Plotted: A Literary Atlas (Zest Books, 2015) by freelance illustrator and artist Andrew DeGraff is a collection of illustrations that straddle the line between infographics and cartography (as he explains in his introduction). If you love literature and maps, you’ll want to check this out, but be prepared for a wide variety of illustrated maps full of imagination and interpretation.

DeGraff decided to created maps of literature that had not been mapped before and that didn’t already have definitive visual representations. Plotted contains maps based on 19 works, cut down from his original list of 50. (We can only hope this means he has a sequel in the works!)

In his final selection, diversity across centuries, genres, and authors was important to DeGraff, plus he included some of his personal favourites — and who can blame him?

Most of the works are novels (Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick, Watership Down), but DeGraff also includes short stories (“The Lottery,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “The Library of Babel), two plays (Hamlet and Waiting for Godot), and even a poem (Emily Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass). Unfortunately I haven’t read all of the texts he uses, so I can’t fully appreciate them. As DeGraff says, “I think these maps tend to be best viewed by someone who has actually read the books, but that may be because that’s the only way I see them. Still, my hope is that they can also entice people who haven’t read these books into picking them up.”

In his introduction DeGraff acknowledges the subjective nature of his project, but also explains that he aimed for historical accuracy (for example in the architecture). The texts leave lots of room for interpretation, which is why we get to see the artist’s imagination run wild in the maps, which vary greatly from book to book.

For each work DeGraff included between one and five maps. Each set is introduced by one-page essay by Daniel Harmon (the book’s editor). He discusses the context of the work, along with some analysis and brief comments on the map(s).

You can see a few sample pages of Plotted on DeGraff’s website.

One quibble I have with the book is that it doesn’t lie flat, causing some details of the illustrations to get lost in the crease.

The book ends with a list for further reading, in which DeGraff describes 8 books about maps (historical and imaginary). I’ve already ordered 6 of them from the library, so stay tuned for more reviews!

And if you are interested in more work by Andrew DeGraff, you should definitely head over to his website.