Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

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.