Humbead’s Revised Map of the World

“The best looking” of Shubb’s three Humbead maps (from the artist himself).

Though it borrows heavily from its two predecessors, the third edition of Rick Shubb’s ‘Humbead’s Revised Map of the World’ is a totally new production. A psychedelic border filled with various creatures and trippy scenes surrounds an image emblematic of the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

A central Pangea is comprised of continental bodies named for influential locations within the movement. Two large scrolls on either side contain hundreds of names of individuals within the nation’s population – an interesting ‘Who’s Who’ from the age. A compass rose shows up, down, left, and right, as well as ‘This Way’ and ‘That Way.’ From an excellent analysis by cultural historian Michael J. Kramer,

“Humbead’s Revised Map of the World reimagines the globe from the perspective of the West Coast folk scene and emerging hippie counterculture. First printed in 1968, with subsequent iterations produced in 1969 and 1970, it was created by Rick Shubb and Earl Crabb, two Bay Area folk music aficionados.

Like Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker magazine cover View of the World from 9th Avenue, published in 1976, Humbead’s is meant to be a funny artifact that cartographically distorts Euclidean space and Mercator projection in order to suggest a more perceptually accurate “mattering map.”…The idea for the map originated in 1967 when Crabb remarked to a hitchhiker from Berkeley to Kansas City that he should ask for rides to New York City since “it was closer.”

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