We are all familiar with the wonderful maze of a store that is IKEA, no? Cunningly contrived to let yourself get lost for a day of perusing mysteriously named Swedish household wonderfulness (and don’t forget the meatballs!) while astutely offering you childcare if you should need it. Our sons happily would play with cars on their street floor mats, and a good time was had by all. And until fairly recently (2019), one of the items on offer was the Björksta, a large classy map of the world. IKEA was just getting ready to open its first location in New Zealand, when an astute Reddit user happened to notice that oops. No New Zealand to be found on the map.
Turns out no one in New Zealand was surprised, since it seems to be a rather regular occurrence, so much so that they keep track. No New Zealand at the massive decorative map of the world at the United Nations. Or the large map on the wall at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Apparently it took the Lord of the Rings movies to convince the rest of the world there is actually such a place.
Then of course there are the mighty Kong Mountains, a towering range that lies through the middle of Africa. It took an embarrassingly long time for mapmakers to admit that they did not exist. So why did they show up on maps for a couple of hundred years? Because mapmakers got very good at mapping coastlines but not so good at mapping what was inside. Every other continent had a tall mountain range within, so why not Africa? Someone spotted a smallish mountain on a very old map named Kong, and they decided just to go with it. Anyone who was traveling into the African interior was pretty much on their own any way.
There’s a lot of entertaining stuff in this book. The writers are a pair of British podcasters, and the jokes can go over the top sometimes, but how can you resist the manipulative Columbus brothers (yes, there were two – it was a team ploy)? Or the nonexistent town of Agloe that appeared on US road maps for nearly a century for a very good reason?
