#26: Maphead, by Ken Jennings

I read this book because I, myself, am a maphead—like the author, who gained fame by winning for 20-some-odd straight weeks on Jeopardy, I’ve had a keen passion for maps since I was a kid. When I was in the third grade, I wallpapered my bedroom with National Geographic maps, which I loved in a way that is hard to recall, much less explain.

In the early part of the book, Jennings posits a connection between love of maps and a more general spatial orientation, a love of space or places.

The word “topophilia,” from the Greek for “love of place,” was popularized by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan… When I first read about the concept, I experienced a jolt of recognition and validation, like a patient finally getting a diagnosis for an obscure malady. I had felt this weirdly intense connection to landscape my whole life, but it was a relief to finally have a fancy Greek name to hang on it.

This connection holds true for me, as well. One unremarkable day many years ago I discovered a new way to bicycle home from where I was working, and I remember the sense of exultation I experienced as a result of navigating through new, previously unseen places, even though they were places composed of the same suburban streets, houses, and stores that I had passed on other, more familiar routes.

So I am a person with heightened spatial awareness, and how far that may go toward explaining myself, to myself or to anyone else, I can’t say. I would be embarrassed to say how much time I fritter away inventing idle games with Google maps. Here’s one: I start from a familiar location, and then hold down one of the arrow keys for a period of time—say 60 seconds. While I’m holding down the key, I avoid looking at the screen, on which terrain is scrolling steadily away. Then when the time is up I zoom in and pretend that I have been dropped at that point on the map, perhaps after a long drive, blindfolded. With some money and credit cards in my wallet, how would I get from that place back home? Have I landed near a road or town, or am I in a roadless forest deep in the mountains? Or, worst case, in the water. Perhaps close enough to swim to shore?

The first part of Maphead is about people who love maps and what loving maps says about the way their minds work. The second part delves into the history of maps and the world of map collectors. The book began to flatten a bit for me in the second part—it was unremarkable, workmanlike expository journalism. Waiting-room prose. The third part was my least favorite—it deals with map and GPS hobbyists, people who participate in elaborate and complex mapping games. For example, some people play a game that combines scavenger hunting with maps. Someone creates a kind of puzzle and then disseminates it to the players, who interpret clues and follow along in their road atlases. Despite my own peculiar mapping daydreams, this sort of activity strikes me as being acutely dull. Activities for individuals lacking a capacity for boredom. But I guess it’s a bit high-handed to denounce an activity that scratches someone else’s itch just because it doesn’t happen to scratch mine.