Read Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks Online

Authors: Ken Jennings

Tags: #General, #Social Science, #Technology & Engineering, #Reference, #Atlases, #Cartography, #Human Geography, #Atlases & Gazetteers, #Trivia

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

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ALSO BY KEN JENNINGS

Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac

Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive,
Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

Scribner
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Copyright © 2011 by Ken Jennings

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address
Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, NY 10020.

First Scribner hardcover edition September 2011

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010052219

ISBN 978-1-4391-6717-5
ISBN 978-1-4391-6719-9 (ebook)

Additional credit for illustration on
page 53
:
McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World. © 1979 Stuart McArthur.
Available worldwide from ODT, Inc. (1-800-736-1293;
www.ODTmaps.com
;
fax: 413-549-3503; e-mail: [email protected]). Also available in Australia from
McArthur Maps, 208 Queens Parade, North Fitzroy, 3068, Australia;
phone: 0011 614 3155 5908; e-mail: [email protected].

Further credits:
Images on
page 66
courtesy of NASA; map on
page 81
courtesy of Altea Gallery
(
www.alteagallery.com
); map on
page 118
© Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC;
photograph on
page 118
© Mayang Murni Adnin; photograph on
page 171
by
Jim Payne; images on
page 230
© OpenStreetMap and contributors, CC-BY-SA

For my parents.
And for the kid with the map.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1:
ECCENTRICITY
Chapter 2:
BEARING
Chapter 3:
FAULT
Chapter 4:
BENCHMARKS
Chapter 5:
ELEVATION
Chapter 6:
LEGEND
Chapter 7:
RECKONING
Chapter 8:
MEANDER
Chapter 9:
TRANSIT
Chapter 10:
OVEREDGE
Chapter 11:
FRONTIER
Chapter 12:
RELIEF
Notes
Index
MAPHEAD

Chapter 1
ECCENTRICITY

n
.:
the deformation
of an elliptical map projection

My wound is geography
.

—PAT CONROY

T
hey 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
.

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