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December 18, 2024 2:25 AM   Subscribe

I'm like, ma'am, this is a map store. Half my customers are on the spectrum. I have a trains and transit section. You're among friends.
Andrew Middleton is a GIS specialist and map nerd who last year won ownership of New England's oldest map store. (Content warning: Mercator projection map.)
posted by MartinWisse (26 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
We must be following the same people on Bluesky! Enjoyed this, and his recent State of the Map Center update. I particularly liked this line in the latter:

I spent four months agonizing on my decision before coming to the conclusion that, if I had two good options before me, stay or go, I should choose the one that’s the better story.
posted by rory at 2:58 AM on December 18 [4 favorites]


I’m pretty sure I’ve bought a map from this store, back in the day.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:06 AM on December 18


I love this and don't in any way regret watching the video and will probably visit the store at some point but am I the only one who expected the video linked in the next tweet to be him telling the story the tweet* was about in more detail and not the story of him becoming the owner of the map store?

[*"tweet" is obviously not the right word, what are we calling individual bluesky posts? ]
posted by needs more cowbell at 3:09 AM on December 18


I call them bloops but then again I pronounce it "blooski".
posted by mmoncur at 3:16 AM on December 18 [4 favorites]


The canonical term is "skeets," believe it or not.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 3:53 AM on December 18


The canonical term is "skeets," believe it or not.

I do not. The canonical term is "posts".
posted by rory at 4:17 AM on December 18 [2 favorites]


Posts is correct since they can be viewed by anyone. Skeets can only be seen from the window to the wall.
posted by dr_dank at 4:25 AM on December 18 [7 favorites]


Posts in the streets, skeets in the sheets.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:30 AM on December 18 [4 favorites]


What, does no one like maps in this thread?
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:55 AM on December 18 [1 favorite]


They don’t love them like I love them, that’s for sure
posted by thecaddy at 4:56 AM on December 18 [17 favorites]


I spent the whole video planning an AskMe to find out what his hairstyle is called because I want it. But also: Why not turn the camera around and show the store! This was a fun story! Let's see the result!
posted by mittens at 5:00 AM on December 18


I love the content warning. You know your audience!
posted by ashbury at 5:08 AM on December 18 [1 favorite]


What, does no one like maps in this thread?

I do, especially fantastic maps. (Karen Wynne Fonstad fan here, wooooo!) I also still have a host of aged roadmaps that are ostensibly for research for future books, stories, etc., but really... they're because I have fond memories of using them. The other maps I've hoarded carefully boxed for later examination, well, who knows when you might need a 1982 Texaco roadmap of Nevada?
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:22 AM on December 18 [2 favorites]


What, does no one like maps in this thread?

Would people who don't like maps even visit this thread?

Childhood subscription to National Geographic, teenage D&D player/LOTR fan, learned to drive and to navigate around Australia in an age of street directories and RAC/NRMA maps in the glovebox (1980s/1990s), world traveller whose first purchase for any trip was/is always a physical map, owns a Peters Atlas and knows the arguments for and against (the atlas is fascinating, even if the distortions of the world map annoy some just as much as the Mercator projection does), fascination with and aesthetic appreciation for old maps (including some of the ones I saved from those old Nat Geogs)... yes, I like maps.

I wonder if, given that a big target of urban street crime is mobile phones, we'll see paper street maps make a comeback. Not that Middleton is focusing on selling those in the Map Center. He does leave us guessing a little about which maps he is stocking, rather than the ones he isn't (world maps, street maps).

Anyway, I hope he's able to make a go of it, or at least to pass on the store in a viable state. Sounds like the chances of the latter are better than they were.
posted by rory at 5:27 AM on December 18 [2 favorites]


Too old to have actually been diagnosed as the mildly autistic I clearly am: do NOT make me Sit At A Bar And Chit-Chat. Have drawn almost literally a million D&D maps. Would go out of my way to visit a map store. Both daughters would run in there with me. Ms. Hobnail would sit in the car, fervently wishing any of the three of us would want to sit at a bar and chit-chat.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:29 AM on December 18 [2 favorites]


I do love maps, and was raised navigating by paper maps (which I'm still pretty good at) but I would not visit a map store except to, y'know, buy a map I needed.
I do not, however, love maps enough to watch a YouTube video.
posted by ngaiotonga at 5:43 AM on December 18 [1 favorite]


In my first apartment, I taped several large sectional maps to my kitchen wall to form a 7 foot high map of Africa.

