All my favorite books have maps
All the best books have a map at the front, right? At least, all of my favorites. I love two genres: fantasy/scifi in an invented world (Narnia, Earthsea, etc) or a travelogue in an exotic place. Either way, I’m always flipping back to the front of the book to peek at the map.
But! I also often want to annotate those maps - or in some cases, I want to supply my own. So: I made plotted.io. It’s a simple little web app that lets you add maps from books and annotate them.
You can upload an image of a map - like the drawing on those first pages - of the fantasy world. Or if the story you’re interested in happens in the ‘real world’ (even in fiction), you can choose a ‘real world’ map to annotate.
I have a personal reading journal site, but that’s only for me. I’m the only one who can post there. But Plotted is for everyone! Anybody can grab an account and add a map.
A great example of this is Dracula. The core of the story happens in two places: Transylvania and England. it’s fun to explore a map of where those places really ARE. And there are a couple of plot-relevant journeys in the book (the voyage of the Demeter, and the final race back to Transylvania) where actually knowing the geography really adds to the story. When Dracula causes a storm and fog, the ship Demeter wanders right through the English channel, without a chance to stop for help. Stoker’s original audience would understand this intuitively, but I sure didn’t as an American. Seeing this on a map really drives the story home!
But I think it’s also just as fun when you annotate a fictional place. Like: when you read The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, didn’t you want to visualize all the crossing paths of Aiden Bishop? I know I did. So I made a map!
This is a little half-baked for now, but it absolutely scratches my itch. I can:
- upload a map
- associate it with a book
- draw lines on the map
- add pins on the map
- and label things
- and share that map with others
Is this going to satisfy the real obsessives? Probably not. For fiction worlds where there is a deep bench of expertise - Middle-Earth, Westeros, etc - there’s already going to be some other mapping project. But for the rest of us, we can use this.