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 […]

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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 […]

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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)

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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 […]

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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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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 […]

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Feeding Time is now available from Black Scat Books! This collection of Alphonse Allais’s short pieces, originally published in 1897, shows the great French humorist at his best, spinning out stories, fables, dialogues, and articles with elegance and imagination. You’ll find clandestine train stations and incandescent leeks, the rules for attending funerals with a bicycle, […]

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The Virtuoso Parrot is now available from Black Scat Books! Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet (1828-1900) wrote hundreds of startling articles and stories about secret societies, hidden bloodlines, and his own idiosyncratic views of history. His obsession with finding puns and rebuses, in both ancient inscriptions and modern speech, influenced generations of occultists; it was the inspiration […]

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Music From Elsewhere is now available from Strange Attractor Press! This book collects and discusses music derived from unusual sources, including music attributed to fairies, trolls, trowies, banshees, aliens, angels, spirits, time slips, and dreams. You’ll also find chapters on speculative and cryptographic music, and on music from birds and other natural sounds. It’s 272 […]

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