Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [137]
* Wealthy buyers of the 594-map Blaeu atlas of 1665 could even pay a little extra to have their family coat of arms stamped in gold upon the cover. Compare that with the shoddy way our atlases must live today, crumpled in the backseats of our cars under an avalanche of fast-food receipts (or, if one has kids, Goldfish crackers).
* Jews were, in fact, Portugal’s secret weapon in its battle with Spain for cartographic supremacy, as is evidenced by the Hebrew letters so often used as symbols on its maps. Christian mapmakers were constrained by biblical traditions so goofy that even the Texas Board of Education wouldn’t touch them today, but in the sixteenth century, they trumped geographic accuracy every time. Take 2 Esdras 6:42, for example, which begins, “Upon the third day thou didst command that the waters should be gathered in the seventh part of the earth: six parts hast thou dried up, and kept them.” This text was interpreted to mean that the surface of the earth was only one-seventh water, pretty much the reverse of the actual situation. Medieval maps vastly underestimated the size of the oceans for centuries, with potentially fatal results for mariners.
* Today, Sylvia Wright is best remembered for coining the word “mondegreen” to refer to an oft-misheard song lyric, like “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” The term first appeared in a 1954 Harper’s essay in which Wright described how, as a child, she misheard the final line of a seventeenth-century ballad—“They hae slain the Earl O’Moray, and laid him on the green”—as “They hae slain the Earl O’Moray, and Lady Mondegreen.”
* You may recall from chapter 1 that chloropleth maps are maps that encode information about different territories by coloring them different shades.
* Stevenson was a devoted map buff and always connected his love for maps to his childhood imagination. In an 1894 magazine essay on Treasure Island, he wrote, “I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the STANDING STONE or the DRUIDIC CIRCLE on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.”
* Kids probably also enjoy the naughty thrill of tinkering in God’s domain; imaginary mapmakers are, after all, the Dr. Frankensteins of cartography, altering natural land-forms at whim. Wim Delvoye, for example, is a Belgian artist famous for his shocking installations, like the one where he tattoos live pigs or makes stained-glass windows of medical X-rays of his friends having sex in a radiology clinic. His best-known piece is “Cloaca,” a machine that chews up food and digests it into realistic-smelling feces, which he then sells to gallery visitors. But Delvoye is also the artist behind “Atlas,” a series of intricately detailed, utterly plausible renderings of imaginary continents. The maps seem square in comparison to the rest of Delvoye’s outrageous oeuvre, but in a way they represent something just as transgressive: not just a pig reinvented but a world.
* My favorite childhood video games, whether text adventures like Zork or shoot-’emups like the cult classic Time Bandit, all had one thing in common: you had to make a map if you wanted to win. Today’s 3-D video games aren’t laid out using the overhead