Jennings takes readers on a world tour of geogeeks from the London Map Fair to the bowels of the Library of Congress, from the prepubescent geniuses at the National Geographic Bee to the computer programmers at Google Earth. Each chapter delves into a different aspect of map culture: highpointing, geocaching, road atlas rallying, even the “unreal estate” charted on the maps of fiction and fantasy. He also considers the ways in which cartography has shaped our history, suggesting that the impulse to make and read maps is as relevant today as it has ever been.

From the “Here be dragons” parchment maps of the Age of Discovery to the spinning globes of grade school to the postmodern revolution of digital maps and GPS, Maphead is filled with intriguing details, engaging anecdotes, and enlightening analysis. If you’re an inveterate map lover yourself—or even if you’re among the cartographically clueless who can get lost in a supermarket—let Ken Jennings be your guide to the strange world of mapheads.< “Jennings is a very witty, insightful writer and has written an entertaining and educational book about maps and the geeks who obsess over them.” —Pauline Frommer, travel writer and founding editor of Frommers.com< “It’s a fun read that’s not just for wonks.” —The Salt Lake Tribune< “[A] spirited layman’s history of cartography.” ­—Harpers<

Chapter 1ECCENTRICITY

n.: the deformationof 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 lived at the head of my bed at night next to my pillow, where most kids would keep a beloved security blanket or teddy bear. Flipping through its pages, I could see that my atlas had been as well loved as any favorite plush toy: the gold type on the padded cover was worn, the corners were dented, and the binding was so shot that most of South America had fallen out and been shoved back in upside down.

Today, I will still cheerfully cop to being a bit of a geography wonk. I know my state capitals—hey, I even know my Australian state capitals. The first thing I do in any hotel room is break out the tourist magazine with the crappy city map in it. My “bucket list” of secret travel ambitions isn’t made up of boring places like Athens or Tahiti—I want to visit off-the-beaten-path oddities like Weirton, West Virginia (the only town in the United States that borders two different states on opposite sides) or Victoria Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut (home to the world’s largest “triple island”—that is, the world’s largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island).* But my childhood love of maps, I started to remember as I paged through the atlas, was something much more than this casual weirdness. I was consumed. Read Less