tierra del Fuego. And given half a chance, I still do. I can't really explain why this is, other than the somewhat grandiose statement that an atlas can be a road map for the imagination. In any case, a lot of the feedback I get on Strange Maps is from people who, like me, have had a fascination for maps since they were kids, which shows that it's not as isolated an affliction as I once thought it to be. The diversity of maps on your site is amazing. Do you find most of them through searching the Web? We know people send you images of maps now, too. Half the fun of the blog for me is trawling cyberspace for maps that are sufficiently strange to put up. It's getting a bit harder nowadays, because more and more often, Google refers me to my own site! A couple of months ago, I posted a mail address and since then, map suggestions have flooded in by the hundreds. I try to balance putting up interesting maps I find myself and maps sent in by readers of the blog. And I don't want to put up too many maps of one kind. That's why I'm generally not inclined to include fantasy maps, for example—apart from the unavoidable Tolkien map, of which I posted a variation showing correspondences between Middle-Earth and Europe. There's just too many of those around. I'm also not too keen to put up too many "statistical" maps, such as the GDP map of the U.S., which generated the most traffic and comments of any map so far. Many suggestions I've received in that respect are quite interesting in themselves, but to put all of them up would skewer the balance of the blog. What's your favorite map? Any map that surprises me! And there've been a few of those (don't ask me to pick just one). Some examples: –The map of Market Reef: I had never heard of this island, dissected by the Swedish-Finnish border, and was even more surprised to see the improbable border on the island itself, and the reason for it. –The map of Newyorkistan: a cover illustration of the New Yorker Magazine. Laugh out loud funny! –Czechoslovakia threatens Germany: for the sheer, nowadays unimaginable audacity of Nazi propaganda. –East Germany Lives On: incredibly, a small island off Cuba may be the last piece of the German Democratic Republic still in existence. –The Whole World in a Cloverleaf: because it's such a beautiful map and because of the interesting way and moment in which it was made, when symbolic, symmetric cartography gave way to the irregular shapes charted by the discoverers. –The Tory Atlas of the World: just a lot of fun, if you can stand the politically-incorrect ravings of out-of-date British conservatives. –The Geography of France's Presidential Elections: because it showed a surprising correlation between voting patterns and geography. –The Postcode Map of the UK: because of all the information packed into the map. –Greetings From Bruceville: just very beautiful and imaginative. That's a fabulous list. Are there any maps you've come across, but refused to post? Not thus far, but I've noticed some more political maps generate a lot of negative feedback. The map showing Greater Albania, i.e. the maximalist ambitions of Albanian nationalists including parts of Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia, and all of Kosovo, even caused so much shouting between Serbians and Albanians that I had to censor some of the entries. Maybe this is too similar of a question, but are there any types of maps that you don't enjoy or like? A map has to be nice to look at, so I don't like maps that are too schematic or that look like they've been copied too much. And there are definitely some colour schemes that I don't like, but I can't really put my finger on it. Other blogs have embraced Strange Maps so enthusiastically; we see it linked to all the time. How did the word first get out about the site? The first map that I noticed getting a lot of traffic was the one re-drawing the borders of the Middle East. But in general, any map saying something about the U.S. gets a lot of traffic, and I think the first one of those was the map showing the state of education vis-à-vis the teaching of evolution vs. creation in the different states; that one got over 450 comments so far. Tell us about the research you do for each map—it's often extensive! I try to learn something from each map I post, so I gather info on the subject from a few sources and write an accompanying story in as interesting a way as I can. It can often take some time before I'm satisfied with the text, which means there's usually a couple of maps in a "holding pattern" at the same time. Currently, there are about 10 maps waiting for the accompanying text to be finished. Well, we won't keep you from them any longer. Thanks, Strange Maps!
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