This week’s Waste Your Friday Afternoon features Strange Maps.

Strange Maps is the sort of brilliant oddity that back in 1994 it seemed the web would produce in abundance, an individual’s obsessively focused site devoted to one interesting topic. In this case, the name describes the topic. Strange Maps collects , displays, and explains the frontiers of cartography. Each entry is devoted to a map of … a fictional world … cartographic depictions of odd data … or just the real world displayed in unusual or aesthetically pleasing fashion. Each map is accompanied by a short essay explaining it and expounding on the detail, written in scholarly yet approachable prose.

A few favorites:

The scary world of Russian imperialist science fiction.

A nation which existed for less than one day.

The cartographer’s view of American religion.

The internet in map form.

And so on and so forth. This site, appropriately, rewards repeated exploration. Almost every entry is a fascinating piece of work, entertaining and educational at the same time. Strange Maps now has years of archives, to which you’ll want to return.

While it’s not my most read website, Strange Maps is a personal favorite. I hope that you get as much pleasure from it as I do.

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