Vargic's Miscellany of Curious Maps: Mapping the Modern World

New York Times bestseller

A stunning full-color collection of inventive, poignant, humorous, and controversial maps of the world from the internationally recognized digital artist behind the stunning “Map of Stereotypes.”

Slovakian artist Martin Vargic rose to international fame in 2014 when his “Map of the Internet 1.0” went viral. Using old National Geographic maps as inspiration, he drew a striking and meticulous map of the most visited websites in the world, portraying Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple as sovereign countries; the eastern continent as the “old world” with originators like Microsoft and IBM; and at the most southern tip, a forgotten wasteland of outdated and obsolete places of the past like You’ve Got Mail and Friendster. The extraordinary “Map of Stereotypes” is a cartogram based on a westerner’s stereotypical view of the world that assigns more than two thousand labels and pop culture references to cities, states, countries, continents, oceans, and seas on a large-scale world map. Visually stunning and remarkably clever, both artworks generated notice worldwide.

Beautiful, unique, and packed with intricate and brilliant details, Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps showcases this visual artist’s rare talent as never before in a gorgeous edition sure to be treasured by fans. Along with eight exquisite and unexpected conceptual atlases, he has imagined The Music Map, The Map of YouTube, The Corporate World Map, and many more. An additional fifty mini-maps of the world display a diverse list of data, such as the number of heavy metal bands per capita, the probability of getting struck by lightning, average penis length, NSA surveillance rate, and number of tractors per 1,000 inhabitants.

Extensively mapping various subjects from all corners of our modern civilization, Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps is a fresh and thoughtful look at Western culture that will spark conversation and continually surprise and fascinate readers.