I was really impressed by the Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy Library last week. It’s one of those things you see in the papers (they recently re-opened it) that you’d probably visit if you were a tourist, but you wouldn’t often think to stop by if you were just in the neighborhood. I had just finished looking at the disappointing “Pluse: Art, Healing, and Transformation” exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art, and I figured it was due time to check out this fabled map.

The Mapparium, despite the fact that it’s part of a library devoted to the Christian Science religion, is actually very cool. It’s a three story stained-glass spherical map of the world. You stand on a walkway suspended at the equator and look around. The map is actually backwards – because if you were really standing in the center of the earth looking out, Boston would be to the left of San Francisco, so it’s more like looking at an inside-out earth than looking at earth “from the inside looking out”.

Despite that inaccuracy, and the fact that the map shows the political world of the 30’s, the map has one huge advantage over all others: it’s proportionally accurate. True, you can get this from a globe, but the Mapparium is so large, and you can see so much of it at once (because it’s concave instead of convex), that you can really get an idea of relative sizes and distances. For example, you can see why a plane from London to San Francisco flies over Washington and Oregon. You also notice just how far north the United States, Europe, and Asia are. Standing at the equator, you really have strain your neck to see them. Really cool.