Monsters and Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Surekha Davies writes about on how monsters on maps led to her first book and then, in her second, to a consideration of why monsters exist as a category.

By taking images of monstrous peoples on maps seriously I broke both molds. For traditionalists, engravings of headless men in Guiana or giants in Patagonia were what they called “myth,” “fantasy,” or “mere decoration”: cartographers supposedly added monsters to make their maps more appealing to buyers, or because they feared empty space. The “maps as politics” brigade offered a third explanation: monsters on European maps from the age of exploration were propaganda crafted to justify colonialism. For both factions, there was supposedly nothing more to say. I begged to differ.

Londonist Asks ChatGPT to Draw Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“The shortcomings and possibilities of generative AI are, of course, well chronicled across a million op-eds. I could write at length about the dangers or opportunities the technology presents,” writes Matt at Londonist. “But this is a newsletter about London, and I’m still in a silly holiday-season mindset. So all I’m going to do today is ask AI to draw some historical maps of the capital, and then take the p*ss out of them. Popcorn at the ready . . . ” It goes about as well as you’d expect: “terribly,” with results “as crazy as a yacht of numbats,” with labels “so bizarre that I don’t know where to begin.”

The State of The Map Room, Plus New Pages

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The State of The Map Room in 2025: On my Patreon, I look back on how this site did in terms of traffic and income over the past year.

Map Books of 2026: Already live, though at this stage there aren’t very many books listed. You know the drill: if you know something’s coming out this year, let me know.

Map Stores: Another work in progress, this is a list of brick-and-mortar map stores around the world. Does not include online stores, or antique map dealers (which are a different category, and could probably use their own page); these are retail stores you can visit during regular hours and buy maps from. For comparison, see Andrew Middleton’s map, which includes non-profit institutions like archives and libraries, and Zhaoxu Sui’s list of global map stores, from which I’ve been cribbing disgracefully.

The Onion on the New York Subway

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Onion: MTA Admits to Fabricating Large Parts of Subway Map. “‘Frankly, no one I know has ever ridden farther than the Carroll Street Station in Brooklyn. We’re not really sure what’s out there, but we figured we’d better put something on the map. Now we see the error in our ways. It was a mistake to trick New Yorkers into believing the G train exists—it does not.’” (Responses on social media are invariably some variant of I knew it.)

Canada Map Sales to Close

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Canada Map Sales logo

The Canadian Press reports on the closure of Canada Map Sales, a map store owned by the Manitoba government that sells topo maps, nautical charts, and other maps, posters and imagery, at the end of March 2026. It’s a victim of the digital age, says the cabinet minister responsible, who points to alternative online sources for the maps. (On the other hand, it might also be because the store is in a nondescript government building in an industrial park in southwest Winnipeg.)

Flyover City Tours Discontinued in Apple Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

MacRumors reports that Flyover city tours in Apple Maps appear to have been discontinued as of iOS 26. The Flyover imagery itself remains; this is about the feature that led the user from landmark to landmark using that imagery, which I guess wasn’t used much. It doesn’t happen very often, but online maps do retire features from time to time (Google has retired standalone apps for My Maps and Street View, for example).

The Apollo Transforming Printer

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

On the Library of Congress’s Worlds Revealed blog, a fascinating piece on a fascinating piece of hardware used by NASA to process lunar photographs taken for and by the Apollo program into orthorectified imagery useful for mapping.

Images from “Apollo Camera Systems and Lunar Mapping,” by Frederick Doyle, showing examples of scan angles from cameras imaging the lunar surface and the corrections made in the final orthorectified print.
Images from “Apollo Camera Systems and Lunar Mapping,” by Frederick Doyle, USGS. Frederick Doyle Papers.

Designing these photography systems was quite complex, as the team had to account for the movement of the spacecraft, distortion introduced by the camera’s lenses, variation in terrain on the lunar surface, the scanning speed of the camera, the angle of the sun at a given time (which affected the amount of light available), and extreme temperature changes (to name a few!). Apollo’s new panoramic camera produced film images with very wide angles, resulting in a distortion of scale and a curved horizon with a varying scale. […]

To make the panoramic photos useful for mapping, the images themselves needed to be corrected such that the distortions introduced by the spacecraft motion disappeared. Enter the Apollo Transforming Printer. It was able to remove the distortion introduced by the panoramic camera by reconstructing the motions of the orbital camera. Unlike today’s digital rectification processes, this was an optical remapping. The Printer utilized the original film negative, reprojected it through a lens and mirror system, and produced a print that was geometrically corrected.

