Beyond two dimensions : ‘Strange Maps : An atlas of cartographic curiosities’ by Frank Jacobs

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.

While Jacobs's collection underscores the awe-inspiring in the ordinary, the book also shows beautiful maps of horrible events. In 1900, one James Mooney mapped, in three stages, the European invasion and marginalisation of the traditional homeland of the Native American Cherokee tribe, an area that eventually vanished under the shocking encroachment that took place during the Gold Rush of the 1830s – when it was all over, hardly 600 Cherokees had escaped from what was once a thriving and widespread community. Jacobs has titled this map of an ever-shrinking territory, 'Going, Going, Gone'.

Along the same lines, another dramatic map shows a statistical graphic of Napoleon Bonaparte's march to Moscow and back during 1812 and 1813, documenting the tragic loss of human lives. This image, basically two lines that vary in thickness and delineate the number of people killed, was made in 1869 – a graphical indication of the distances, the rivers to be crossed and the loss of lives during the various stages of the march. Napoleon started his journey with a 442,000-strong army, arriving in a deserted Moscow with only 100,000. Only 4000 troops returned, an immense loss of life that this map, designed by Charles Joseph Minard, is able to show in an astoundingly clear way.

Geographic poetry
Reading Jacobs took this reviewer back to 2005, when my students and I travelled all over Kabul to gather information for the making of a usable map of that city, something that simply did not exist. (The last readable map of Kabul was made in 1972.) Our final product is somewhere between a cartoon map and a tourist-landmark map, but either way became highly popular. However, the trials and travails we experienced in the process of making and distributing it showed us that there are unexpected pitfalls in the process of mapmaking, not all of which are purely in the realm of cartography.

We managed to make sketches of landmark buildings while under the constant scrutiny security personnel: the Americans, the Presidential Palace guards and the Afghan police. But more was to follow. The Afghan printer decided to print the maps in Lahore and bring them to Kabul in the back of a taxi. While entering Kabul, the taxi was stopped at a checkpoint and the 'highly suspicious cartoon maps' were confiscated. The driver and printer were thrown in jail, and it took ten days of hard lobbying, including talks with the interior minister the general in charge of national security before they understood that our cartoon map was not accurate enough to be used for, say, flying airplanes into buildings. Finally, the driver and printer, and half the printed maps, were released. The rest of the maps were kept as 'evidence'.

Frank Jacob's book, too, suffers from a series of niggling problems. Not all the maps have been given dates. It is also not clear why two artistic works by Aaron Meshon are included, while ignoring fantastic work by other artists. For instance, Julie Mehretu, an Ethiopian-American artist, uses large canvases to build a series of colourful layers that map history, population shifts, trading routes and growth of urban spaces. Elsewhere, working with youths in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, artist Vic Muniz has assembled garbage into an astounding map of the world.

The book also suffers in scope. First, though it presents itself as covering the entire planet, in reality it focuses largely on Europe and the US. A quick count shows that 43 maps can be linked to Europe and 37 to the US, while the rest of the world combined gets a meagre 17. Where are the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries, the Islamic world and Japan, among many others? Second, the book suffers from what appears to be a forced classification into 18 seemingly unnatural categories.

Whatever the drawbacks (including with regards to layout, prioritising insipid design to the size detriment of actual maps), there are some incredible finds on offer in Strange Maps. One of the most amazing is by a geographer-poet named Howard Horowitz, who painstakingly worked on a 'word map' of Manhattan: placing a series of words related to the physical geology, ecology, culture, lifestyle, history and infrastructure of Manhattan all together in the shape of the island. The shape even has seven small horizontal branches, indicating Manhattan's seven bridges. Poetically capturing the essence of one of the most diverse and vibrant places in the world – 'on warm nights in Harlem, noisy streets and quiet rooftops,' he writes, 'kids splash around a hydrant as lovers embrace' – took Horowitz almost 18 months. The simplicity of stitching together lines of words in black ink on a white background onto the recognisable footprint of the famous island demonstrates how powerfully expressive a unique and strange map can be.

~ Anne Feenstra is an architect who teaches at Kabul University.