Born from a love of great maps.

Hi. I'm Lewis Kogan, founder of UnConformity Vintage Maps. I first discovered maps when I was about ten years old, poring over the stained and dogeared forest maps my parents would bring on our family backpacking trips. In college, I used to peruse the map collection in the basement stacks at the University of Montana Library, and I could lose myself in a good map for hours on end. Maps continue to fascinate me and inspire my imagination. Lost stories hide everywhere - in what is included and what is omitted. Great maps start conversations. They spark our curiosity. And they enrich and deepen our understanding of the places we live and love.  

Cartography is as much an art form as a science, there is no doubt in my mind. All maps are created to convey information - details about a specific place, generally at a specific moment in time - but how that information is presented is marvelously full of subtlety and surprising beauty. Two maps showing the same information about the same place can be radically different, one terrible and one sublime. The more brilliant the artist, the more readily we are able to decipher the information presented within the map. The very best maps even hint at deeper subtleties, illuminating our natural world and our human history in unexpected ways. The closer you look, the more stories and riddles the map has to tell us. What a joy it is to have a great map in one's possession!

That's really at the heart of what I was aiming for when I started UnConformity. I wanted to seek out and discover maps that were arresting in their aesthetic beauty, capable of revealing near-endless discoveries when inspected at length, and which would capture and hold the viewer's curiosity, motivating them to look deeper and wonder more. 

I hope UnConformity will help you make your own discoveries, and share the joy of a great map with those you love.  

So go ahead... find a map. Look close. And then, look closer.  

-Lewis Kogan, Owner - UnConformity Vintage Maps