Ken Jennings - Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

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ALSO BY KEN JENNINGS

Ken Jenningss Trivia Almanac

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

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Copyright 2011 by Ken Jennings

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First Scribner hardcover edition September 2011

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Designed by Paul Dippolito

Manufactured in the United States of America

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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 :
McArthurs 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: odtstore@odt.org). Also available in Australia from
McArthur Maps, 208 Queens Parade, North Fitzroy, 3068, Australia;
phone: 0011 614 3155 5908; e-mail: stuartmcarthur@hotmail.com.

Further credits:
Images on courtesy of Altea Gallery
( Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC;
photograph on by
Jim Payne; images on OpenStreetMap and contributors, CC-BY-SA

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

MAPHEAD

n.: the deformation
of an elliptical map projection

.

PAT CONROY

T hey say youre not really grown up until youve moved the last box of your stuff out of storage at your parents. If thats 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, everybodys parents attic or basement has its share of junk, but the eight-foot-tall mountain of boxes filling one bay of my parents garage isnt 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 didnt find the Legos, much to my six-year-old sons 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 Hammonds Medallion World Atlas from 1979.

I wasnt 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 capitalshey, 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 isnt made up of boring places like Athens or TahitiI want to visit off-the-beaten-path oddities like 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.

Back then, I could literally look at maps for hours. I was a fast and voracious reader, and keenly aware that a page of hot Roald Dahl or Encyclopedia Brown action would last me only thirty seconds or so. But each page of an atlas was an almost inexhaustible trove of names and shapes and places, and I relished that sense of depth, of comprehensiveness. Travelers will return to a favorite place many times and order the same dish at the same caf and watch the sun set from the same vantage point. I could do the same thing as a frequent armchair traveler, enjoying the familiarity of sights I had noticed before while always being surprised by new details. Look how Ardmore, Alabama, is only a hundred feet away from its neighbor Ardmore, Louisianabut there are 4,303 miles between Saint George, Alaska, and Saint George, South Carolina. Look at the lacelike coastline of the Musandam Peninsula, the northernmost point of the Arabian nation of Oman, an intricate fractal snowflake stretching into the Strait of Hormuz. Children love searching for tiny new details in a sea of complexity. Its the same principle that sold a bajillion Wheres Waldo? books.

Mapmakers must know thisthat detail, to many map lovers, is not just a means but an end. The office globe next to my desk right now is pretty compact, but it makes room for all kinds of backwater hamlets in the western United States: Cole, Kansas; Alpine, Texas; Burns, Oregon; Mott, North Dakota (population: 808, about the same as a city block or two of Manhattans Upper East Side). Even Ajo, Arizona, makes the cut, and its not even incorporated as a townits officially a CDP, or census-designated place. What do all these spots have in common, besides the fact that no one has ever visited them without first running out of gas? First, they all have nice short names. Second, theyre each the only thing for miles around. So they neatly fill up an empty spot on the globe and therefore make the product look denser with information.