Perhaps needlessly, Jacobs warns “This atlas is not for navigation!” But one gets the feeling that in addition to considering “regular” atlases indefensibly dull, Jacobs also considers the pursuit they enable-the successful journey from point A to point B-nothing but a detailed map of snoozeville. A terrific map called “New York-Global Island” (unfortunately printed on too small a scale to be readable) recreates Manhattan as a cluster of countries in mostly accurate positions, China in Chinatown being one. One patchwork representation of the borough’s every-changing neighborhoods elicited heated comments on Jacobs’s blog collected in the book, they attest to the fact that the city’s nebulous geography is often a matter of opinion.

A section called “Iconic Mahattan” collects four very different maps of the small island.

Maps projecting the outcomes of past wars, like one dividing Europe under Nazi rule, display chilling alternate realities. “Jesusland,” a map popularized during the 2004 election, divides North America into Jesusland and The United States of Canada. Standard atlases have accuracy in their favor, but these rogue maps succeed in delivering something new: bias is an asset here, and an illumination. and Canada and delicious accidents, like a steak in the shape of Brazil with a leafy green side of Columbia, Peru, and Bolivia or “Jamerica,” America as a blot of red jam: These complement the “literary” maps, which, in addition to the above-mentioned '1984' map, include one of the land of Oz and one of the island in “Lord of the Flies.” There are paintings with elements of cartography, like the illustrator Aaron Meshon’s depiction of a baby threatening Vancouver maps for never-realized places, like a ten-state Australia or an imperial Texas forgotten lands, like the Republic of Indian Stream, which existed for only three years in the eighteen-hundreds on the border between the U.S. Jacobs, in keeping with his nose-thumbing at regular atlases, relishes pointing out past cartographer’s mishaps, like the mapping of California as an island.

Like this one, which imagines the three superstates of George Orwell’s “1984”: This “anti-atlas” is a peculiar and delightful compiling of disparately obsessive imaginations, selected on the criteria of strangeness, rarity, and originality, and arranged into eighteen sections, including “Strange Borders,” “Based on the Underground,” and “Watchamacallit.” “Every strange map tells a story-sometimes surprising, always informative and generally not covered by those more comprehensive atlases,” Jacobs writes.

Frank jacobs maps