Read on Twitter
1/ A thread about fantastical and historical maps, inspired by an exchange with @AxelCorlu.
All maps of course are fantasies and elaborate fictions themselves, which is part of their fascination for me.
All maps of course are fantasies and elaborate fictions themselves, which is part of their fascination for me.
2/ Even the most nefarious colonial maps display this almost childlike clumsiness about reality. I think it is this artifice of representation and what it tells us that I have found interesting.
3/ My father was an antique dealer so we a lot of maps and nautical charts around. And old magazines. Thanks, @NatGeo ! But I really dug the maps in books I read as a kid. Here are a few. It’s a laddish and self-indulgent list so bear with me.
4/ Tolkien, obviously. I really liked the idea of maps with hidden knowledge on them, and the way those little mountains and trees were drawn. We’ll come back to those lil mountains!
5/ But the MOST important was Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. Mine was blue-print blue but this is a clearer image. Norton is a fixture in my hometown so it had local resonances I guess.
5a/ Compass rose, metered border, baroque legend, elaborate fonts. It has it all!
6/ Robert E Howard’s Hyboria. Predictable, I guess. I really appreciate the minimalist architect’s compass on this now.
7/ Alan Garner’s Alderley Edge and environs, which, like many Americans, I only realized relatively late in life is a Real Place. And which I try to visit as often as I can. The map is almost as lovely.
8/ And the map from Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Good luck to you trying to read it without it. Notice the bow-compass. 
9/ Which brings me to some of my books. In 2008, I published a translation of the “memoirs” of a medieval Syrian warrior-poet, Usama Ibn Munqidh, with @PenguinClassics . I’m very proud of the maps, esp this one:
9a/ it’s based on a Soviet map of the region+stuff I learned traipsing up & down the Orontes Valley like a damn fool.
I wanted to convey something of the fantastical nature of Usāma’s account, so I instructed the artist to make the lil mountains as Tolkienesque as possible.
I wanted to convey something of the fantastical nature of Usāma’s account, so I instructed the artist to make the lil mountains as Tolkienesque as possible.
10/ With Race for Paradise (2014), I was thus hugely lucky to find illustrator @elisabethalba to put similar historical-fantasy whimsy in the maps I needed. Perfection!/ END
