The Map Room

@maproomblog.com

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A blog by @jonathancrowe.net about maps in all their forms, on and off since 2003. maproomblog.com Email digest: maproomblog.com/about/subscribe Mastodon: mapstodon.space/@maproomblog Support via Patreon: patreon.com/jonathancrowe

A mosaic of images from the past week’s posts, including an example of Ed Fairbairn’s art, the cover of Boston in 50 Maps, some maps presented in Apple Watch format, and a geologic map of the Sierra Nevada in California.
Cover art for This Way Up, a book by the Map Men Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman.
Ferdinand Verbiest, Kun yu quan tu, 1674. Ink on paper, eight scrolls, 217 × 54 cm. Library of Congress.
A mosaic from this week's posts: the cover for The Sky Atlas, and two maps depicting patterns in the names of streams in the United States.
John Rocque, A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark, with the contiguous buildings, 1746. An engraved map of 18th-century London in 24 panels.
A mosaic of images related to this week’s posts: a map of Minnesota hot dishes by region, a promotional image from Google related to its Google Maps announcements this week, and a detail from John Churchman, The Magnetic Atlas (1794) related to an exhibition in Paris.
A mosaic of images from the past week: a thumbnail image for a surrealist map film, a product photo for a map-themed fountain pen, and a set of icons for online maps.
A mosaic of images. Clockwise: Da Vinci's octant map of the world (1514), the book cover for The Library of Lost Maps by James Cheshire (2025), and an xkcd comic, Zero Declination, showing up as magnetic north.
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.
Book covers for Cincinnati in 50 Maps and Columbus in 50 Maps.
Clockwise from top left: Poster from the Above & Below exhibition at Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center; Book cover for Mr Ward’s Map by Elizabeth Cox; Thomas Ward survey map of Wellington City, sheet 22, 1892. Wellington City Council Archives.
Images from the Great Korean Encyclopedia, CD-ROM edition.
Imagery of Maine’s Mount Desert Island captured by NISAR’s L-band radar on 21 Aug 2025. NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Safari Can’t Find the Server: Safari can’t open the page “https://mapstodon.space” because Safari can’t find the server “mapstodon.space”. [screenshot]
A crop from Gareth Fuller’s pen-and-ink pictorial map of Washington, D.C., published as The DMV in 2025.
A crop from the map of the Star Wars galaxy found on Starwars.com. https://www.starwars.com/star-wars-galaxy-map
A map of the world showing where the seafloor has been mapped. New bathymetric data added in the past year is shown in red. Source: Seabed 2030. https://seabed2030.org/2025/06/21/seabed-2030-announces-millions-of-square-kilometers-of-new-seafloor-data-on-world-hydrography-day/
Screenshot of an interactive map of the 2025 Australian federal election results from the Guardian website. The Guardian calls it an “exaggerated” map, in that geographically small urban constituencies are slightly enlarged for visibility while maintaining a reasonably geographically accurate shape overall.
Daniel Huffman’s map of the world using his 'asymmetric monstrosity' composite map projection.
MTA Chair & CEO Janno Lieber, NYCT President Demetrius Crichlow, and Chief Customer Officer Shanifah Rieara unveil a major redesign to the New York City Subway Map at Times Sq-42 St on Wednesday, Apr 2, 2025. Marc A. Hermann/MTA. CC licence.
A map of the world showing the vertical gravity gradient on the ocean floor. The gradient is used to model seafloor topography. NASA Earth Observatory/SWOT.
A photo of the World of Maps storefront in a snowy day in Ottawa on 27 November 2017.
A selection of slides from my 2019 presentation, “The Territory is Not the Map: Exploring the Fantasy Map Style.” The slide at left outlines the talk: 1. What we talk about when we talk about fantasy maps; 2. What fantasy maps look like; 3. The origins of the fantasy map style; 4. The implications of the fantasy map style. The slide at right has an inset of the Tabula Peutingeriana and has the title 'A Pseudomedieval aesthetic'. Bullet points: - A purely medieval aesthetic would not be understood by modern fantasy readers - A purely modern map would be rejected as anachronistic - Result: A modern map that looks and feels like an old map, but isn't.
An elevation map showing the topography of Antarctica underneath its ice sheet. Polar projection centred on the South Pole. Colour. From Pritchard et al., Bedmap3 updated ice bed, surface and thickness gridded datasets for Antarctica. Sci Data 12, 414 (2025).
A screenshot of Maps Surveyor from the Apple App Store
The 1452 mappa mundi by Giovanni Leardo held in the collection of the American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
A screenshot from Apple Maps, showing how the Gulf of Mexico is labelled as Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).
A screenshot from Google Maps showing the Gulf of Mexico labelled as 'Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)'
Detail from Mercator, Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate (1569), showing the Gulf of Mexico labelled as 'Golfo Mexicano' 456 years ago. Wikimedia Commons.
A series of sketches by Kathleen Jennings of what would become her map for The Wild Huntress by Emily Lloyd-Jones.
Left: a map of Iceland showing where polar bears have been reported in recorded history. Right: A screenshot from moonlidar.com, showing a colour-coded topographical 3D virtual globe of the Moon.
“Les costes aux environs de la rivière de Misisipi: découvertes par Mr. de la Salle en 1683 et reconnues par Mr. le Chevallier d’Iberville en 1698 et 1699,” from Nicolas de Fer, L’Atlas curieux, 1701. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.
A screenshot from the virtual version of the Pallazo Vecchio’s Map Room.
Screenshot from a CBC News interactive story about daylighting rivers: an interactive map showing buried rivercourses on the Island of Montreal.
Plan of Cincinnati and Vicinity (1860). CHPL.
Cover of the U.S. edition of Mapmatics
Screenshot from the Yellowhead Treaty Map website, showing areas covered by treaties with Indigenous peoples in Canada.
A satellite image of a Kiribati atoll. NASA Earth Observatory.
Untitled cordiform map in which a world map is placed inside a fool’s cap. 1590. Franco Novacco Map Collection, Newberry Library.
Hurricane Milton as seen from the International Space Station on 8 October 2024.
Cover image from The Truth About Harry Beck, a play now on at the London Transport Museum. It’s an outline cutout image of Beck with the London Underground map in the back.
Book cover: Atlas of Iowa
Images of two books showing their jacket covers: Kris Butler's Drink Maps in Victorian Britain (left) and Debbie Hall's Adventures in Maps (right).
Excerpt from an enhanced version of Bartolomeu Velho’s portolan chart of the east coast of North America, ca. 1560, showing place names that are faded and next-to-invisible on the chart itself. Library of Congress.