This Way Up: When maps go wrong (and why it matters) by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman

This is a book to curl up on the sofa with on Boxing Day. It will take your mind off other things and provide interesting conversation-starters when you go back to work – or next get lost.

British authors Cooper-Jones and Foreman are creators of the Map Men YouTube series. Their book shares nineteen stories of maps gone wrong.

…maps with big, stinking, awful map blunders like a country that’s gone missing, or a fictional mountain range, or a mis-drawn border … mistakes that could lead to the unfortunate map-user getting hopelessly lost.

Why do these blunders matter? As Cooper-Jones and Foreman say, getting lost can make us either cross…or dead.

The book opens with the tale of the 2019 IKEA map that – gasp! – left out New Zealand. It’s an interesting story, although IKEA is not the only mapmaker that’s forgotten about us. Apparently there’s no New Zealand on the map at the United Nations headquarters in New York either. Although Cooper-Jones and Foreman have good things to say about New Zealand in their rambling opening chapter, they lose points for describing our national icon, the kiwi, as “a rubbish bird with no wings”.

Other stories in the book include “paper towns” invented by mapmakers, confusing regional maps based on the location of television transmitters and cabling infrastructure, and maps under the control of a totalitarian state. There are fake news maps such as the CNN map that put Hong Kong on the Brazilian coast, and the map shared by a Russian television network that labelled New Zealand as Japan. Although GPS technology and digital mapping apps have made it easier to navigate from one place to another, the book has some wild (yet amusing) stories of people who have driven hundreds of kilometres beyond their intended destination due to technological errors.

There’s a lot of matey chatter in this book, including made-up conversations, imagined scenarios, and narrative asides – all of which distract from the key points. There are even several pages of blacked-out text. Yet beyond all the clutter Cooper-Jones and Foreman include interesting historical, political, and geographical facts, as well as exploring the practical challenges of map-making.

They acknowledge that making an accurate map is near-impossible.

A map’s job is to take a bit of the real world and translate it into something useful, using [the] three defining features of scale, symbols and projection, each of which is a form of distortion. … Any representation of a sphere converted into a flat plane necessarily has to be distorted in some way, either by being stretched, squashed or sliced.

Perhaps it’s nothing short of a miracle that most of still get from A to B with relatively few wrong turns.

Reviewer: Anne Kerslake Hendricks

HarperCollins