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.

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.

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