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World Maps Online

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Map specialty retailer based in Seattle. Offering a vast range of wall maps, map murals, and education

11/03/2026

Quick geography question: which country shares the longest land border with France?

If you said Spain, you're in good company, and you're wrong, but only by a little. France's longest land border is in South America, between French Guiana and Brazil. The CIA World Factbook puts it at about 418 miles (673 km). The border with Spain comes second at about 401 miles (646 km). Some sources list the Brazil border closer to 730 km, so Brazil comes out on top either way.

French Guiana often gets called a colony, and it was one until 1946. That year it became a full department of France, with the same status as any department on the mainland. People there are French citizens, it's part of the European Union, and it uses the euro. It's also where Europe launches its rockets, from the spaceport at Kourou. A bridge over the Oyapock River links it to Brazil by road.

Filmed at World Maps Online, our map workshop in Seattle, where we print the maps you see in these videos.

Share this with someone who'd guess Spain.

11/02/2026

Every November I dread setting the clocks back. Waking up gets harder, it takes me a couple of weeks to adjust, and my cat has no idea why breakfast is suddenly an hour late.

So here’s where I land: I’d rather lock in daylight saving time permanently, even though that means a sunrise close to 9 a.m. here in Seattle in the middle of winter. Dark mornings I can live with. Changing the clocks twice a year, not so much.

A few things surprised me while I was looking into it. Daylight saving was never meant for farmers, who actually helped get it repealed back in 1919. It started as a wartime way to save fuel, and decades later the golf, charcoal, and candy industries pushed to bring it back. The US even tried permanent daylight saving in 1974 and dropped it within a year.

Right now the Sunshine Protection Act has passed the House but is stuck in the Senate. Meanwhile British Columbia has already locked its clocks, so Seattle and Vancouver will be an hour apart all winter.

Would you rather have darker mornings or darker evenings?

10/29/2026

Watch me take this print and add wooden hanging rods to it. We make historical map reprints on archival paper or on canvas.

A customer ordered this classic 1914 world map as a 44” wide print on canvas, and added the wood hanging bars.

We make those by hand in our workshop in Seattle.

10/28/2026

This week we ended up with a world map we didn’t actually intend to make.

Every so often a customer asks for one of our world maps with the Gulf of America label, so we edit the file for that order and print it. This time Jessie grabbed the edited file by mistake, and nobody noticed until the whole map had come off the printer. Our standard label is still Gulf of Mexico, and those edited files now live in their own folder so it doesn’t happen again.

So now there’s one extra map sitting in our Seattle shop that nobody ordered. We could keep it as a time capsule from 2026, sell it to someone who actually wants it, give it away, or do something we haven’t thought of yet.

What would you do with it? Tell us in the comments, and we’ll let you know what we decide.

10/27/2026

One panel of our popular Beige Oceans World Map wall mural coming off the printer in our Seattle shop.

Our murals print in sections that line up edge to edge, so a full map goes up on the wall one panel at a time. This one is peel-and-stick fabric which installs easily with no paste.

We’ve been printing maps in Seattle since 2010, and murals are the biggest thing we make. A whole wall turns into a map.

If you’ve got a blank wall that’s been bugging you, the full mural is in the shop. Link in bio.

10/26/2026

London sits farther north than any spot in the Lower 48. The northernmost point we have is the Northwest Angle in Minnesota at about 49.4 degrees, and London is up around 51.5. We work through these on a whiteboard outline map of the US...

I marked up a few more places while I was at it. Madrid lines up with Philadelphia and New York. Rome sits on basically the same line as Chicago, but Rome’s average January high is around 55°F while Chicago’s is right at freezing. Paris is a little north of Seattle, where I’ve lived most of my life, and the two cities have more in common weather-wise than you’d guess.

Most people give the Gulf Stream credit for Europe’s mild winters. It helps, but the bigger reason is the wind. It mostly blows west to east, so western Europe gets air that’s been sitting over the Atlantic, while the East Coast of the US gets air that just crossed a frozen continent. Which side of a continent you’re on can matter more than how far north you are.

You might also notice the latitude lines on the US map are curved. That’s the conic projection most US maps use to keep the states from getting stretched out of shape.

