Map Addict

Book cover: Map Addict Mike Parker’s new book, Map Addict: A Tale of Obsession, Fudge and the Ordnance Survey, is out today; from the Daily Mail’s account of it, it sounds like eccentric good fun: “Mike Parker — who spent his teenage years shoplifting Ordnance Survey maps from a Midlands educational bookshop in Worcester — brings a welcome tincture of outlaw glamour to his subject. … It ranges through the history of the Ordnance Survey; the disappointing absence of the phrase ‘here be dragons’ from the medieval Mappa Mundi; the peculiarities of the Irish postcode system (absence of same, primarily); the origins of the London A-Z; the places you’d encounter those born ‘cuddywifted’; the mystical alignments of Milton Keynes; and the 1980s touring schedule of Echo and the Bunnymen.”

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