This Way Up
Related
- Map Men (Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman, 2025)
Overview
Subtitled When Maps Go Wrong (and Why It Matters), the first book from the makers of the Map Men YouTube series. Each chapter is a cartographic blunder and what followed from it: islands that were charted for centuries and never existed, borders drawn with a ruler by people who had not been there, Soviet maps deliberately wrong to confuse an enemy, corporate maps that quietly invent or delete places, and the surprising number of ways to get north wrong. The tone is the same as the videos, which is to say two men being funny about something they have researched properly.
Notes
Here partly because it is a pleasure and partly because it is a book about how a confident, official-looking representation of the world can be wrong and stay wrong for a very long time. A map is a model, and the errors in this book are all the ordinary failures of models: copied from a source without checking, drawn to serve an interest, or never revisited once everyone believed it. That is a theme of this whole vault with better pictures. Not every claim in the book is as well sourced as the best ones, which the authors would probably enjoy having pointed out.