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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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