Here's a blank map of the moon, from The Lunar World by Josiah Crampton, 1853.

You've heard that Michigan is the "Mitten State," and here is revealed the giant hand inside that mitten.  From 1950.

You've heard that anything can be erotic, and here's how someone saw the Panama Canal as a lesbian kiss.  From 1923.

Here's a leaf map of Peloponnesus, from English Illustrated, 1889.

You've seen paisleys with geometric central elements.  These are armed citadels.  Our exemplifying collage shows the stronghold Fort Independence on the paisley Castle Island, Boston Harbor.

"Star maps," from Scientific American, 1894.

The Michigan mitten is knitted by bees, as we learn in The Bee-Keeper's Review, 1907.

You've heard that Australia is upside down.  Even if the earth isn't a globe, Australia is still upside down, as proven by this flat earth map from 1893.  Here's a larger view of the map over at Wikimedia.

From Memoria Philosophica by J. R. Gayton, 1826.

We are pleased to have verified this map from Descriptive Geography by Samuel Brook, 1891.  "Most of England is a sea of blue," confirms Rhodi Evans in 2015.

Scholar Doug Howick has pondered the mysterious dots in the Scale of Miles on the blank map in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.  Howick writes, "The sequence of dots on the scale has always intrigued me. The original has a '22132' arrangement, but I have been unable to make anything of that.  I've also wondered whether it was a message in Morse code, which had been invented by Samuel Morse in 1844.  If so, it would spell 'IIESI,' which doesn't make any sense to me either."

We might suggest that the dots are "blind spots" indicating the "forgetfulness of antecedent spatial configurations," the "discrepancies and approximations" which cannot be obliterated (as per José Rabasa's critical reading of Mercator's 17th-century Atlas).  And/or, the scholar of silliness and its metaphysics, Nina Lyon, writes of how a place inevitably becomes a metaphor, "an elastic description of its describable characteristics as required to illustrate a point plucked from the mind's ether."  She writes about how the bumps of a terrain's anatomy become apparent "only with movement" as one repositions oneself in time and space so as to perceive "the multiplicity of it.  The many bits of detail, those many geographical features marked out in contour lines and dots of scree on maps, all unfold from the single furrowed surface of the earth upon which your feet continue to move, with slow determined pace. ... The features exist for as long as you can see them, and then you keep on moving and they fall back into where they were before, into the mass again.  What seem to be individual entities all fall back into one thing in the end.  They are merely attributes of it.  The one is ontologically prior to the many."  Yes.

The artist of this blank map, David Waywell (a.k.a. Stan Madeley), admits that "some people might say that it's a bit obscene."  Almost by way of apology, he notes "how much skill was involved in drawing licorice with white ink." 

A "retroactive lifetime goal"* is having our own Carte Blanche Atlas [of Blank Maps] referenced by a Lewis Carroll expert as "amazing" and "a reliable source of information ... without errors."  Scholar Doug Howick even quotes our nine crucial differences between a blank map and a blank page.  (Those nine differences are listed here as well.)  It's all in the Knight Letter of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, and a pdf of the issue is available via Archive.org.  (Granted, this is technically news from 2011, but we blog years in advance as part of our ongoing time-bending experiments.)

*Phrase courtesy of Jonathan Caws-Elwitt