Like so many things that once set adolescent geeks apart, reading maps for places that aren’t there has gone mainstream. 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. 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. This, I decided, had to be what grown-up reading looked like. An older cousin read The Lord of the Rings over the course of a hot summer when I was nine, and I watched in fascination as he traced the Fellowship’s progress across the foldout map that came with the book in those days. I spent my adolescence around maps of places that didn’t exist. Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars. “The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. Adrian Daub | Longreads | August 2017 | 20 minutes (5,033 words) 1.
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