Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

Ken Jennings is hilarious. Back when he was on Jeopardy I would watch everyday (and still do occasionally). If you want to get a dose is his humor, check out his Reddit Ask Me Anything. I've always loved maps, so this book hit a sweet spot for me. I remember being the navigator on road trips as a kid, winning the “Pride” award for geography in elementary school (whatever that is) and hacking on Google Maps before they put out an official API. Somehow this book tied into everything I love about maps and exploration. Highly recommend it.

Ken Jennings is hilarious. Back when he was on Jeopardy I would watch everyday (and still do occasionally). If you want to get a dose is his humor, check out his Reddit Ask Me Anything. I've always loved maps, so this book hit a sweet spot for me. I remember being the navigator on road trips as a kid, winning the “Pride” award for geography in elementary school (whatever that is) and hacking on Google Maps before they put out an official API. Somehow this book tied into everything I love about maps and exploration. Highly recommend it.

Are you a maphead? Do you know the symptoms? King of the Mapheads Ken Jennings knows his fellow mapheads. He knows those of us who, in childhood, saved our allowances to purchase an enormous Hammonds world atlas. Jennings knows how we mapheads have all the states and capitals memorized. He can spot us as we longingly, lovingly spend hours pouring over enormous library globes.

Maphead-dom is a satisfying existence, we learn, as Jennings transports us to visit with enormous colonies of mapheads, at the London Map Fair, the National Geographic Bee, to the treasure trove of maps hidden in the depths of the Library of Congress.

And we are happy to accompany Jennings in this delightful journey chronicled here.

I am not a maphead myself, but I thoroughly enjoyed every page of this book. Ken Jennings is the famous Jeopardy record-breaking winner and has written books about trivia. This book, however, is all about cartography.

Jennings himself is a maphead, and I think this book probably started with a question like “Why am I like this? Are there others like this?” These two questions get presented with answers that delighted this particular reader. But really, what is a maphead? Someone that likes to look at maps? Someone that collects maps? Someone that geocaches? Someone whose goal it is to travel to every continent in the world during the month of January?

I was fascinated with the intelligence of the children in the Geography Bee, and I am swayed by Jennings' argument that perhaps the Geography Bee, while not as famous nor renowned as the Spelling Bee, it is actually harder and more entertaining.

I learned a great deal about the history of maps, about the Library of Congress' immense holding of expensive, rare, and overlooked maps. I learned about the St. Valentine's Day Massacre Road Rally, and nearly purchased my own voucher to participate in this year's road rally. Perhaps next year. From the Geography Bee, to exclusive travelling clubs to road rallies to geocaching to the history of GPS, there's a lot covered in a few pages.

The one thing that prompted me to read this book was one reviewer's mentioning that the book covers some history of the US Interstate System. In the end, I actually didn't learn much new about those roads (it's already an interest of mine), but I learned much more about other topics of which I wasn't aware. I'll never look at the hobby of geocaching the same (never really gave it much thought) for instance.