About

Why a map of the pieces is different from a map of the outline.

Anyone can name the shape of their state or province. Far fewer could draw the hundred-odd pieces it is actually made of, or point to the one they grew up in.

That is the whole idea. A Patchwork Atlas print names every county, census division or council area and gives each one its own color, so the place stops being an outline and becomes the patchwork it really is. It is a map for the person who knows the difference between two neighboring pieces an hour apart.

Every part named

The names are the product. A Texas print carries all 254 county names, printed large enough to read from where you would actually stand. Most maps sold as wall art label the big places and leave the rest as shapes, which is fine until the place you are from is one of the shapes.

The colors are worked out, not decorated

No two neighboring regions share a color on any of these prints. That sounds like a small thing and it is the difference between a map you can read and a pretty blur: if two regions that touch are the same color, the border between them disappears, and the border is the thing the map exists to show.

Four colors are always enough to do it, which is a genuinely surprising piece of mathematics, and every map here is colored by working the answer out for that particular map rather than by picking colors that look nice.

One hand across the whole range

Every map is drawn in the same style, so a wall of them looks like a set rather than a collection of unrelated posters. Buy the place you are from and the place you live in now, on different continents if that is how it went, and they will hang together.

What these are not

They are decorative prints, not survey documents. They are drawn to be recognisable and correct enough to find your own county or district on, and not to settle a boundary. The terms say so properly.