This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
While mapping out the exact route that Phileas Fogg follows in Around the World in 80 Days, Andrew DeGraff had a revelation. "There's no balloon!" says the 37-year-old, California-based illustrator of Jules Verne's 1873 novel. "We think there is, but actually our memories have just been Disney-fied."
This map is among 18 cartographical takes on literary landscapes -- a chapter-by-chapter visualisation of A Christmas Carol, for instance, and an Escher-like analysis of Pride and Prejudice -- inside DeGraff's Plotted: A Literary Atlas. All of the titles he worked on had to fit his criteria of having some sort of scale. "To plot movement for a physically confined story such as The Metamorphosis would have become its own form of Kafkaesque nightmare," he says.
DeGraff's exhaustive research led to a bunch of illuminating lit-crit insights. For example, while researching Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he combined every indicator of physical movement in the novel's 110,000+ words with real geography. "If Huck and Jim had travelled another 200 miles west, they would have found themselves in what the 1840 census called 'Unorganised Territory'," says DeGraff. Travel narratives, such as Huck's, proved the most fruitful, because "they can sprawl and languish to illustrate pace".
DeGraff hopes the maps can help introduce books to new readers, or refresh our memories of them. "Whenever I show these to people who have read the books there's an 'I totally forgot about that part' moment," he says. "It's fun to help fill in those holes."
Plotted: A Literary Atlas (Zest Books) is out on November 1.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
