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Product Description
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places was originally published in 1980; this 1987 update added some new realms to this travelogue of places from literary fiction. In it you'll find descriptions and sometimes maps of Middle-Earth, Narnia, Oz, Utopia, Shangri-La, El Dorado, Wonderland and Flatland, amount 100's of others. Each entry includes a brief description of the land including its history and its inhabitants.
This is a wonderful oversized coffee table book. It is not only a delight to peruse and bring back memories of those classic tales, and sometimes new insights, but can also make a nice conversation starter of ice breaker. If there's a sudden awkward silence in a room, who wouldn't enjoy filling it with talk of Lilliput, or Pepperland, or Stepford?
To remain of manageable size (barely!), the author has excluded places that are off the planet Earth as well as "heavens and hells and places of the future," and literary pseudonyms for real places. It compensates by covering a wide range of anonymous and obscure sources, and volumes of forgotten lore.
The book is widely noted for the number and excellence of its illustrations, by Graham Greenfield, and its maps and charts, by James Cook. Guadalupi and Manguel acknowledge Philip Grove's The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (1941), and Pierre Versins' Encyclopèdie de l'Utopie, des Voyages extraordinaires et de la Science-Fiction (1972), as precedents and inspirations.
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