Many composers have also been excellent writers: Charles Ives, Erik Satie, Virgil Thomson, and George Antheil, for example. And some writers have pursued ambitious careers in music that rivaled their literary careers: Paul Bowles, Anthony Burgess, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example. And for centuries, songwriters have written both music and lyrics. Under this rubric, however, I’ll post another category: music by writers who only composed sporadically, often with surprising results.

The first one is Edward Lear. Lear wrote music for two of his verses, “The Pelican Chorus” and “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,” both with the help of a certain Signor Pomé. Here’s the latter, from August 1, 1876.

Lear also composed settings for twelve poems by Tennyson, with the assistance of Edward Francis Rimbault. Here’s the beginning of one of them, “Edward Gray,” from 1871. Lear sang them for Tennyson, to the latter’s approval.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

There have been many card games that invite the player to collect the panels of a comic strip. This one features Skippy, by Percy Crosby, and was published by E. E. Fairchild in 1932.

Here’s the back:

And the box:

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

L. Frank Baum developed the Land of Oz in a series of books, which were continued after his death by Ruth Plumly Thompson. This definitive map was drawn by John R. Neill for the endpapers of the 1939 Ox book Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz. It’s not very detailed, but it does help orient the reader.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The map below traces André Breton’s walks through Paris in October and November 1926, as described in his 1928 novel Nadja. It’s taken from the wonderful Guide de Paris mystérieux, edited by François Caradec and published by Tchou in 1966. Tchou published a series of “Guides Noirs” that are full of intriguing things.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus (serialized in 1913 and published as a book in 1914) takes place on the estate of the wealthy inventor Martial Canterel. The 1965 edition by Jean-Jacques Pauvert includes, as an appendix, maps and diagrams by Jean Ferry. Here’s Ferry’s depiction of Canterel’s estate.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The Dell mapbacks were not confined to mysteries. Here, for example, is the map intended to guide the reader through P. G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith. Perhaps the presence of jewel thieves made the book enough of a mystery to warrant it.

More surprisingly, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Cave Girl, in which a modern collegiate must become a savage fighter to win the love of the eponymous cave girl, also required a map. The plot, essentially a series of fights, isn’t hard to follow, but the map is attractive anyway.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Some of the most popular literary maps were featured on Dell’s “mapbacks.” In the 1940s and 1950s, these handsome paperbacks carried a map of the story on the back cover, presumably to help the reader to follow the action. Most of them were mysteries, but there were some interesting exceptions. Here’s the map for Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town (1948).

The map for The Man Who Didn’t Exist, by Geoffrey Homes (1944), took a different approach, showing the interior of a single house.

Both of these showed fictional locations. Brett Halliday’s Counterfeit Wife (1949), however, took place in Miami, so the map showed the real Miami, with fictional locations indicated by numbers.

I only hope all three approaches helped readers keep track of the often convoluted plots.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Our second literary map was drawn by James Branch Cabell, to show Poictesme, the fictional country featured in many of his novels. To keep things imaginary, he attributed it to an equally fictional chronicler of Poictesme, John Frederick Lewistam. The map first appeared in James Branch Cabell, by Carl Van Doren, Robert M. McBride, New York, 1925. Please click on it to enlarge it.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

This site has lain dormant for several months; it’s time to revive it. I’ll bring it back with a series of literary maps. The literary map is an odd genre. Unlike a standard map, it doesn’t guide the viewer over real terrain, but through an imaginary space. It can either show a series of fictional events in a real location, or a series of events in a fictional setting.

Here, as an example of the former, is a map of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, from A Literary & Historical Atlas of Europe, by J. G. Bartholomew (Everyman’s Library, 1910). Please click to enlarge.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara is now available from Black Scat Books!

Isidore Isou, the founder of the artistic movement Letterism, was a great admirer of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. So, when Tzara died in 1963, Isou disrupted the funeral to give the great provocateur a properly raucous sendoff. Isou’s lively account of the proceedings is both a polemic against traditional funerals and a warm declaration of his affection and admiration for Tzara.

Isou’s text was originally published in 1964. My translation of it was first published in a limited edition by Black Scat Books in 2012. This revised edition is much improved and is now available to all readers interested in Isou and Tzara.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)