As carriers of the latest scientific knowledge, maps also require leaps of imagination, and many (or most) have been crazily wrong. The historic and modern examples in Frank Jacobs’s engrossing anthology, several of which appeared originally on his popular blog (www.strangemaps.wordpress.com), include geographic blunders (California as an island), literary fantasies (Thomas More’s map of his Utopia), counterfactual propaganda (Europe, if the Nazis had triumphed) and a slew of other forms that blur the line between drawings and graphs, diagrams and photographs.

Mr. Jacobs demonstrates that almost anything can be plotted and traced — Neil Armstrong’s moon walk or a breakdown of the states where Ludacris boasts of bedding women in his rap song “Area Codes” — and thus in a most entertaining fashion, he has expanded our sense of what maps have been as well as what they can be.