It all started with a Belgian boy who had a great curiosity for maps. The curiosity became a passion before moving onwards into a passionate obsession. And, after he felt he had seen all the conventional atlases and traditional maps in the world, he moved on to 'strange maps'. Frank Jacobs also literally moved on (to London), and started to put together a whole new collection of maps. A blog was set up, and now this book has followed.
Exploring the word 'map' leads us to the medieval Latin mappa mundi, meaning 'sheet of the world'. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'map' refers to a (generally) flat representation of the Earth's surface, a two-dimensional representation of the stars, a diagrammatic representation of a route, or a diagram showing the arrangement or components of any object. It is clear from the introduction that the author is fed up with the first two categories, his fascination instead highlighting maps that are more diagrammatic, more descriptive, or those that trigger a different perspective. Most of his maps thus go beyond the 'old' categories defined by the Oxford academics, as Jacobs tries to provoke a different way of looking at a variety of subjects through maps – including Himal Southasian's 'upside-down' map of this region. Also, some of the maps go beyond two dimensions, trying 3-D effects and even going into the fourth dimension, by showing changes over time.
Strange Maps is a colourful book, which contains all sorts of weird, funny, beautiful, horrible, shocking and artistic maps. The wide and varied collection is already quite an achievement, and it looks like we are seeing only the beginning of this ever-growing corpus. For one series, inspired by the famous London Underground map, John Howrey, a musician and designer, developed what he calls The Musical Theatre History Tube Map. In this, the history of musical theatre slowly unfolds itself before the reader: You can enter at My Fair Lady, then change after four stations at Cats, hop off at Mary Poppins or stay on all the way up to the end of the line at Lion King.
One creation seems to come straight from the pop art collection of a modern-art museum. Orange-brown doughnuts of various sizes, lemon yellow and olive-green blurbs, bits and pieces of night blue and fire-brigade red are mixed with salmon-pink splashes. Together, they form a map that Jacobs calls 'the colourful side of the moon'. This sheer artistic beauty (see pic) is actually a scientific map detailing information about the geology of the moon, colour-coding the various minerals. Made by US scientists, it is not only a map that would never have left its highly technocratic research environment had it not been for Jacobs, but also brings to readers a view of the moon that has literally never before been seen.