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I like maps. When I travel somewhere new, I open Google Maps and spend a day or two plotting museums, food, and orienting myself to the geography of the city. I've whittled away countless hours in Street View, just to get a glimpse of a spot on a map. Sometimes it's a small, Southern American 'burg. Other times it's dead-center in a Central American metropolis I never knew existed. Or if I get bored of claustrophobic concrete canyons, it's off to the farthest reaches of the map, hoping to catch a panorama of a fjord or Sub-Saharan desert.

Ken Jennings summarized it nicely; he says that maps represent a sense of place. Each dot on a map exists; people live there, food is eaten, and the landscape may be completely alien. A map stokes my imagination, and I can play with an escapist fantasy for a couple minutes until I decide to finally write that memo that's been on my to-do list for a week.

This book is full of people who share that love of maps and take it to an absurd extreme. There's a map-based "road rally" in which contestants have to navigate the USA with a paper map and oblique trivia navigation. Geocachers spend hours collecting caches because... they're there. Sixth graders answer questions about places that are seemingly fictional in the National Geography Bee final.

I won my school's geography bee in seventh grade and flamed out on the state geography test because of places that, to me, still don't exist. Maphead is a reminder that there are people who take something I like and run with it until it's so specific and obsessive that it's almost inaccessible.

The book is mostly fluff, but it's fun fluff.