Maphead Quotes

“Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“Borders may divide us, but, paradoxically, they're also the places where we're nearest to one another.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“I always feel a certain sense of reverence in libraries, even small city ones that smell like homeless internet users.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than ever in a world where nonstate actors -- malleable entities like ethnicities, for example -- are as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“In his book Why Geography Matters, the geographer Harm de Blij argues that the West’s three great challenges of our time—Islamist terrorism, global warming, and the rise of China—are all problems of geography. An informed citizenry has to understand place, not because place is more important than other kinds of knowledge but because it forms the foundation for so much other knowledge.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“There were two problems with this idea. First, it led to crappy “virtual reality” movies like Virtuosity and The Lawnmower Man. And second, in the long run, it turned out to be totally wrong.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“To be rooted,” wrote Simone Weil, “is perhaps the most important and the least recognized need of the human soul.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“If you never open a map until you're lost, you're missing out on all the fun.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“Columbus’s fateful voyage was inspired by his study of a map by Paolo Toscanelli. But there was also the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which killed hundreds of people until a physician, John Snow, drew a map demonstrating that a single contaminated water pump was the source of the illness, thereby founding the science of epidemiology. There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.* Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The Apollo 11 crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“The essential traits we associate with maps today evolved gradually over millennia. We first see cardinal directions on Babylonian clay tablet maps from five thousand years ago, for instance, but distances don’t appear on maps for three thousand more years—our oldest such example is a bronze plate from China’s Zhou Dynasty. Centuries more pass before we get to our oldest surviving paper map, a Greek papyrus depicting the Iberian Peninsula around the time of Christ. The first compass rose appears in the Catalan Atlas of 1375. “Chloropleth” maps—those in which areas are colored differently to represent different values on some scale, like the red-and-blue maps on election night—date back only to 1826.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks