212 - Transit Map of the World’s Transit Systems

Be glad they don’t have coffee-tables in the Tube, métro, subway and U-Bahn, otherwise you wouldn’t have any excuse not to take this book with you on your subterranean peripatations. ‘Transit Maps of the World’ is an expansion of the earlier ‘Metro Maps of the World’ and was published at the end of October by Penguin USA.

This map was a promotional e-card for the book, the caption at the bottom reads: “This playful diagram shows all the cities which have, are building or are planning to construct an urban rail system. It is the opening page of a new book about the graphic design of subway, metro, underground and U-Bahn system maps and diagrams.”

Produced in the by now iconic style of Harry Beck’s 1933 London Underground map, the diagram reveals the differing degrees of metro-isation around the world.

• Africa is most poorly endowed with public underground transit systems: only Cairo and Alexandria (Egypt), Tunis (Tunisia), Algiers (Algeria) and Lagos (Nigeria) have or are planning them.
• Actually, Oceania is even less metro-ised, but this is self-explanatory: there’s no need for subways in a continent where most countries are small island nations. Only Australia (Melbourne, Sydney) and New Zealand (Auckland) – significantly less small than the other Oceanic islands – have them.
• Beck’s method of making geography subservient to clarity distorts distances, in London as well as on this fanciful map – rendered even more bizarre by some unlikely stops close to each other: how about Baghdad to Izmir via Jerusalem, or Athens to Esfahan via Tel Aviv? Or Taipei to Pyonyang via Seoul?
• As in Beck’s design, there’s a concentration of lines and stops in the central area (which on the London tube map, I’ve only recently discovered, has the shape of a bottle). This gives the impression that outlying areas, such as the Americas, are much less metro-ised. Which might be a bit of an exaggeration, much like the placing of Bologna at the centre of this world map is an overstatement of that city’s charm (to everyone but the Bolognesi, I’m sure).
• Okay, this is a fantasy transit map. But just imagine taking the metro in Vancouver, all the way to Shanghai! With stops in Montréal, Amsterdam, Prague, Kiev and Novosibirsk! Come to think of it: that’s a pretty long stretch to have to sit in a dark tunnel…

This map was kindly provided to me by Mark Ovenden, author of the book.

211 - Humbead’s Revised Map of the World (With List of Population)

They did a lot of crazy stuff in the Sixties, man. Especially at universities like Berkeley, a hotbed of political radicalism, of experiments with free love and cheap drugs  (or was that cheap love and free drugs?) and of… map reviews. This is the verbatim text of such a review from the Berkely BARB  de dato March 1-7, 1968 and written by E.D. Denson.

“Certainly the most astonishing document to come from the underground presses is Humbead’s Revised Map of the World With List of Population. It provides the independent verification of the fallacy of space, and that pernicious reasoning that makes New York and Berkeley seem far apart on normal maps. Everyone knows that what’s important is people, not distances, and now for the first time we have a map recognizing this.”

“It also provides the first real attempt to link together what Lonnie Feiner calls the tinker-toy of life. Perhaps you’ve noticed, if you are a traveller, that you continue to run into the same people over and over again as the years move on in different guises.”

“Today they are guitar makers, tomorrow gardeners, next year they’ll be selling insurance or founding religions, but you can be certain that in any new scene half of the population will be people you already know.”

“The reason for this is the relatively small population of the world, we’ve always suspected. Now here for the first time is a list of the population of the inhabited world (Berkeley, SF, LA, NYC, Boston & Cambridge) drawn by one of the most encyclopedic of our generation. A sample of the perhaps 1000 names: Big John Campbell, Stan Lee, Little Junior Parker, Ken Spiker, Danny Kalb, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.”

“Tom and I had, as we are wont, a long discussion of how this list was drawn up. It seemed unlikely that one person knew all of these names: I don’t and I’ve been in the same scenes that the compiler has, I believe. But it also seems unlikely that a committee drew up lists either, because there is some indefinable consistency in the names, some internal logic which links them together.”

“Perhaps they were taken from the Berkeley BARB 1966-67? But no, because the Berkeley BARB doesn’t know of many of these people because they have been living in other portions of the world. I fall back on my original thesis: one man knew all of these names.”

“You can too. As a public service several of us have agreed to pool our knowledge and publish the Charchild-Denson Identifier of Humbead’s List of the world’s Population. There are some gaps in our collective knowledge, which we invite the public to fill. So go to the Print Mint, get the map, turn on your decoder ring, and off we go.”

“NW QUADRANT: Campbell Coe–Photographer and owner of Campus Music. Brian Rohan–SF atty & recently dance promoter with the Grateful Dead. Ravi Shankar–Indian musician associated with the sitar, Billboard artist of the Year.”

“Lyndon Johnson–the latest, and perhaps last, president. Don Reno-hillbilly musician, flourished late 1940’s with Red Smiley? Eugene Pugatch–doctor of great renown. Timothy Leary–public figure, martyr, priest. Jesse Fuller–one man band from Georgia now resident in Oakland, records for various companies.”

“Peter Siegel–recorder and producer of Pat Kilroy’s record on Elektra. Paul Smith, Bill Stein (assistance please). Gypsy Boots–inventor of the Gypsy Boots energy bar. Rolf Cahn–neo-folk guitarist, founder of the Caballe, flourished Berkeley 1950’s. That’s all for today’s broadcast gang, tune in again sometime.”

Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the last president? That must have been some good acid. Or some deep shit.This map was sent in by John Ross, and can be found here on humbead.com.

Unfortunately, the names are illegible and I couldn’t google a larger image. Anyone? Man?

Update on the list of names: they can be found here on the aforementioned site. Thanks to ubermensch for pointing that out.