It’s been ten years since Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman teamed up to form Voltron launch an occasional and irregular series of videos about maps. They called themselves the Avengers Map Men, and in each episode, sandwiched between the catchy theme song¹ and the long ad break for Surfshark, they took as their subject an odd map or cartographic situation and proceeded to say a lot of smart things in a very silly fashion.

Now those videos have led to a book, This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (and Why It Matters), which came out last fall to no small amount of fanfare and promotion, and we get to see whether the schtick that works on YouTube is translatable to the printed page. It turns out that the answer is, kind of.

This Way Up focuses on wrong maps, but there are many ways for a map to be wrong, as the book reveals. A wrong map can contain a mistake, like the IKEA map poster that left off New Zealand or a century of maps showing the Mountains of Kong, the conjectural mountain range that was thought to separate Saharan from sub-Saharan Africa, but didn’t. It can be a map that is wrong on purpose, like the Situationist Naked City map of Paris, or Soviet maps that included obfuscations and errors for security reasons, or maps with copyright traps. Or it can be a map that the viewer just rejects, just plain nopes out of, the map is just wrong, even if it’s cartographically acceptable (putting Shetland in an inset box) or just displaying a geographic reality that doesn’t make sense (ITV’s broadcast regions, a product of transmission tower range more than cultural groupings).

This is an excellent choice of subject matter, not just because wrong maps make for fertile ground for comedy (try and make jokes about an excellent map with absolutely no flaws whatsoever, I dare you), but also for pedagogical reasons. The Map Men have always been subversively educational: they’re not just goofing on maps with pantomimes and wisecracks (Mark’s a former geography teacher, after all). With several million views per video, they’re reaching a lot people than more earnest attempts at cartographic outreach.² And focusing on maps gone wrong is useful and important. Their thesis is that wrong maps make you think—and with increasingly accurate maps in our pockets, we increasingly don’t have to, which is increasingly a problem.

I would add to that the fact that the idea of maps’ accuracy and infallibility is very very strongly held. As I said in my review of three books about phantom islands, “Maps have to tell the truth. They simply have to. Maybe that’s why stories about mistakes on the map, and the havoc those mistakes cause, fascinate us so much.” This Way Up is all about the havoc wreaked by wrong maps, from the border complications that ensued when a reference map used to negotiate a border left a gap that needed working out later, to the outrage generated when a news broadcast puts Hong Kong on a map of South America, to the countless incidents of people getting lost because they were obedient to their satnavs. Wrong maps have consequences—some of which are major (Columbus’ voyage facilitated by his brother’s map exaggerating the size of Africa and minimizing the distance westward), some of which plain chilling (a bad shortcut taken by the Donner party).

Not everything in This Way Up works or strictly speaking belongs. There’s a chapter on the Marshall Islands that alternates between stick charts and the maps of Bikini atoll before and after nuclear testing that is played more or less straight: the stick charts aren’t so much wrong as different, and the maps aren’t what’s wrong about Bikini. Nor is it clear to me where the wrong can be found in the Millionth Map of the World project, unless it’s the failure of the project itself.³

As for the comedy, fans of the Map Men will find much that is familiar. It’s easy to imagine their voices as you read the text. Using haiku to describe the IKEA map, or writing the entire Shetland chapter in the form of an epic poem, is exactly the skit-forward madcappery you’d expect from them. But the comedy doesn’t always fit the format. The chapter on the Donner party, done in the form of a podcast transcript, is interminable to read—but I bet it works a lot better in the audiobook version. There are books where the audiobook is either the best version of the book or a work in its own right (e.g. John Hodgman’s Complete World Knowledge trilogy); I can’t help but wonder whether I’m missing out by not getting the audiobook.

Got this one from my public library.

This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (and Why It Matters)
by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman.
Mudlark, 23 Oct 2025, £17; ISBN 978-0-008710279
Hanover Square Press, 18 Nov 2025, $30; ISBN 978-1-335-00131-3
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop. 

1. It’s in your head now isn’t it. Map map map men men. Damn it.
2. In one of my articles about fantasy maps, I even linked to their video on the Hereford Mappa Mundi to make a point about the geographical inaccuracy of medieval maps, because it was clear and straightforward—and the Map Men fans in the audience loved that I did it.
3. I may have answered my own question here.