Weird maps: Three book reviews

It's Febreviewary!

Last month I set myself a 2026 challenge to learn a bit more graphic design and got some practise in by making a new TTRPG-aligned poster every day.

As part of that, I've been reading all sorts of art books to see how people put things together. Here are my reviews of three books of fantastical maps: Plotted, Strange maps, and City across time.

More reviews to come later this month.

 

Plotted: A literary atlas. 2015. Andrew DeGraff (illustrator), Daniel Harmon (editor and essayist).

This book takes classic English-language books and converts their plots into maps. As such it is full of exquisite illustrations, with some lightweight literary commentary on each one.

The concept is interesting, but it has hits and misses.

The good 

DeGraff has created some truly stellar illustrations, including in the graphic designs for the title pages. I like this title for Moby Dick in particular:

Plotted – Moby Dick (title). Andrew DeGraff.

The main illustration provided for Moby Dick is an exploded/cutaway diagram of a whale, labelled in the way that it would be butchered by whalers. It's a fascinating and compelling piece, if gross, and probably the book's strongest deviation from the 'map' theme.

Another favourite is the Library of Babel. This world of infinitely tessellating rooms really got my TTRPG gears turning, but that's as much on the original work, which is one of only a few Borges stories I've read (something I must remedy someday).

Plotted – The Library of Babel (diagram). Andrew DeGraff. 

There are some interesting design decisions. For example, charting the arcs of characters' lives towards marriage for Pride & Prejudice makes for a neat visual.

 

Plotted – Pride & Prejudice (marriage map; cropped). Andrew DeGraff.

 

The stretches

A repeated motif in Plotted is the tracking of characters, showing the paths they take through their fictive worlds. I'm not sure I'm sold on these traces. They look nice, but what do they add as an infographic? For people familiar with the work, I don't think it really reveals much. For people unfamiliar, it's just messy layers of lines that don't say much about the text.

Plotted – A Christmas Carol (map). Andrew DeGraff.

 

The trace technique is at its weakest in e.g. the illustrations for A Christmas Carol or Hamlet, where it just shows routes taken around a town or a couple of buildings.

On the other hand, it was a great fit for Around The World In 80 Days! I just think these character traces were over-used.

There are a couple of real stretches to force a text into the mold of the book's premise. Take the illustration for A Narrow Fellow In The Grass by Emily Dickinson. The source text is a 128-word poem, and Charted creates a graphic for it which (a) is barely a map, (b) goes well beyond the actual textual content, and (c) still doesn't have much to say. The book's front matter mentions that to some extent the artist and essayist just picked their favourite pieces of literature, and I'm guessing that's what happened here.

That's one of the things which made me conclude that a better premise for this project would have been to create a wider variety of pseudo-infographic non-traditional illustrations, some of which happen to be maps. Again, that Moby Dick exploded diagram (not a map) was incredible!

By modifying the approach like that you could avoid the pitfalls of the unremarkable character traces and forcing maps onto texts that are deeply unsuited to them, although of course you could no longer call it "a literary atlas".

In summary

The premise isn't as strong as it sounds, but the book is a visual feast regardless, and there are some stand-outs that individually make it worth taking a look. You'll probably get more out of Plotted the more of the texts you're familiar with.

 

Strange maps: An atlas of cartographic curiosities. 2009. Frank Jacobs.

This book lives up to its name. It's filled with all kinds of interesting things, from fictional islands to the Land of Oz to maps made of the North Pole before we knew what it looked like.

Strange Maps – The Land of Oz

 

The book is divided into sections, so we have maps of places from fiction in one, propaganda and political maps in another (the ten-state Australia is remarkable), etc.

Also abstract or fantastical illustrations of real places:

Strange Maps – Vancouver

 

My favourite map? Probably an 1834 visualisation of the world's major rivers descending into a fictional sinkhole.

Strange maps also contains the most full explanation of enclaves, exclaves, and fragments that I didn't know I needed.

Minor quibbles 

The book has some unexamined colonial language. That's unfortunate for something published as recently as 2009.

There are a couple of sections containing a lot of America-centric maps which mean little to someone outside the country. A 'cartographic curiosity' that you have to be from a particular culture to appreciate isn't very exciting. Having page after page of them becomes tedious.

The book is well-made; I only have one criticism in that regard. The large form factor makes plenty of space for the maps, but the downside is that this sometimes means a map on one page and accompanying text filling the facing page. And while often this is necessary to explain the broader historical context, sometimes the author struggles to find something interesting to say, using trivia and colour commentary to fill a huge empty page. Just leave it blank!

In summary

A fascinating book. Definitely worth picking up, although I wouldn't be afraid to skim bits of it to get to the best stuff. The fictional maps are visually interesting, but I particularly enjoyed the real-world absurdities:

Strange Maps – Market Reef

City across time. 2019. Peter Kent.

This is a children's book illustrating how an imagined city changes across the course of history, with cross-sections showing how archaeological objects are laid down in the strata.

I grabbed a copy because I'm a sucker for cross-sections, and I thought it might be useful for the dungeon archaeology project I have coming up. And it's definitely inspired me!

The book instructs you to “look carefully to see how the buildings people knock down and the garbage they drop create the layers of history beneath their feet”, and it knocks it out of the park.

Page spreads from City across time. Peter Kent.

I'm no judge of children's books, but Kent's writing seems perfectly serviceable. He is also the illustrator, and does a truly wonderful job with the visual storytelling.

The process of archaeological deposits being laid down as the city progresses through historical periods is shown with unbelievable artifice, often in the subtlest little minutiae, which the text never draws attention to. Post holes show up where structures were. Tiny objects are lost and buried. Features from former eras are re-used. Strata are dug into and disrupted. All of it is delightfully illustrated.

There is something very emotionally impactful about showing the accretion of history in a single place as people and civilisations come and go. 

The book opens with Stone Age people hunting mammoths and discussions of the misnomer 'caveman' and the role of caves as religious sites; it closes in a postapocalyptic future Earth where a dark ruined basement is full of things the post-fall people have collected, a site with a clear religious/burial role, and paintings daubed on the wall.

 

Cropped page showing a basement serving a similar role of a cave to prehistoric people.

In summary

City across time was one of my favourite books to read in the last couple of months. You have to bear in mind that it's a children's book, so you'll only get so much from the textual content, but I really appreciate the depth of thought and planning that went into the illustrations. And the results speak for themselves. This got me fired up to work on Dungeon Dig Site, and wanting to draw some cross-sections of my own.