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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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!
Recent Comments