Book Patrol

Maps

    2. Visuals
  2. Maps

Reading Jane Eyre: All 594 translations in 57 languages

Posted by under , ,

The project is called Prismatic Jane Eyre and is the brain child of University of Oxford professor Matthew Reynolds. In collaboration with an international team of more than two dozen scholars they dove deep into the publishing history of Charlotte Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, Jane Eyre. Why Jane Eyre? Says Reynolds: The more I thought about and re-read Jane Eyre, the more it came to seem the perfect book for the kind of exploration I wanted to make. It was full of contradictions that were likely to play out differently in different places, times and tongues.  It was a powerfully...

Continue Reading →

New technology looks to uncover hidden text on map that influenced Christopher Columbus

Posted by under , ,

The map is referred to as the Martellus map. It is named after its creator, the German cartographer Henricus Martellus, and is thought be have been produced in or around 1491. The only known surviving copy lives at the Beinecke Library at Yale. Being a large wall map, it is 4 by 6.5 feet, and having survived for over 500 years it is understandable that the map has seen better days.  The map, which is usually on display by Beinecke’s service desk, has been relatively unexamined following a peak in interest after its acquisition in the 1960s because it is largely illegible. Now thanks to a new...

Continue Reading →

A 21st Century Literary Atlas of Europe

Posted by under ,

The impetus for the project is simple: Where is literature set and why? For over a hundred years "literary criticism has been struggling with the question of how best to depict literary spaces on maps in an adequate and objectively accurate manner" Combining the fields of literary geography and cartography researchers at the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation in  Zurich have been at work since 2006 compiling new interactive tools to assist researchers and others with an interest in literature and place. Subjects like "fictionalization processes over time (of a region, a city); interactions between fiction and reality; and last but not least coherences between natural...

Continue Reading →

The Beat Generation in the Big Apple

Posted by under ,

Carl Solomon, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs at the Gotham Book Mart, New York City, 1977 Calling all tour guides... The latest New York-centric map from Constantine Valhouli features the haunts, hangouts and related places of interest for the Beat Generation. From the library in Ozone Park, Queens where Jack Kerouac started planning his seminal road trip to the West End bar across from Columbia University which became "a college bar for the Beat poets" and all points in between. The map highlights 123 spots of interest with most falling within the boundaries of NYC.       Link to...

Continue Reading →