sorry for being off-topic, but I just couldn’t resist.
So, here’s a little puzzle:
When daan mentioned recently that the Dietrich-Kitada projection was first seen in Bruno Dietrich’s text Grundzüge der allgemeinen Wirtschaftsgeographie, I got curious and searched for the text. I found it in an used book store on the web, put it to my shopping cart, and then looked if there’s some other book I’d like to order, too.
There was.
It was Karlheinz Wagner’s Atlas zur physischen Geographie (Orographie) of 1971. (I guess I don’t have to translate the title, the english words look quite similar. And yes, that’s the same Mr. Wagner who created the well-known projections.) It’s a rather small atlas (60 pages), but I instantly liked it a lot!
However, that’s not the topic here.
There was a thing that made me frown: The frontispiece of the atlas.
Here’s a photograph:
- wagner-atlas.jpg (215.87 KiB) Viewed 1499 times
The outer shape looks the eastern hemisphere of the sinusoidal projection (stretched horizontally), but the shapes within surely don’t look like any landmasses on earth. Some piece of abstract art? That seemed quite unlikely to me, but I don’t have the slightest idea what publishing houses were thinking half a century ago.
Well, of course it’s not abstract art, and fortunately the mystery was solved on page 5 at the atlas, because there was that illustration again, but now accompanied by a description. So now I know what it is – but do you? Maybe it’s plain and simple to you and you’re already laughing at me because I couldn’t see it. Or maybe it’s a tough nut to crack for you, too.
Have fun!
