One of the most familiar postmodern strategies for bringing a fresh perspective to a familiar situation is that of “making strange.” Making strange strips off the veneer of familiarity readers have come to expect, and presents those readers with something they have to discover anew outside of whatever context they would, hitherto, have relied upon to provide pat answers. This paper proposes that other well-documented avenues for this type of strange making exist and deserve examination. Specifically, there exists a body of interpersonal psychobiology studies describing human society in game structure terms that remain largely unexplored in the cartographic literature. This paper introduces this psychedelic analysis, and proposes its application to contemporary explorations of the nature of maps and cartographic practice. What is proposed is a strategy and toolbox of tactics that can, properly employed, take any or all existing conceptualizations of maps, map making, map use, or the informed practice of cartography and “make them strange” so they can be dispassionately examined and evaluated.

Like many of you, I have never set foot in the University College London (UCL) Map Library.I've never browsed its shelves, opened the drawers, or sorted through the piles of antiquated maps that are older by decades than most of us.After reading The Library of Lost Maps, however, I have a sense of nostalgia for this room I've never entered and whose (now retired) librarian I've never met.The Library of Lost Maps is not so much a book documenting a miscellaneous bunch of maps, as it is a novel about a library.It reads as if it were a memoir of the library itself, with the author James Cheshire taking on the role of dutiful biographer.Each chapter introduces a freshly rediscovered map pulled from the back of a drawer that was last opened who knows how long ago, and walks us through its background, reception, and acquisition by the archive.Through this framework we are introduced to a cast of characters (that is to say, actual cartographers) whose methodologies and motivations bring us outside the walls of UCL and into the mapmaker's own time and territories.