I like maps.
posted by Lemkin at 6:05 AM on December 18 [1 favorite]


When I was a tween, or earlier, I used to draw contours maps, usually of islands; populated with Ordnance Survey symbols "church with tower - disused lighthouse - coniferous forest . . . " where my BobbyNoPals self was safe, and even happy.

In the early 80s, in grad school, I accumulated a lot of quant data across New England and the Canadian Maritimes and invested a good bit of time thinking about making ascii-art 2-D maps to display the results. I knew I could leverage that as an analytical as well as a display tool. But eventually I realised I had to get out of school and go make a living, so I traced maps of the region and typed in the numbers for each of the Figures in my thesis. I was definitely in a [deciduous] yellow wood over that decision: I coulda been a cartender.
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:15 AM on December 18 [5 favorites]


Seattle has a map store. Used to be a fairly stuffy little shop that was convenient to the local shipping industry.
Then they had the bright idea to get a location at Pike Place Market, and cater to tourists.
Seems to be working for them.
posted by funkaspuck at 6:26 AM on December 18 [1 favorite]


Glad to see Metsker Maps is still in business, wherever the location. I bought a bunch of maps there over the years. Great place to browse...
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:32 AM on December 18


It's rare to see a sentence that more efficiently encapsulates exactly who you're dealing with into, like all the information you might conceivably need in this interaction, than "content warning: mercator projection".

Incredible work, just an astounding semantic density here. Well done.
posted by mhoye at 7:00 AM on December 18 [1 favorite]


I love maps. I own loads of maps. I have a huge map on the wall to read while on the loo. I have more maps in the loo. I have a fantasy about buying enough of every 1:25000 scale map of the UK to paste them all together on the floor of a sports hall or something and just wander around looking at it closely. My favourite part of D&D as a kid was BY FAR creating dungeon and terrain maps. I will buy a map at the slightest excuse. I love the Stanford's map shop in London. (Is it still going?) I love my mapping apps on my phone.

As part of an ADHD diagnosis earlier this year I was told I definitely also have 'quite a few autistic traits' - and I didn't even mention maps!
posted by dowcrag at 7:12 AM on December 18 [1 favorite]


I like maps--if I'm going to a state that I've never been to before, I have to get a copy of their official highway map--but one of the factors in my recent car replacement quest was that the car should ideally have Apple CarPlay, about 90% for the navigation. But I still like to look at maps, and have a driving map of Ireland framed (I've never been). So, yeah, I'd love to go there and browse.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:18 AM on December 18


Hi, I'm The 10th Regiment of Foot and I'm a cartoholic.

One of the best parts of my workplace (which I won't disclose, but it has the word Department in its name so draw your own inferences here) is that it has an Office specifically for geography. This office has to be THE resource for ALL the agencies of the US for political mapping and boundary determination WORLDWIDE! To the non-cartoholic this might sound rather unexciting, but let me assure you is constantly in flux all the time!

Flood changes a river course that has been the border between two countries for the last 500 years? CALL THE GEOGRAPHERS! What will be the American response to this dispute? All official maps of said border must be changed immediately to reflect the new policy stance! SEE? Exciting stuff.

Plus, and here's where my crippling addiction comes in, I can go down to their office and say something like, "Please give me a dong, ris, and worker district breakdown for South Hamgyong province, North Korea." AND THEY GIVE IT TO ME NO QUESTIONS ASKED!!!
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 7:22 AM on December 18 [1 favorite]


Something tells me that people in this that might like Strange Maps, a series by Frank Jacobs where he features various unusual maps, like all 85,000 volcanoes on Venus, gravity anomalies in Illinois, or "Strange Lapps and Their Magical Drumming Maps".
posted by foxtongue at 7:40 AM on December 18


I'm a geographer, and I approve this post.
posted by mollweide at 8:02 AM on December 18


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