This is the kind of thing you start noticing when a big map is hanging on your wall every day. The one I’m drawing on is a dry-erase US outline map we print in our Seattle workshop at World Maps Online.

What city do you know that’s warmer or colder than its latitude would suggest?

10/23/2026

Which is farther west, Reno or Los Angeles?

Most people say Los Angeles without a second thought. It’s Reno, and by more than 80 miles.

The reason so many of us get it wrong has less to do with geography than with how the brain stores it. We don’t carry an accurate map around in our heads. We file places by the state they belong to. Nevada is the state to the right of California, so Reno gets filed as east, and the way the California coast slants southeast down toward LA never makes it into the picture. Researchers caught people doing exactly this back in 1978, when most of the people they asked placed Reno east of San Diego.

Once you know to look for it, it turns up all over the place. The southernmost point of Canada is farther south than the Oregon–California border. Lima, Peru is east of Miami. The Galápagos Islands are east of Kansas City. And Alaska is both the westernmost and the easternmost state, because its Aleutian Islands reach across the 180th meridian.

Printed maps play the same game. On almost any US wall map, Alaska has been shrunk down and tucked into a little box in the corner, a long way from where it actually sits.

I also couldn’t leave out the Diomede Islands, two small islands in the Bering Strait about two and a half miles apart whose clocks are set nearly a full day apart.

We print and mount wall maps in our shop in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood. If this got you wondering what else your mental map has wrong, a good map on the wall is the easiest way to keep checking it. Search for World Maps Online.

So be honest: did you say LA?

10/14/2026

Ever notice those tiny dots in the middle of the Pacific labeled “U.S.”? Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis, Johnston... they’re thousands of miles from anywhere American. So why are they claimed by the US?

Bird p**p. Seriously.

In the 1840s, American farmland was worn out, and the best fertilizer on earth was dried seabird guano, piled up over centuries on islands off the coast of Peru. Peru knew exactly what it had and charged accordingly. So in 1856 Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, which let any American citizen claim an unclaimed island for the United States, as long as it was covered in guano. Over the next fifty years or so, Americans staked claims to around 100 islands.

It didn’t always go smoothly. On Navassa Island in the Caribbean, a worker revolt in 1889 left five supervisors dead, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Haiti still claims Navassa today. Most of the guano islands the US kept are now quiet wildlife refuges, handed back to the birds.

Not every guano island got off that easy. In 1899, a rock from Nauru that had been propping open an office door in Sydney turned out to be some of the richest phosphate ever found. Over the next century, about 80% of the island’s surface was strip-mined, first under Germany, then Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and finally by Nauru itself after independence. By around 2000 the phosphate was gone. Today the people live on a thin ring of coastline around a mined-out interior.

In 2026, they took back the name the island always had in their own language: Naoero.

We’ve been making maps in Seattle since 1999. If you like what we do here, be that friend who recommends a great source for printed maps. Link in bio!

10/13/2026

Here's something most of us never stop to question: why is north at the top of every map?

The honest answer is that there's no natural reason. The Earth is a ball spinning in space, and "up" is something people made up. For a long time, they didn't even agree on which way it was.

Medieval European mapmakers put east at the top, toward the rising sun. That's where the word "orient" comes from, the Latin oriens, meaning the rising sun or east. To orient a map once meant to point it east. And in 1154, the geographer al-Idrisi drew his world map for King Roger II of Sicily with south at the top.

North-up goes back to Ptolemy, the astronomer who worked in Alexandria around 150 CE. In the northern sky, the stars turn around a fixed point, which gave him a natural way to find north, and that's how he drew the known world. His Geography disappeared from Western Europe for centuries until scholars rediscovered it in the early 1400s. By then sailors had been steering by north-pointing compasses for a couple of hundred years, so mapmakers followed Ptolemy's lead, and north-up became the way the world has been drawn ever since.

We've been making maps in Seattle since 1999, and stories like this are why we never get tired of it. If you'd like a map of your own, north-up or otherwise, you can find our collection on our site, link in bio

Address

101 S Brandon Street
Seattle, WA
98108

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 4pm
Tuesday	8am - 4pm
Wednesday	8am - 4pm
Thursday	8am - 4pm
Friday	8am - 2pm

Telephone

+18778842402

Website

https://www.worldmapsonline.com/

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