Andrew Middleton, the owner of the Map Center in Pawtucket, RI (previously), has put together a map of map stores and non-commercial map institutions (archives, libraries, etc.). Comment on Bluesky to suggest other places.
Earlier this month, Andrew posted about the state of the map store, wherein he lays out what makes up his business and where he’d like to go from here. (Mind you, that was before this post and this post went all sorts of viral.)
A Street View car passing through the tiny Spanish village of Tajueco captured images of what sure looked like a man loading (or unloading) a wrapped body from the trunk of a car. The images helped authorities solve an outstanding missing person case: remains were discovered earlier this month, and two people have been arrested. News coverage: BBC, El País, New York Times, The Times. Given that it had been 15 years since the last time a Street View car passed through Tajueco, which has maybe 50 inhabitants, doing a shoulder-check for camera-equipped cars was likely not in the forefront of the perpetrators’ minds. (Current screenshot above: the man has since been blurred for obvious reasons.) [Gizmodo, PetaPixel, The Verge]
A lack of time and energy have conspired to prevent me from serving up a gift guide this year, but I can point you to a few links related to books that have come out this year.
First up, I have in my hands a review copy of the seventh volume of the Atlas of Design. It is the usual collection of marvellous cartography from familiar and unfamiliar mapmakers, some of which quite unexpected, and I hope to have more to say about it shortly. It made its debut at the NACIS annual meeting in October and is available to purchase from this page. See my review of the sixth volume.
Matthew Edney’s list of map history books published or seen in 2024 is now live; he’s been posting such a list each year since 2017 (previously).
Alaistair Bonnett’s latest, 40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World came out in September from Ivy Press. Geographical magazine published an interview with him in October. I’ve reviewed two of Bonnett’s books here before—Off the Map (Unruly Places) and The Age of Islands (Elsewhere)—which were more about geographical curiosities than maps per se. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
To promote A History of the World in 47 Borders (Wildfire, April)—published in the U.S. as A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders (The Experiment, October)—Jonn Elledge has posted a list of the 47 facts about the 47 borders that are the focus of the book’s 47 chapters. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Mark Ovenden’s latest, Iconic Transit Maps (Prestel, 2024) is a look at transit map design via fifty examples around the world. Cameron Booth reviews it on his Transit Maps blog. Way back in 2008, I reviewed the first edition of his Transit Maps of the World. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Related: Map Books of 2024.
How many libraries host map collections that you might be unaware of? The Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library’s online exhibition, Landscape and Layers, is an introduction to that library’s map holdings, which per the blog post include 19th- and early 20th-century maps of the city, Sanborn fire insurance maps, and early maps of Ohio.
A population-based study suggesting that people in jobs that require real-time spatial processing—taxi and ambulance drivers—have the lowest rate of Alzheimer’s-related death comes with a bunch of caveats and is reluctant to draw a direct correlation. Per Euronews, people good at spatial processing may be at lower risk regardless of whether they use that skill driving ambulances and taxis. Also:
Independent researchers pointed to a few of those factors, including the fact that the taxi and ambulance drivers in the study died on average around ages 64 to 67, while Alzheimer’s onset is typically after age 65.
Further, few of the drivers were women, who are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than men, and the analysis didn’t consider genetics or include scans that could show any changes to the brain as a result of their jobs.
So this is a long, long way from being able to say, for example, that driving a taxi prevents Alzheimer’s.
Previously: London Cabbies’ Unique Brains May Help Alzheimer’s Diagnosis.
An outage at their Amsterdam ISP knocked OpenStreetMap offline on Sunday; they’ve spent the past two days in read-only mode via their secondary server in Dublin but appear to be back up and running as of 8:45 AM EST today. Details at the OSM community forum.
“Scientists mapped the flow of water through every single river on the planet, every day over the past 35 years, using a combination of satellite data and computer modeling. What they found shocked them,” CNN reports. “Nearly half of the world’s largest downstream rivers—44%—saw a drop in the amount of water flowing through them each year, according to the research published Thursday in the journal Science.” On the other hand, smaller, upstream rivers saw an increase in flow.
There are plenty of online resources about Sanborn maps (and other fire insurance maps); Brandon Silverman has built a website focusing on the art and typography found on Sanborn maps’ cover and title pages, with literally thousands of examples.
Previously: Fire Insurance Maps Online; A Guide to the Library of Congress’s Collection of Fire Insurance Maps.
The decline in passenger rail service in the U.S. and Canada is charted by this interactive map, which uses a slider to compare Amtrak and Via Rail service in 1980 with what it is today. [Maps Mania]
I haven’t seen many maps of the 2024 U.S. presidential election results, but then I haven’t been looking very hard for them either. Last week, CNN posted some charts and maps showing where the candidates under- or overperformed relative to the 2020 election. “Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that in the states where the campaign was the most hotly contested, more people voted in 2024, whereas in states where one side or the other seemed more likely to win, turnout generally dropped.”
The headline accompanying this Economic Times (India) article is more than a bit misleading: ”Google Maps leads three men to death as car plunges from incomplete bridge into river.” Horrifying. The bridge across the Ramganga River in Uttar Pradesh was closed after a part of it had been washed away in a flood several months previously. But there’s a twist. Google Maps didn’t mark the bridge as closed, and did route the travellers across it, but the road hadn’t been blocked or marked closed on the ground either. This wasn’t a case of ignoring local signage and blindly following online maps: local signage failed too. Google isn’t a panopticon: someone would have had to tell Google Maps that the bridge was closed, and I have to wonder whether that happened. But a Google Maps error makes for a better headline, one that goes international, than a horrible local lapse. At any rate, an investigation is ongoing. [Jalopnik]
Alice Hudson, who from 1981 to 2009 was chief of the New York Public Library’s Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and as such responsible for one of the world’s significant map collections, died on 6 November 2024 from complications of kidney disease. She was 77. The New York Times published her obituary yesterday.
Lots of little companies and individuals making and selling maps; the Independent Map Sellers page lists a bunch of them in one handy place. “Interested in buying something special for the map enthusiasts in your life (or yourself)? Skip the giant companies and go straight to the source: there are loads of skilled, independent cartographers out there whose work you can buy!” [Daniel Huffman]
The Yellowhead Treaty Map is an interactive map of the various treaties between the state and Indigenous peoples in Canada. “Covering every Canadian treaty from 1763 to the present, The Treaty Map aims to challenge the commonly held view of treaties as land surrenders and offers a comprehensive, interactive learning and teaching tool, grounded in Indigenous perspectives of treaties.” [Ian Mosby]
Pacific nations like Fiji, Kiribati and Tuvalu will face at least 15 cm of sea level rise over the next 30 years, according to a NASA analysis. “In addition to the overall analysis, the agency’s sea level team produced high-resolution maps showing which areas of different Pacific Island nations will be vulnerable to high-tide flooding—otherwise known as nuisance flooding or sunny day flooding—by the 2050s. Released on Sept. 23, the maps outline flooding potential in a range of emissions scenarios, from best-case to business-as-usual to worst-case.” [Universe Today]
