First Person: Frank Jacobs

When Frank Jacobs started his Strange Maps blog, he found he was not alone in his map obsession

I always thought that mapophilia was a lonely affliction until I started my blog, Strange Maps, in 2006. I remember the first map I posted – it was a map of the location of asylums for the insane in Pennsylvania. It provided a bizarre geography of insanity, and it interested me because it was not the kind of map that would have a place in mainstream cartography. Equally, the map didn’t tell us much about mental health. I loved it because it was such an interesting juxtaposition of a condition that is so difficult to define with something as cool, rational and delineated as cartography.

I’d find strange maps online – I don’t draw my own – and then categorise them, describe them and link them to other maps. I have more obvious categories such as history, science and tech, and politics, as well as unusual ones: love, sex and happiness, life and death, truth and justice. One type is the allegorical map. In the 19th century, symbolic maps were very popular, especially during prohibition in America. Prohibitionists would draw moral maps. They’d describe the country of drunkenness and how to travel from it to the continent of sobriety. The road to success was drawn across chasms of despondency and mountains of procrastination.

After a few weeks, I had thousands of hits. By the end of the year, I’d had half a million hits. Having thought that I was the only person who was obsessed with maps, I realised I was not alone.

I had loved maps from very early on. As a child, I found atlases more interesting than books; I thought they were like travel guides for the imagination. But, for me, the problem with school atlases was that they stuck to the curriculum and tended to be predictable and conservative. We would only look at historical or political maps or ones that presented the topography of the world and because I was reading a lot of atlases, the standard school maps became quite boring. To this day, I look for maps with a meta-cartographic quality, something that shows things outside the ordinary remit of a map, as well as something that’s attractive.

When I first moved to London I bought an A-Z. I had heard that, to stop the book from being copied, there is a fake street on every page, and I wanted to find the invented streets. I ended up finding an Elvis Street which I was sure couldn’t exist. I cycled to Willesden Green to prove my hunch, but to my surprise, Elvis Street was real. Since then, I have found a couple of the fake ones.

I am often asked what my favourite map is. It’s difficult to answer. There are so many I like. But there’s one by a cartographer called Heinrich Bünting. He was a theological commentator from Hanover who illustrated his book Itinerarium, published in 1581, with a few woodcut maps. One of his world maps shows the three principal continents, Europe, Asia and Africa, arranged in the form of a clover leaf with Jerusalem at the centre. Three countries were put outside the clover: England, Denmark and America. It seems tongue-in-cheek to me because at that point in history, people knew that this way of looking at the world was no longer relevant. It was an antique and symbolic way of looking at the world stemming from the bible.

There’s also a map, drawn by an 11-year-old Jewish boy, about his and other Jews’ journeys from Nazi Germany to safe countries. The naive quality of the map is so stark against its tragic contents.

I get about a dozen e-mails a day suggesting maps for me to include in my blog. One of the wonders of the internet is that it is so much easier to find unusual maps. My blog is like my personal scrapbook of interesting maps. I work in an embassy in London, but it could easily turn into a full-time job for me. Yet I wouldn’t like to do it full time – I wouldn’t want discovering maps to feel like a chore.