Oooh, this is a great book. If you like maps that is.

Mike Parker is a self-confessed map addict. As a child he dedicated his life to acquiring a complete set of the OS 1:50,000 Landranger series maps. When his pocket money suggested it would take a long time to complete the set he simply resorted to shoplifting.

This is a book about an obsession, but it is a very fine book nonetheless. It is quirky, often very funny, cheeky and very informative as well. There’s a really good section on the birth and development of Ordnance Survey, the best producers of maps in the world according to Parker. There’s a great chapter on borders and border country, focussing (for example) on those strange little states where the border runs down the high street or through the middle of the bar. There’s the importance of maps in history and the importance of maps to history. Many modern county boundaries — and sometimes national boundaries —a tidy and ordered, precisely because they have been created by studying maps.

Maps have always been associated with political power, and there’s a very good chapter here about the real purposes of some early maps, taking in England’s Catholic insurgents, the Papacy and so on. From power Parker logically moves on to religion and how that has shaped maps.

The chapter, Carto Erotica, considers the naughty bits of maps. There are the obvious ones like the Cerne man in Dorset — just how big should his penis be when represented on the OS Map? And then there are the place names, the Piddles, Bottoms and so on. Maps also reveal the way we have become more prudish — many medieval towns had streets called Gropecunt Lane, for example. Most commonly these have now become Grove Lanes. Spare a thought though for the poor residents of the Austrian Village of Fucking. Austrian tourism chiefs have realised that different nationalities like to visit different places in their country and are fascinated by different aspects of it. Fucking is the favourite of the English who love nothing better than returning home with a knicked village sign!

And then there are the big issues? Is it true that women can’t read maps? I’ll leave this one for you to judge. Of course, the book looks at the humble satnav which Parker simply hates, although he recognises the power and importance of computer mapping with its ability to overlay many different types of information.

I’m deliberately not focussing on detail and content because I don’t want to spoil it.

I assume that many of you who read this blog love maps as much as I do. Of course you do for you’re hill walkers. You are also probably, in the main, male. You will love the quirky and the eccentric. You will probably like collecting things and will be the kind of person who revels in useless facts and information. And there’s a lot of that here.

Map Addicts looks at all kinds of fascinating things. How does the OS use errors and details as kind of map signatures through which they can spot the unlicensed use of their material? What about the old cold war policy of simply not sketching out military installations? Rather wonderfully I thought, map lovers (and presumably the Ruskies) could work out where the top secret places were but simply looking for gaps on the maps! How about the grid design of Milton Keynes, designed to align with the path of the sun during the summer solstice! What about the battle between the OS and tourism chiefs who want every little thing listed on maps with their own little symbols. And then there was the british board of censors trying to decide when a penis was too erect to show on screen. The ideal — acceptable penis — is the same angle as is Kintyre to Arran. Brilliant. Just the kind of mappish devotion you would expect from Brit censors. And what about the current craze for making maps based on your life’s sexual history? I kid you not, there are people that do that kind of thing. Rather weirdly the author contemplates his own sexual history and reckons that much of it can be placed on just one page on one A to Z — the same one in which I live (Birmingham, Moseley and Balsall Heath if you must know)

Where is the the square mile that the OS reckons to be the most boring square mile of land in the UK? Which OS map has the most green sea on it? Which maps has the least contours. Who picked maps as their desert Island books? Oh yes, there’s a lot of really vital stuff to learn here, not to mention the usual stuff about disappearing counties and county boundaries — there’s a wonderful cameo appearance from Rutland.

Rather engagingly, this is also the story of one maps obsession with mapping and the personal story — how the obsession grew as he did — is a lovely read in itself. How many others here grew up on the books of Malcolm Saville, with those great maps on the inner cover?

We Brits are the best map maker in the world. We had to work at it mind. We used to be crap and we had to work hard to beat those frenchies at their own game andof course ultimately we prevailed (with the help of the yanks) is securing the Greenwich Meridian, the centre of all world map making. The real centre of map making is probably Southampton though, where the OS is based. Above all else this is a Brit book — where else could you find a list of the 10 best Landranger Maps and one of the 10 worst Landrangers?

I hadn’t quite realised the nature of some people’s obsessions with maps. There are clubs and societies, internet chat rooms and, of course a thriving market in old and antiquarian maps. It is a typical British obsession, a bit like steam trains and the train timetable. It’s all here, this weird world, in Map Addict.

I’m writing this on a train back home to Brum. The first thing I will do when I get in is to have a good old look at my maps, handle and caress them.

If you sometimes feel the same way, then this is a book you can’t miss!