Imaginary Maps as Cartographic Guides

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Bodleian Map Room Blog looks at a specific kind of map of imaginary places, “designed to be a guide to cartographers by showing how to portray certain features, or for the map reader to show what the symbols mean.”

Here’s an example, ‘Colours and symbols used on fair sheets and fair tracing’, issued by the Hydrographic Office of the Navy in 1973. Fair here meaning a document after correction, ready to be used. But is it fair? With this ‘made-up’ map the Hydrographic Office have used real names but in random locations, so Campania, in reality a region of Italy, features, as does the English county of Rutland (though as a town here) and a made-up mountain, Montrosia. Best of all is mention of “Approaches to Valhalla”. The map shows different forms of landscape, both natural and man-made with the symbols used to show those features, and the names are added to give the whole an authentic feel.

It makes sense to do it this way: no single real map is likely to contain every single feature you’re trying to demonstrate.

La figure de la Terre

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
John Churchman, The magnetic atlas; or, Variation charts of the whole terraqueous globe, comprising a system of the variation and dip of the needle, by which, the observations being truly made, the longitude may be ascertained. Plate I. 1794. The Royal Society, RCN 33275.
Detail from John Churchman, The Magnetic Atlas (1794). The Royal Society, RCN 33275.

La figure de la Terre: Un débat franco-anglais (XVIIe-XXIe siècle), an exhibition running at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris from 1 April to 20 June 2026.

This exhibition offers a historical and scientific journey through more than three centuries of research devoted to measuring, modeling and understanding the shape of our planet, from the 17th century through to the space age. Since ancient times, we’ve known that the Earth is, broadly speaking, a sphere. The key question was whether it was slightly flattened at the poles or elongated. To answer this question, scientists, astronomers, mathematicians and geodesists have developed theoretical models, designed innovative instruments and conducted vast observation campaigns around the world. The exhibition features exceptional sources drawn mainly from the collections of the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Society, testifying to the intensity of scientific exchanges between Paris and London and the decisive role of international cooperation in the production of knowledge.

France seems to have quite a lot of map-related programming lately.

GPS Jamming and the Iran War

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

GPS jamming has become pretty much endemic in every conflict, open, hybrid or frozen, so it’s no surprise that it’s going on in the Persian Gulf: “Though commercial vessels are not the target, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters on February 28, according to a report from Windward, a shipping intelligence firm.” The CNN article goes on to explain why GPS (and other GNSS systems) are so vulnerable, and how spoofing and jamming have become so commonplace.

A Paris Symposium on Maps and Popular Culture

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A symposium on maps and popular culture, Popcartographie : cartes et cultures populaires (XIXe-XXIe siècle), will be taking place at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Mitterrand site in Paris on 10-11 April 2026. Its three themes: maps in popular culture, maps as amateur practice, and the map as a paraadigm of popular fiction. Free/registration; program at the link. English translation at H-Maps. [Matthew Edney]

AI Crawlers and the Cost of Geospatial Infrastructure

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Bill Dollins reacts to Gary Gale’s experience with AI crawlers taking down his mapping project (previously), and what that portends for the open geospatial web. “On its own, this is a small incident. No critical infrastructure failed. No global service collapsed. It is, however, a revealing stress case. It shows how open geospatial infrastructure behaves when exposed to a new class of demand. That demand is continuous, automated, and indifferent to the social and economic assumptions that shaped the system in the first place. This is not an isolated story. It is an early signal of a broader shift already underway.”

Google Maps Granted Access to South Korea’s Map Data, with Conditions

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Reuters: “South Korea will soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps doesn’t work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers.” Prior to this decision Google Maps had to use lower-resolution map data in South Korea because it was forbidden from storing South Korea’s high-resolution data on its own servers outside the country. Google will have to abide by certain restrictions, including blurring military and other sensitive facilities and disallowing lat/long coordinates on South Korean territory—South Korea really doesn’t want Google Maps to be used by a military adversary. [Tara Calishain]

Previously: South Korea Deciding Whether to Grant Google and Apple Access to Domestic Map Data.

Aurora’s Map-Themed Fountain Pens

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Product image from the Aurora web site showing the Fra Mauro pen and accompanying bottle of ink. Both are sitting on top of a reproduction of the Fra Mauro map.
Aurora Pen

I’m as much a fountain pen nerd as I am a map nerd, but I somehow only found out just now that Italian pen company Aurora has been releasing a collection of antique map-themed fountain pens. Each is named after a famous mapmaker, with five planned and two announced so far: the Tolomeo (i.e. Ptolemy) in 2024 and the Fra Mauro last year. Your guess is as good as mine as to who the next three will be named after. (The Aurora Instagram account seems to be the one to watch, as it’s more active than other channels.)

Only 680 of each are being made, so these are limited editions. The top and bottom finials represent an armillary and a compass rose, respectively; the trim is silver, the bodies are cellulose acetate, and the nib is 18k gold. The pens use a piston-filling mechanism.

