Gotta Map?

During some of my recent bookstore visits, I picked up a couple books worth mentioning. Both were purchased at City Books on Pittsburgh’s North Side and both of the books have to do with maps.

    The first is a nearly new book (2018) called The Writer’s Map. It contains a group of articles by twenty-four different authors. These essays or chapters are about how maps are often included in books and can also be influential in the first thoughts of a new book or story.

    The illustrations in this larger format book are very nicely copied, having maps of both real and imaginary places. All of them were made to help us find our way, whether through the real world or the book we are reading.

    I always enjoy having a map included on the inside cover of a book, (This book has one!) I refer to them frequently and am disappointed when they aren’t a good representation of the novel. These maps make the location of a story that much more real to me. It helps me to envision the place!

    The second book is an old Collier’s World Atlas and Gazetteer. Printed in 1935, it has the ability to take me back into the past.

    Back to when Alaska and Hawaii weren’t states yet, back to a time when the city of Pittsburgh was covered with railroads. I find it fun to browse through the maps and see what has changed over the past eighty-eight years. There are countries, and neighborhoods in this atlas which no longer exist and lots of places which have been absorbed by others. The statistics have changed a bit also. 

    There are a couple older atlases and maps in my collection which show Pittsburgh being spelled without the "h" at its end, (pre-1911) and where West Virginia hasn’t yet divided from Virginia because of different thoughts dealing with slavery. (Pre-1863) Looking at old maps can be another form of time travel.

    I find maps absolutely fascinating, whether they are the old crinkly maps, printed on tissue thin paper in the Beadeker Travel Guides, old folded gas station maps or star maps printed on thick paper in the Uranometria volumes. I have a couple atlases of the human body, filled with color plates showing the bones and what muscles are used to power them along with maps of the veins and arteries that fuel them.  Pictures of the human body, but they are maps never the less. In novels, my opinion of a book rises if it contains a map, or even better, a few maps! Maps such as; the Treasure Island map on the inside covers of the book, Swiss Family Robinson’s map, the map of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley or the jungle maps of The Lost City of Z. They all guide us through the book. What a wonderful accompaniment!

    While reading The Writer’s Map, one of the chapters was written by Reif Larson who wrote The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. Some of the maps in this book are included and after reading that chapter, I went to the bookshelf and pulled my copy of the book out and started re-reading it. As of right now, I’m about 60 pages into it. What a great book!  (It is about a young, (very young!) cartographer who is invited to make a speech at the Smithsonian Museum. They have no idea how old he is. He sets off on his own, going from Montana to Washington DC, mapping his journey in his journals. I’ve re-read it a few times and enjoyed it every time.)

    The fact that I started re-reading this book once again is an example of how I believe that all books are connected in some way. Books I am reading often have a similar plot, the same location or the same subject matter as the one I just completed. This doesn’t happen all the time but it occurs enough that I look forward to seeing what similarities the book I’m reading might have with those of the past. This example also shows how one book can lead me to another. In a way…it was a map to the book that was sitting on my shelf.

    A quote from another book I just read, The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson fits right in here. Writing about his father; “there was almost nothing he would’ve liked better than to cover the dining room table with maps and consider at length, possible routings”

Maps, where would we be without them?   I know I’d be lost!