The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

In my mid-teens, I was given a Christmas present, a copy of a book called The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (binding already cracked – guess my parents couldn't help themselves). And when I look back on it, it's impossible to calculate the influence on my thought since.

The whole premise is that it is a catalog of imaginary places, along with tips for imagined travelers, which are actually quite narrowly defined. For instance, any place that is really just a stand-in for a real place is excluded (e.g. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi). As is anything “not on Earth,” whether in heaven or hell or on another planet. And last, and most controversially and infuriatingly, those places that “could” exist based on the logic of how we assume the world to work, such as the decaying home of Dickens' Miss Havisham. These were places of pure irreality, and this was designed as the guidebook.

This was also natural extension of who I was as a child who had loved the classification of all things, taking out all of my toy cars and baseball cards and sorting them in infinite ways, who had loved atlases and encyclopedias and anything that sought to contain the world. Sure, for several years, I had been an American teenager, with everything that implied, and moreover had been a smart enough, snarky enough American teenager around the turn of the 21^st Century (see attached items: Nirvana's “Nevermind,” Outkast's “Stankonia,” Donnie Darko, Lost in Translation), and had a lot of fuck-you in me, but I was still someone who loved the scientific organization of things, especially in geography (the laws of all space) and geology (space and time as expressed in the ground beneath our feet).

I was already familiar with a number of the authors mentioned. A number of the haunts of broadly familiar characters showed up – the Wizard of Oz, the Beauty and the Beast, Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter all made appearances. But a few of the locales reflected what I considered to be a more idiosyncratic vein. Like H.P. Lovecraft, an unhappy proto-neckbeard who tried to write like a vampire lord locked in his castle, and decorated his prose with long-abandoned archaeological and paleontological jargon. Or Jorge Luis Borges, with his famous classification of all animals by a Chinese scholar, most likely a fiction of Borges himself, a man who could rest comfortably with the unchallengeability of his breadth of esoteric knowledge in a pre-Internet era, and who could therefore simply be cast as an all-knowing mandarin (as an aside, one of the co-authors, Alberto Manguel, had occupied role previously held by Borges, as the director of the National Library of Argentina).

But there was something else, a hint of the future. A whole index of names to look into for starters, writers who also dreamed of vast imaginary worlds, but also didn't constrain themselves to the “speculative” genres, and who certainly weren't widely read in Middle America.

And the text was accompanied with these almost Victorian maps and unearthly engravings, so clearly modeled on the frontispieces of the sort of books I would find at used bookstores and libraries, antique editions of Gothic romances and boys' adventure books and epistolary novels and scientists' travelogues no one had read in years.

Perhaps those that I would most obviously fall in love with could be called “postmodernists,” and I was to read their books in short order. Umberto Eco, for one, and Italo Calvino, whose work I would soon develop a fawning love of.

After all, the first edition of the Dictionary of Imaginary Places was published in 1980, just as American audiences were first becoming familiar with the concepts that would soon become ensconced in college humanities departments as “theory” – intertextuality, Barthes' death of the author, the idea of the world as essentially consisting of sign systems.

But what interested me more, in the long run, were all of the forgottens and also-rans from much earlier eras. Who knew, for instance, that L. Frank Baum wrote countless other books set in the world of Oz? And there were other writers, people like Anthony Hope, Paul Féval, Horace Walpole, and James Branch Cabell who once commanded massive audiences, but have now been left to gather mildew. It's not so much that I was necessarily interested in these guys as writers – to be honest, I still haven't finished a single book by most of them, and some of them that I have tried to read have proven turgidly unreadable in that particular pre-modernist way – but more that they represented a current in popular fiction, which back then constituted a major part of the popular imagination that has since been abandoned.

And some were simply unavailable – I'm remembering one in particular. A book by the 19^th Century Italian author Amedeo Tosetti, Pedali sul Mar Nero, in which “Tartars” on bicycles lived inside a steel egg called Malacovia in the marshes at the mouth of the Danube. Something I always kept an eye out for, before realizing it was never translated.

It was only in discovering places that never existed that I discovered places and times that did exist. So consequently, it did act as a guidebook for me, albeit in a completely different way.

Fiction becomes the way in which we see features of our reality separate from immediate perception. Like a camera obscura, we see our world turned upside down, and see the things we never saw before.