![\"Plotted-cvr-525x525\"](\"http:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Plotted-cvr-525x525.jpg\")
<\/a>Plotted: A Literary Atlas\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nby Andrew DeGraff<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Product details: Hardcover: 128 pages<\/span><\/p>\n Publisher: Pulp; Original edition (October, 2015) <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The 1963 Madeleine L’Engle classic, A Wrinkle in Time<\/a> was one of my favorite books from childhood. Alongside the Narnia Chronicles. it was as close to sci-fi as I was going to get.<\/p>\n This was what my copy looked like:<\/p>\n Disclosure: I am a vicious judger of books by their coverer and always was. Needless to say, this was not<\/em> appealing to an 8-year-old me. A\u00a0trio of pale-green concentric circles that\u00a0looked like goddamn radio waves, against a dark, storm blue background. The three silhouettes not saying ANYTHING about the characters that I may or may not be reading about in the book.<\/p>\n What the hell was this? Too sic-fi, too weird, too psychedelic.<\/p>\n Turns out, it is the story about a 12-year-old girl, Meg and her little brother Charles who\u00a0live in the requisite big, drafty New England house on a wooded hill, with parents who are brilliant scientists, the mom a beautiful one. Meg is messy, not pretty, temperamental, and surly. She fights with the school bully to protect her little brother. The time-traveling part comes in when the children need to search for their father, who has disappeared –\u00a0\u00a0\u201cthrough a wrinkle in time, to the deadly unknown terrors beyond the tesseract!”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If I had not gotten past that cover, I would have never given myself entree in science fiction and would have missed out on The Lord of the Ring Books which gave way<\/p>\n (I remember this edition, a more lurid fantasy attempt to broaden its appeal).<\/p>\n In the covers and illustrations between the pages of many of the books I read, the writers have a way of conveying to their readers exactly where their characters are in a given time and place. It\u2019s not always easy to paint the mental picture you want if the drawings are skimpy, unadorned sketches , or if the narrative is complex, or if the writer has built a world that is incomprehensible in scope. But I always made the mental effort of conjuring up what places looked like.<\/p>\n What does the town in Shirley Jackson\u2019s \u201cThe Lottery\u201d look like? What about the Castle Elsinore in Hamlet? Or Odysseus\u2019 path in Homer’s Odyssey? Or the New York of Invisible Man?\u00a0But what about some more complex literary habitats? How would you draw a map of the place where Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot? \u00a0Or delineate the routes to love and\/or social standing in Austen\u2019s Pride and Prejudice? Retrace Frederick Douglass\u2019s escape from slavery into his prominent role in shaping the national discourse? The flat Earth of Around the World in Eighty Days or the many Londons of A Christmas Carol?\u00a0How might a map of Moby-Dick look? Would it follow the Pequod around the North Atlantic?\u00a0Envision a visual depiction of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges\u2019 infinite labyrinthine library from The Library of Babel or Huckleberry Finn\u2019s adventurous route through the lush Mississippi delta?<\/p>\n I just picked up a book called Plotted,<\/em> a collection of \u00a0stunningly detailed incredibly wide-ranging maps all inspired by literary classics, re-engaging\u00a0readers with a canonical text. One of which is A Wrinkle in Time.<\/p>\n The Wrinkle in Time map is firmly set in the fantastical, and the visual universe that DeGraff creates is necessarily otherworldly, showing the Murray siblings’ journey through space with their witch guides. Brilliantly original painter and pop cartographer,\u00a0Andrew DeGraff<\/a>, uses his painting skill and cartographer\u2019s ability to visualize multidimensional worlds, layering with aerial perspectives, proportions, and cut-away views, and\u00a0a stunning amount of narrative and atmospheric information. For this particular book, you obviously can\u2019t employ ordinary cartography, since the characters travel through space and time via a mysterious device called a tesseract.\u00a0The tesseracts, then, are depicted as literal wrinkles in their journey lines. In addition to the lines that represent all the characters, the novel’s ominous antagonist, “The Black Thing,” is represented in black splotches on the map.\u00a0The stunning map uses colored lines to represent each fictional character’s journey through the galaxy of the novel, with detailed illustrations of each of the planets they visit along the way.<\/p>\n Besides a Wrinkle in Time, Plotted<\/em>,\u00a0offers incredibly detailed, cleverly structured geographies of 19 easily rendered classic books, including Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, Invisible Man, Watership Down, A Christmas Carol,\u00a0Huckleberry Finn. I like how each map features its own location-specific artwork and color scheme, individual to each book. Breathing new life into the dying art of cartography DeGraff\u2019s intricate and vibrant illustration dish up a new perspective on stories we all know, while drawing us deeper into fictional realms.<\/p>\n In the case of Moby Dick, which has been imagined so many times, Degraff opts instead to map the ship on one page and the whale on the following.\u00a0The map \u00a0is a cross-section of the Pequod itself\u2014and then a remarkably similar cross-section of a whale, its ribs and holds and rudders laid bare for the reader to investigate.<\/p>\n The map of Samuel Beckett\u2019s Waiting for Godot is\u00a0hilarious and accurate. Vladimir and Estragon are represented by two anthropomorphized speech bubbles with arrows signifying Pozzo and Lucky circling around them; the rest is a blackish orange, with suggestive white shapes on the other side, just popping into frame, to hint at the world going on just beyond these two hapless men.<\/p>\n For the Jorge Luis Borges\u2019s short story, \u201cThe Library of Babel,\u201d the author imagines the universe as a series of adjacent hexagonal rooms, with neither characters nor a journey. It is an endless library comprised of \u201can indefinite, perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings. The Library contains all possible books ever written, and is so full of knowledge that it is actually quite useless to its patrons<\/p>\n This second map takes is Escher-like. \u201cThe Library of Babel,\u201d like much of Borges\u2019s fiction, lies just outside of human understanding, because humans can\u2019t wrap their heads around the idea of infinity.\u00a0DeGraff\u2019s map captures that ineffable spirit, somehow, in that most rational of human inventions: a map.<\/p>\n Check out this video on the makings of his Robinson Crusoe map:<\/p>\n
\nLanguage: English
\nISBN-13: 978-1-936976-86-7<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n100% hand-painted map of \u00a0“A Wrinkle in Time” (All photos: Andrew DeGraff\/Zest Books)<\/em><\/h5>\n
<\/p>\nThe planet of Camazotz, which is dominated by The Black Thing.\u00a0(Andrew DeGraff\/Courtesy of Zest Books<\/em><\/h5>\n
<\/a>There is two-page spread to each of the five acts in Hamlet, using colored lines to trace the movements of the play\u2019s characters. A similar approach is applied to A Christmas Carol through a series of maps that allow readers to follow Scrooge\u2019s journey with each ghost. \u00a0Pride and Prejudice is cleverly depicted through the eyes of Mrs. Bennet. Each family has a house, the heights of which are based on social standing, with Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley soaring to the top and the sleazy Mr. Wickham at the bottom. When the characters marry, as they are wont to do, they meet between their houses, connected by driveways. I loved the fact that the Bennet\u2019s house has two doors left empty to represent the unmarried Mary and Kitty.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nRobinson Crusoe by Robert Louis Stevenson (Andrew DeGraff\/Courtesy of Zest Books)<\/em><\/h5>\n
DeGraff first presents a wide view of the Library from above, so it looks like a detail of a mechanical beehive. Then, in a close-up, we can spot people in the galleries, wandering around, looking for answers.<\/p>\n<\/a>\u201cThe Library of Babel\u201d (Andrew DeGraff\/Courtesy of Zest Books<\/em><\/h5>\n