Long Reads:
Maps were my entrée into geek life, and they remained the medium through which geekdom moved: beat-up paperbacks handed around between school friends, boxed sets at the local game store — we probably spent about as much time poring over maps as we did reading or dreaming up the stories that took place within the worlds they represented. The science fiction we read did without them, but any cover featuring a dragon, a many-turreted castle, or a woman in a leather bra suggested you’d find a map the moment you peeked inside the book.
Like so many things that once set adolescent geeks apart, reading maps for places that aren’t there has gone mainstream. Nerds and non-nerds alike relish their weekly swoop across the map of Westeros in Game of Thrones’ gorgeous title sequence.
Like the author of this piece, my entree into fictional maps was through Lord of the Rings and I’ve always had a fascination with maps, real and imaginary.
I always thought whenever I made it big, I’d have a house large enough to accommodate a Map Room. You know, extra large tables, cabinets with extra large, shallow drawers, large historic maps framed on the wall, large leather-bound books about exotic locales, cartography tools and shit, maybe a small landscape model or two, lots of wood panelling, etc.
Probably not practical anymore in the digital age, but I’d still like to build one.
Half the fun of my D&D days was creating the maps of the world; Hand drawn on vellum drafting paper with my Rapidographs. And yes it all started with that map in The Hobbit, which my 4th grade teacher lent me to read…
Maps were always a great way to help interest me in a good story. Historical timelines, too.