These two books are catnip for map geeks

If you’re a map geek – and many travelers are – you may wish to avert your eyes. Two books – one new, one renewed – are here to tempt you as the holidays approach.

As these volumes show, maps can be deeply addictive because each one is a new worldview, with its own style and grammar.

Depending on who has designed it (and toward what end), a map can bring elegance from chaos and lead you to places you’d never have gone otherwise.

Conversely, a map can blunt your curiosity, twist the truth, break your spirit.

Yet if you’re addicted in a certain way, even the bad ones deliver a perverse sort of pleasure. And no amount of real-time GPS information can undermine the joy a well-made, old-school map can bring. Especially an old one from an interesting place.

One of the new volumes is “Map: Exploring the World” (Phaidon, $59.95), a big, heavy hardback that includes more than 300 gorgeous images from milestone moments in cartography, with plenty of attention paid to the last decade of digital innovations. The range is pulse-quickening.

Here’s a 13th century Chinese map of the sky, right next a 2014 geologic map of Mars; an 1837 pre-Braille map of Maine for the blind; a 2012 map of Glasgow by scent (perfume, fast food, wet moss and the River Clyde are key features); a 1932 map of Harlem nightclubs next to a 1963 map of Midtown Manhattan high-rises; a 2005 digital map of North American aircraft flight patterns; a 2013 global tweet map.

The maps were chosen by an international panel of curators, academics and collectors.

Not surprisingly, Saul Steinberg’s hilarious 1976 New Yorker “View of the World from 9^th Avenue” is here -- and so is a doubly hilarious 1939 map by Daniel K. Wallingford that may have inspired Steinberg.

Oh, and yes, there’s a map to homes of the Hollywood stars, circa 1937.

The other book in this pairing is not as new or broadly pitched, but it’s profoundly trainspotterly – a comprehensive global collection of city rapid-transit system maps by transit design expert Mark Ovenden.

Ovenden published the first edition of “Transit Maps of the World” about eight years ago. Now he’s back with a revised, expanded edition in paperback (Penguin, $35).

Here you can gaze slack-jawed at the complexity of the Beijing and Tokyo subway systems, or marvel the elegance and enduring influence of the iconic color-coded London Underground diagram designed by Henry Beck in the 1930s.

How many ways are there to condense sprawling geography, clarify urban randomness, make a municipality knowable? At least enough to fill 176 pages.

Of course I went looking for the Los Angeles pages and found the city’s Metro system in the second rank of cities – behind older and mightier transport agencies like those of Paris, New York, Moscow and Mexico City. (Who does Ovenden see as the the peers of L.A.? Vienna, Milan, San Francisco and Buenos Aires, among others.)

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