‘Three Norths’ Leave England

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Ordnance Survey has announced that the triple alignment of true north, grid north (on OS maps) and magnetic north—the so-called three norths—has left England and is now over the North Sea. It’ll make landfall again in Scotland late next year. This is an artifact of, and specific to, Ordnance Survey maps, whose grid has a meridian is two degrees west longitude, east and west of which there is some difference between true north and grid north, and the movement of the north magnetic pole. In other words, the third north is product-specific. The triple alignment has been working its way north for the past three years; see my previous post for more.

Luke Jerram’s Mirror Moon

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Installation artist Luke Jerram’s past work includes large reproductions of the Earth, Moon, Sun and Mars. His latest is Mirror Moon, a touchable stainless steel globe of the Moon created with NASA topographic data.

A one-metre version of Mirror Moon debuted at the Royal Society last year. A larger, two-metre version is coming to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich next March to mark its 350th anniversary. Jerram discusses the project here.

More on Le Guin’s Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps at the Architectural Association Gallery in London (previously, previously) wrapped up last Saturday. The Library of America has an interview with Sarah Shin, who co-curated the exhibit and co-edited the accompanying book (which comes out in North America next month). A sample:

I’ve always loved how Le Guin describes writing as translating, asking “What is the other text, the original?” Similarly, I think that drawing maps, for Le Guin, was a way of making visible what already exists elsewhere in the source: “the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them.”

Thanks to Zvi for the tip.

The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin ed. by So Mayer and Sarah Shin. Spiral House, 21 Oct 2025 (U.S. 10 Jan 2026), £23. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

2025 Spiral Globe Ornament

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Thumbnail of a printable image that can be used to create a globe ornament, with instructions at the bottom.

John Nelson’s near-annual globe ornament blog posts are always a revelation. With the exception of the one time he went to 3D printing, they’re paper craft exercises that show just how many ways you can run card stock through a printer1 and end up with a reasonable approximation of a globe. This year’s, which uses spiralled vertical strips instead of gores, is no exception.

See also the ArcGIS Blog mirror, the modifiable ArcGIS Pro package, and a roundup of his past craft ornaments.

A History of Swiss Cartography

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book cover: Engineers of Map Art

Engineers of Map Art, a book on the history of Swiss cartography that focuses on work done at ETH Zurich, came out in English last September. (The German edition, Ingenieure der Kartenkunst, came out last January.) “This publication provides a comprehensive overview of 170 years of cartography at ETH Zurich and pays tribute to the personalities who have contributed to the development of the discipline. It is published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation and highlights its contribution to science and practice.” Eduard Imhof is covered in chapter 4. It’s available for free download as an open-access PDF; a hard copy can be ordered for CHF 50. Thanks to Peter Wrobel for the tip.

Cincinnati and Columbus in 50 Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book covers for Cincinnati in 50 Maps and Columbus in 50 Maps.

Two more books from Belt Publishing came out this week, both part of their “50 Maps” series, each focusing on an Ohio city: Cincinnati in 50 Maps, edited by Nick Swartsell and with cartography by Andy Woodruff; and Columbus in 50 Maps, edited by Brent Warren and with cartography by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. They join Cleveland in 50 Maps (2019) and other books in the series that aren’t about Ohio cities. Columbus-based independent news outlet Matter has a feature on Columbus in 50 Maps.

  • Cincinnati in 50 Maps ed. by Nick Swartsell; cartography by Andy Woodruff. Belt, 2 Dec 2025, $30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
  • Columbus in 50 Maps ed. by Brent Warren; cartography by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. Belt, 2 Dec 2025, $30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop. 

Related: Map Books of 2025.

GIS and Enshittification

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Linda Stevens believes that the GIS industry is showing signs of enshittification: “Coined by tech critic Cory Doctorow, ‘enshitification’ describes how once-great platforms decay under the pressures of greed and control. They begin as open, user-centered systems but gradually morph into closed ecosystems optimized for corporate rent-seeking rather than public good. GIS, long built on ideals of openness and shared data, now shows many of these symptoms.” In a second piece she says GIS, “with its specialized user base and high switching costs, is particularly vulnerable,” and lists some warning signs to watch out for (price hikes, degraded featurs and service, lock-in, upselling). She neither names names nor specifies specifics, mind.

Previously: Reimagining GIS.