Blogging about maps since 2003
Classroom materials and maps produced by the Utah Historical Society for the State of Utah’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States include this rather interesting map of the peoples of North America in 1776. It shows “colonial communities” alongside Indigenous language groups. [John Garrison Marks]
On The Conversation, James Cheshire looks at the Cold War-era maps that news magazines commissioned to explain the geopolitical situation to their readers. “Their maps were large, dramatic and designed to be spread across kitchen tables and classroom desks. And they also offered a very different perspective to the mainstream maps we have become accustomed to today.” Which is to say: polar projections were front and centre.
Daniel Huffman gives us a behind-the-scenes look at “the ‘selling mappy goods’ side of the business, in my tradition of being open about my finances. I can’t say whether my experience is typical, but you might find it interesting if you’re thinking about selling mappy things.”
Previously: The Logistics of Selling Maps.
More than a hundred map-related events are taking place today (4 February 2026) in France, plus a few elsewhere, as part of the first Jour de la Carte (Day of the Map).
Une centaine d’événements organisés par des acteurs publics, privés, éducatifs, culturels, associatifs, citoyens et citoyennes sont prévus en France et à l’étranger, pour réaffirmer le rôle essentiel de la carte comme outil pour faire démocratie, permettant à chacun de comprendre, de débattre et d’agir sur son territoire.
The organizing body is called La République des Cartes, whose members include cartographers and academics, and the goal is expressly political (in a civil-society sense, one that strikes me as quite French).
La République des cartes est une coalition mue par un objectif : replacer la cartographie au cœur du débat démocratique. L’actualité géopolitique des derniers mois livre de multiples exemples, – tels que le changement d’appellation du Golfe du Mexique ou la situation du Groenland – de l’importance des cartes. Pour se représenter le monde autrement, collectivement, déployer une politique sur les territoires et accompagner la transition environmentale grâce à la carte.
Quotes from the press release. Looks like the goal is to make this an annual event.
Mountains are almost ubiquitous in fantasy maps, and almost always drawn in profile, as a line of hill signs. In a Patreon post, mapmaker John Wyatt Greenlee (aka the Surprised Eel Historian) discusses a couple of ways to draw mountains and mountain ranges in the usual fantasy map style.
See also his post about the mountains in maps he draws for his academic clients, i.e., maps that appear in academic monographs. (“Some academics don’t want mountains. Some want icons. And some want topography. But some brave souls want full-on Tolkienesque mountain ranges.”)
London stationery store Present & Correct has published a book of vintage illustrated tourist maps from Japan. “In 2025 we found the maps rummaging in Tokyo’s Jinbocho area before photographing & collating them into this 136 page paperback.” Fifty Pre-War Tourist Maps from Japan is available from their website. [Kottke]
A map dealer’s catalogue is not the first place you’d expect to be a locus of resistance. Even so, in the first 2026 catalogue from map dealer Neatline Maps, Kristoffer Damgaard curates a selection of Greenland-focused material, along with a ten-page history of the mapping and exploration of Greenland. “Understanding how Greenland was explored and mapped over time provides an important context for understanding why the present confrontation is so deeply unnecessary and wrong.” Thanks to Fred for the tip.
Somebody’s been talking about Greenland again, and we’re getting another flurry of articles about how Greenland’s apparent size on maps may be to blame for the obsession. Last year it was suggested that Trump wanted Greenland simply because it looked really big on the Mercator projection: Slate and Newsweek were a lot less circumspect about it than Foreign Policy was, but then they would be. The latest round of press appears to be equally circumspect. The Financial Times and Geographical magazine turn evidence of executive ignorance into some kind of teachable moment about map projections instead of saying outright: he thinks it’s bigger than it actually is, and that’s nuts. Providing some context is always good, but let’s try not to bury the lede.
