A map has never been a neutral photograph of the world — it's a set of choices about what to include, what to distort, and what to leave blank. This collection follows those choices across 2,600 years: the ancient scholars who measured the Earth with shadows, the medieval traditions that mapped Heaven as carefully as geography, the phantom continents that fooled centuries of sailors, and the modern debate over what an honest map should even look like.
Not all maps here are accurate — and that's the point. This collection covers real scientific cartography alongside sincere religious cosmology, honest mistakes, deliberate hoaxes, and one genuinely enduring modern myth. Each page treats its subject with the same rule: state clearly what's documented fact, what's belief, and what's simply wrong.