Thirty genuinely true, cross-checked facts about maps, borders and the strange business of naming the world — spanning Maps & Projections, Places That Aren’t There, Borders, Naming, Time & the Globe, Measuring the Earth, Islands & Water and India on the Map. Inside: why a fake town invented as a copyright trap eventually became a real place, why nobody can say how long a coastline is, and why the tourists queueing on the Greenwich meridian are standing about a hundred metres from zero. No myths, no filler — every fact verified against independent sources.