Most people know the poles are exaggerated on the Mercator projection. They’ve seen other projections. In Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier pushed back against the argument that map projections distort our understanding of geography: “Do they never look at a globe, or at other maps? Are map users complete idiots?”1 It was a rhetorical question: of course they aren’t, he was saying. Apparently there’s an exception. But when the emperor has no clothes, you have to proceed as though most people run around naked.
Previously: Trump’s ‘Cartographic Compulsion’.
Eclipse Company co-founder Jesse Tomlinson writes: “Since you have many eclipse map posts on your site, I wanted to send a quick message letting you know about our newly rebuilt website, The Eclipse App. In 2023, you wrote about the maps we made for the 2023 annular eclipse and 2024 total eclipse.” Right now the site defaults to the 2026 solar eclipse over Greenland, Iceland and Spain, but it also covers the 2023, 2024, 2027 and 2028 eclipses, each with path-of-totality, historical cloud cover and solar position maps.
A new, far more detailed map of the landscape underneath Antarctica’s ice sheet, generated “by applying the physics of ice flow to ice surface maps and incorporating geophysical ice thickness observations.” There’s an aspect of speculation, of inference, to this method—the map is predicated on our understanding of how ice flows, and that understanding may change. But in the meantime the new map is suggesting the existence of some under-ice landforms hitherto undiscovered. BBC News, Reuters.
Previously: A New Map of the Land Beneath Antarctica’s Ice.
From May 2025: a blog post from TeleGeography looking back at their annual maps of submarine cables, which they’ve been putting out since at least 2013, and with a different design each year (here’s my post about the 2022 edition). Always the Mercator projection though. Affords a look at how the submarine cable network has expanded in recent years. [Kottke]
Gladys West has died at the age of 95. An African-American mathematician who grew up in Jim Crow Virginia, West “devoted herself to solving one of science’s most complex challenges: accurately modeling the shape of the Earth. Her painstaking calculations and programming helped transform raw satellite data into precise geodetic models, enabling reliable satellite-based navigation. That work ultimately became the backbone of the Global Positioning System (GPS)—now essential to aviation, shipping, emergency response, smartphones, and daily life worldwide.”
Previously: Gladys West, GPS’s Hidden Figure.
How many novels include maps? For his 2013 monograph on fantasy maps and settings, Here Be Dragons, Stefan Ekman surveyed a random sample of 200 fantasy novels and found that about a third of them came with maps. Computational methods have now answered this question using a much bigger sample:
Digital humanities scholars from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers of Computing and Information Science have developed a computational system to mine maps from nearly 100,000 digitized books from the 19th and early 20th centuries, discovering that just 1.7% of novels include maps, mostly at the beginning or end, among other findings.
They also discovered that 25% of maps in novels depict fictional settings, and military and detective fiction—not fantasy or science fiction—were the book genres most likely to contain a map, contrary to initial hunches.
Contrary to what I would have expected as well! See the article here (PDF). [Tara Calishain]
In a Guardian piece last month, Laura Spinney briefly touches on three books and the ways in which they subvert our understanding of what’s on the map and how we use them to see the world. They are Free the Map: From Atlas to Hermes: a New Cartography of Borders and Migration by Henk van Houtum et al. (nai10, 2024); William Rankin’s Radical Cartography (Picador/
Doug Greenfield catches up with the 50 Maps series from Belt Publishing, focusing mainly on the two most recent: Cincinnati in 50 Maps by Nick Swartsell and maps by Andy Woodruff, and Columbus in 50 Maps by Brent Warren and maps by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. (Previously.)
Cincinnati in 50 Maps is one of two books—the other is Alan Wight’s Cincinnati’s Foodshed: An Art Atlas—that are the subject of a 23-minute segment on WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition this week, which interviews the authors.
The Guardian maps the devastation wrought by wildfires across the globe. “Brazil, Bolivia, Russia, Australia and Canada have all endured some of their worst fire seasons in recent years, as heatwaves stoked by fossil fuel pollution drive the risk of extreme blazes higher. The maps, using data from the University of Maryland, show some of the hardest-hit forests.”
