Vienna in 1907 was busy inventing modern design, and here is one of its young artists using the humble postcard to mix medieval grotesques with bright folk colour. They look like they could have been printed last week by a very good risograph studio.

A curiosity for the shelf next to the hollow-Earth maps. Samuel Rowbotham, writing as Parallax, built a whole 'zetetic' method out of looking down a Fenland canal and trusting his eyes. The diagrams are earnest and lovely, and it is a useful study in how a confident wrong idea gets built to last.

Nur's note calls it brilliant, and the idea earns it: take the world's largest reference work and throw away everything you couldn't walk to before your tea goes cold. It turns the encyclopedia back into what old county gazetteers were, a guide to the ground under your feet. Worth trying from Penang to see which forgotten shophouse or temple has an article nobody reads.

A map drawn as a circle makes perfect sense once you picture the person using it: a lookout in a tower, turning slowly to scan the horizon for smoke. These were made for Maine's fire towers about a century ago, so they double as a New England curiosity. Maps built around a single point of view are always worth a slow look.