These are not the first map-themed pens I’ve encountered, but they’re certainly the most expensive, with prices somewhere around 1,400 euros (VAT included) at the various online pen stores I’ve checked at. If they’re still in stock, that is.

‘The Most Amazing Map Exhibition Ever Mounted’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Every so often Matthew Edney posts something that had to be cut from his work in progress. In this case it’s a piece about what he calls “the most amazing map exhibition ever mounted”: Cartes et figures de la terre, which ran at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1980.

The curators of Cartes et figures de la terre were not map specialists. The principal curator was Giulio Macchi (1918–2009), an Italian film maker and producer for Italian state television, who was also an experienced curator of art exhibitions. The large accompanying volume, of the same title as the exhibition, was edited by Jean-Loup Rivière (1948–2018), a playwright, director, and theater critic and theorist who was then a research fellow at the Centre Pompidou.

Neither Macchi nor Rivière were committed to established scholarly and professional attitudes towards maps and their history. Entranced by the great variety of scientific and artistic map images, both past and present, they emphasized the aesthetic form of maps rather than map content. In doing so, Macchi and Rivière challenged the seemingly eternal verities of the normative map, even as they remained bound to those verities, not least to the idea that all maps are somehow all the same and a necessarily exceptionalist form of representation. They were especially enamored of the spectacular and of the creative in mapping.

Among other things, they brought the Coronelli globes out of storage.

In conjunction with the exhibition was a short surrealist film about cartography, Le jeu de l’oie (Une fiction didactique à propos de la cartographie), written and directed by Raúl Ruiz for France 2; you can watch it on YouTube (English subtitles are available):

Pinhead Map Icons

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A screenshot from the Pinhead Map Icons page showing every single icon at a very very small size.
Pinhead Map Icons

Quincy Morgan has released Pinhead Map Icons: “So you’re making a map and need some icons. Well, maybe a lot of icons. Like, for anything that might appear on a map. And they need to be visually consistent. Like the size and direction and whatever. And they gotta be free. Even public domain. In vector format. With no AI. Oh, and they all need to be legible on the head of a pin.” 1,045 icons and counting, in SVG format.

The Library of Lost Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book cover: The Library of Lost Maps

When it comes to books that present the maps of a single library or museum—take, for example, Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room, about the Bodleian, or Tom Harper’s Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library—there seems to be a standard, curatorial template, one that focuses on full-colour reproductions of the maps, each of which is accompanied by a short explanatory text. The maps, as objects, are the point.

The Library of Lost Maps (Bloomsbury, 2025) is about the maps held in the Map Room of University of College London. But author James Cheshire is doing something quite different here. Partly this is because UCL is neither the Bodleian nor the British Library. Their holdings are not remotely similar. There’s no equivalent of the Gough Map or the Selden Map here; the maps are more modern (19th and 20th century) and less rare and singular. UCL’s Map Library was a working map library, used by its staff for teaching and research, rather than something more curatorial.

But what the maps at UCL do have is stories attached—about how they were made, and about how they came to be in UCL’s hands. The Library of Lost Maps is simultaneously a story of the early days of UCL and its role in broadening education in Britain, its role as a repository for so many maps being produced during the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflicts, and its uncertain future as that role of map repository is increasingly seen as obsolete.

Continue reading “The Library of Lost Maps” →

Da Vinci’s Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
An octant map of the world circa 1514, showing the globe in eight pieces, that is increasingly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo da Vinci’s authorship of this 1514 octant map of the world has been disputed over the years.

Miguel García Álvarez looks at the maps of Leonardo da Vinci. “Leonardo never wrote a treatise on geography, as Ptolemy did, but his understanding of the territory and the importance of finding effective ways to represent it was far ahead of his contemporaries. I could simply leave you with his collection of maps, and I guarantee you would be fascinated by their beauty. Instead, I am going to limit myself to just three and use them to illustrate how he achieved three crucial advances in the early 16th century that are fundamental to understanding the history of geography.”

See also Christopher Tyler, “Leonardo da Vinci’s World Map,” Cosmos and History 13 (2017).

One-Day Oxford Symposium Explores Digital and Analog Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Maps: Digital | Analogue is a one-day symposium from the Sunderland Collection, held in conjunction with the Bodleian Libraries, taking place on 26 February 2026. “Discover the secrets that digitisation can reveal about historical maps and atlases, explore the world of online gaming maps, learn about globes and conservation, and find out all about the colours and pigments used in early cartography.” Free registration, streamed and in-person at Oxford’s Weston Library.

Previously: Oculi Mundi.

A Zero Declination World Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Bad Map Projection #216: Zero Declination. A world map in cylindrical projection distorted so that up is magnetic north. (Randall Munroe, xkcd, 13 Feb 2026.)
Randall Munroe, “Bad Map Projection: Zero Declination,” xkcd, 13 Feb 2026.

The Bad Map Projection series of xkcd cartoons are mischievous and brain-melting but often as not come with a kernel of truth. Last Friday’s is a case of geomagnetorectification, distorting the map to line up true north with magnetic north. Is it wrong that I think it’s more interesting than brain-melting?