Ironically, I found the map society meeting without the help of a map.

While a meeting of a map society may seem somewhat anachronistic, I enjoyed it and am pretty sure it was more interesting than a meeting of computer-driven global positioning system advocates would have been.

Five people presented. The first showed us various inflatable and pop-up globes, including an inflatable one that might have been big enough to transport the stars of the movie The Aeronauts to new heights. The pop-up globes made me think of Sydney, Australia’s Shakespeare Pop-up Globe Theatre, though the closest I’ve come to it is an evening at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.

The second person displayed a map of Chicago from the 1933 World’s Fair showing Chicago as it was in 1833, although apparently not really, as it was just something to sell at the fair (printed t-shirts didn’t become popular until the 1960s), without the need for, or regard to, accuracy.

The meeting started to hit its stride with a European map from 1914 that featured dogs, that is, the dogs of war, which should have, again, made me think of Shakespeare (Marc Antony in Julius Caesar), but instead reminded me of Christopher Plummer’s scenery-chewing turn in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

As proof that maps, computers, and people under the age of 30 can coexist, a student from Jones College Prep then gave the crowd an introduction to Minecraft, the best-selling video computer game of all time(?), and a mapping project he worked on with it, which led to him showing us a prize-winning map of a Canadian province created by one of his Minecraft buddies.

The last map we saw was the most timely, showing receding ice caps, world heat and humidity levels, and annual storm concentrations, a veritable Tempest.