Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [0]
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ALSO BY KEN JENNINGS
Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac
Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive,
Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
Scribner
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Copyright © 2011 by Ken Jennings
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First Scribner hardcover edition September 2011
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Manufactured in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010052219
ISBN 978-1-4391-6717-5
ISBN 978-1-4391-6719-9 (ebook)
Additional credit for illustration on page 53:
McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World. © 1979 Stuart McArthur.
Available worldwide from ODT, Inc. (1-800-736-1293; www.ODTmaps.com;
fax: 413-549-3503; e-mail: odtstore@odt.org). Also available in Australia from
McArthur Maps, 208 Queens Parade, North Fitzroy, 3068, Australia;
phone: 0011 614 3155 5908; e-mail: stuartmcarthur@hotmail.com.
Further credits:
Images on page 66 courtesy of NASA; map on page 81 courtesy of Altea Gallery
(www.alteagallery.com); map on page 118 © Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC;
photograph on page 118 © Mayang Murni Adnin; photograph on page 171 by
Jim Payne; images on page 230 © OpenStreetMap and contributors, CC-BY-SA
For my parents.
And for the kid with the map.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: ECCENTRICITY
Chapter 2: BEARING
Chapter 3: FAULT
Chapter 4: BENCHMARKS
Chapter 5: ELEVATION
Chapter 6: LEGEND
Chapter 7: RECKONING
Chapter 8: MEANDER
Chapter 9: TRANSIT
Chapter 10: OVEREDGE
Chapter 11: FRONTIER
Chapter 12: RELIEF
Notes
Index
MAPHEAD
Chapter 1
ECCENTRICITY
n.: the deformation
of an elliptical map projection
My wound is geography.
—PAT CONROY
They say you’re not really grown up until you’ve moved the last box of your stuff out of storage at your parents’. If that’s true, I believe I will stay young forever, ageless and carefree as Dorian Gray, while the cardboard at my parents’ house molders and fades. I know, everybody’s parents’ attic or basement has its share of junk, but the eight-foot-tall mountain of boxes filling one bay of my parents’ garage isn’t typical pack-rat clutter. It looks more like the warehouse in the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The last time I was home, I waded into the chaos in hopes of liberating a plastic bucket of my childhood Legos. I didn’t find the Legos, much to my six-year-old son’s chagrin, but I was surprised to come across a box with my name on the side, written in the neater handwriting of my teenaged self. The box was like an archaeological dig of my adolescence and childhood, starting with R.E.M. mix tapes and Spy magazines on top, moving downward through strata of Star Trek novelizations and Thor comics, and ending on the most primal bedrock of my youthful nerdiness: a copy of Hammond’s Medallion World Atlas from 1979.
I wasn’t expecting the Proustian thrill I experienced as I pulled the huge green book from the bottom of the box. Sunbeam-lit dust motes froze in their dance; an ethereal choir sang. At seven years old, I had saved up my allowance for months to buy this atlas, and it became my most prized possession. I remember it sometimes