Every map is a lie agreed upon. The Mercator projection inflates Greenland to the size of Africa; the Peters projection corrects this but distorts everything else. You cannot flatten a sphere without breaking something. The cartographer’s job is to choose which distortion serves the traveler best.
Medieval mapmakers filled unknown regions with monsters and speculation. This was more honest than it appears — they were admitting the limits of their knowledge, decorating the boundary between the known and the unknowable. Modern maps leave blank spaces blank, which feels less courageous somehow.
I collect old Ordnance Survey maps of the Scottish Highlands. The contour lines on a good map read like music — slow crescendos up the ridge, tight clusters at the cliff edge, long exhales across the glen.