2007-04-21

Other views of the world

I love maps and can study them for hours. Strange Maps finds unusual maps, maps showing statistics, maps showing unexpected parts of the world, maps using unusual projections and conventions.

2 comments:

Martin said...

Yeah! One of my favourites is Olaus Magnus's 16th century map of Scandinavia and the Baltic region. Full of cool little details, like the wolverine squeezing between two close-set trees to get the food out of its digestive tract and become able to eat some more...

kai said...

Yes! In Palazzo Vecchio in Florence there is a room with the walls covered with maps of all the world known in the late 15th Century and I spent I don't know how long there studying in particular the map of Scandinavia, musing over how some places had been important already then, and others were important then now have become back waters.

The museum book shop in the palace had a very expensive, nice-looking book about this map room, but unfortunately they had not thought of photographing the maps at sufficient resolution that you could make out any details, so I forewent buying the book.