Jerry Gretzinger is 84, and for most of the past six decades he has spent nearly every day adding to a single map — now more than 4,000 hand-painted panels of a place that doesn't exist. In a People Make Games documentary, Gretzinger explains that what he draws isn't up to him. A deck of about 100 cards decides. He flips one off the bottom and obeys: "next higher dimension," "new color," "make blanks." "I attempt to think as little as possible," he says. "I just slap it on."
Cities appear, draw their names from a list of towns "eliminated by the void," and are eventually swallowed by The Void — white paper into which Gretzinger now collages his own letters, receipts, and journals, cutting up the originals to preserve them. He went to school for architecture, has been married to his wife Meg for 44 years, and has inspired a subreddit, r/JerryMapping, where strangers draw maps in his style. After the crew helped assemble the map for the first time in 14 years, someone asks if it's done. "It's never done," says his assistant. Gretzinger: "Roar."
