atlas(t) holiday gift guide

i've written so. Damn. Many. gift guides and year-end lists in the past couple of weeks that I can't think in any other mode. Such is the life of a blogger.

So, since my head's in this space already, might as well do a gift guide for the mappy and geographically inclined geek in your life. This is an ENTIRELY SUBJECTIVE list. I will not consider gifts that SOME OTHER map/geo geek than myself might like. This is just what you should send me if you wanna get on my good side.

Here goes:

• Panamap Series by Urban Mapping

A brand new series of what I can only imagine to be lenticular maps, in which three maps of the same city -- streets, subways, neighborhoods and landmarks -- are arranged like those postcards of Jesus so when you tilt the map one way, you'll see one image, and when you tilt it another way, you'll see another image. Three maps in one! Whether it works well or not, it's a collector's item. There are currently maps of Manhattan and Chicago.

• City Walks Decks Series by Chronicle Books

A wonderful series comprising one boxed deck of cards for each city. There are 50 cards per city, and each card contains a simple walking tour of a route of particular interest: either a neighborhood, or a themed tour. On one side of the card is a map of the route, and on the other side is the text explaining what you're seeing. The cards are the size of a mass market paperback, i.e. easy to carry around, and this is the perfect gift for someone going to a city with an extra day or two to spend walking around. The series covers 14 major metropolises at this point.

• Window Seat Books by Gregory Dicum

Two books that offer a detailed and well-designed guide to reading landscapes from the window seat of an airplane. There's one for the US, and one for Europe. I don't know if this series will continue, but I sure hope so. This is the perfect gift for a frequent flyer.

• Elvis Mars Globe by Greaves and Thomas

At £90.00, it's not cheap. But this accurate globe of Mars, with the whimsical inclusion of the site where an Elvis statue was found in 1989, according to a British tabloid, is the perfect gift for a Mars fan. My folks won years' worth of brownie points by getting this for me for Christmas a few years back. Greaves and Thomas also has a number of other historical and beautiful globes, including Cassini's 1790 terrestrial and celestial globes, and the first antipodean globe, which simply reverses the direction of the globe so we can see what the world looks like to an Australian.

• Starry Night star mapping software

When I was trying to figure out, for my feng shui on Mars novel, what constellations one would see from Mars, an astronomy professor turned me on to the Starry Night software which, among other things, enables you to see what the night sky looks like from other points of view than from Earth. Awesome. They've just released a new version, which is a bit pricey ($150) but great for your astronomer or star chart geek.

• Cheap historical facsimile maps

For those mapping geeks who just like to see -- or hang on their walls -- maps from historical periods, you can't go too far wrong by looking online for facsimile reproductions.

• Like these maps of the Great Lakes, which are $10-15 apiece.
• Or this boxed set of maps of London from four different periods for £27.50. 
• Blue Monocle Maps has a whole historical collection, which you can get in a variety of sizes and on your choice of paper, including world cities like this one of Beijing. These start at around £30.
• Historic Urban Plans has smaller maps of cities the world over that start at around $10.
• Historic Maps Restored has a series of higher-quality maps starting at $30 which are mostly of the US -- railroad maps, topographical maps, panorama maps, etc. There is a small collection of international maps.
• The Old Map Company sells maps of mostly England, starting at around £6. There's a small collection of international maps.

• (ETA): Here's one more I just found ... MAP PLATES! From Signals.com, these plates represent some of the countries of Europe, not all. But how cool is a series of plates in geographical shapes that fit together to make a map? I WANT.

There's much more along the lines of interdisciplinary books on geographical ideas, but I don't want to recommend very many books right now. I think the above is enough to go on for now, don't you?

But please feel free to add your ideas to the comments below!