★★★★★ A fantasy travel guide

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places: The Newly Updated and Expanded Classic

Alberto Manguel, Gianni Guadalupi, Graham Greenfield (Illustrator), James Cook (Maps and Charts)

Seanan McGuire recently published a story-like thing called A Traveler's Guide to Fantastic Countries. It purports to be advertising copy for a travel agency that can arrange trips to such places as Avalon, Niflheim, and The Lost City of Z. This naturally made me think of other, less tongue-in-cheek reference works of fantastic lands. Two that I used to own are this one, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places: The Newly Updated and Expanded Classic and An Atlas of Fantasy (which I reviewed yesterday).

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places is a serious version of the joke that McGuire was making with her story. In the first (1980) edition Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi described a little over a thousand places (according to the Foreword for the 1980 edition), helped out by illustrator Graham Greenfield and mapmaker James Cook. (That is presumably a pseudonym. The Goodreads entry for the book links to this James Cook, who has drawn very few maps since his death in 1779. I was unable to find out any more about the James Cook who drew maps for The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.) Presumably there are considerably more than a thousand entries in this expanded 2000 edition.

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places contains maps, but unlike An Atlas of Fantasy, it is mostly text. If you open the book at random, you will probably see two pages full of text before you, although you needn't look far to find a picture or a map. Places are listed alphabetically, and there is a useful index in which you can find places by author and book title.

This is, of course, not a comprehensive list of all the imaginary places in literature -- that would be impossible. In his Foreword Manguel describes the rules they used to decide what to include. Only places one could in principle visit are included, thus no heavens, hells, or future science fictional lands. Also literary versions of real places, e.g. Hardy's Wessex or Faulkner's Yoknapotawpha are not included. Manguel admits that there were many difficult borderline cases, and that some were included "because they aroused in us that indescribable thrill that is the true achievement of fiction, places without which the world would be so much poorer". Fair enough.

Of course, the other large category of lacunae is places created after publication of this update in 2000. Thus we have an entry for Hogwarts (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997) but not the Faery Knowes of October Daye's story (Rosemary and Rue was published in 2009). This is a problem real-world geographers don't have, or have only in a much milder form.

This is not a book I will ever read, in the sense of starting at the beginning and reading one page after another until I reach the end. It will sit on my shelf for purposes of decoration and reference. If you accept that, it is hard to see how it could be better.

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