"America at the center"

I've heard in various places the claim that world maps made in the US always put the US near the center, but I don't think I've ever actually seen such a map. It seems to me that it would be awkward to split Eurasia in two, and I'd probably have noticed the oddity (this page on south-at-the-top maps mentions a correspondent having one made by the George F. Cram company, so I suppose they exist).

Most of the ones you can get here split the globe near the International Date Line, so that Europe is near the center in longitude. This is partly Western ethnocentrism (the Prime Meridian, an arbitrary British creation, is in the middle), but it's also convenient because there's not much land in the middle of the Pacific. Sometimes there's some special handling of the split near where Russia meets Alaska.

This stock photo library has some with the Americas at the center. They're weird-looking.

Did I have a map with the US in the center?

Having doubted the prevalence of world maps with the US in the center, and considered the possibility that they used to be more common, now I'm wondering if I actually had such a map once. When I was a kid I had a cheap wall map of the world that was in the dreaded Mercator projection (I think the publisher was Hammond). It wasn't on my wall; I'd unfold it and spread it out on the floor for fascinated pondering. That one might have had the Americas in the middle, but I don't remember for sure.

Not long after I got hold of a world map from National Geographic magazine that I recognized as superior, because for some reason I had gotten really interested in geography. At the time (around 1979 or 1980) they were using the van der Grinten (I) projection, and the split was at the Date Line. (They subsequently switched to the Robinson and then recently to the Winkel Tripel, same as the Cram maps I linked to before (they spelled it "Winkle" for some reason). Personally I think the Robinson is the best of the three if you want an uninterrupted world map, but the Winkel is OK too.)

I like that map projections site. The page with the van der Grinten also mentions a peculiar projection called the Raisz Armadillo that projects the earth onto a section of a torus. Recently I spotted an old world map that actually used the Armadillo among the friendly detritus on the wall of a Ruby Tuesday's.