Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus (serialized in 1913 and published as a book in 1914) takes place on the estate of the wealthy inventor Martial Canterel. The 1965 edition by Jean-Jacques Pauvert includes, as an appendix, maps and diagrams by Jean Ferry. Here’s Ferry’s depiction of Canterel’s estate.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The Dell mapbacks were not confined to mysteries. Here, for example, is the map intended to guide the reader through P. G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith. Perhaps the presence of jewel thieves made the book enough of a mystery to warrant it.

More surprisingly, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Cave Girl, in which a modern collegiate must become a savage fighter to win the love of the eponymous cave girl, also required a map. The plot, essentially a series of fights, isn’t hard to follow, but the map is attractive anyway.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Some of the most popular literary maps were featured on Dell’s “mapbacks.” In the 1940s and 1950s, these handsome paperbacks carried a map of the story on the back cover, presumably to help the reader to follow the action. Most of them were mysteries, but there were some interesting exceptions. Here’s the map for Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town (1948).

The map for The Man Who Didn’t Exist, by Geoffrey Homes (1944), took a different approach, showing the interior of a single house.

Both of these showed fictional locations. Brett Halliday’s Counterfeit Wife (1949), however, took place in Miami, so the map showed the real Miami, with fictional locations indicated by numbers.

I only hope all three approaches helped readers keep track of the often convoluted plots.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Our second literary map was drawn by James Branch Cabell, to show Poictesme, the fictional country featured in many of his novels. To keep things imaginary, he attributed it to an equally fictional chronicler of Poictesme, John Frederick Lewistam. The map first appeared in James Branch Cabell, by Carl Van Doren, Robert M. McBride, New York, 1925. Please click on it to enlarge it.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

This site has lain dormant for several months; it’s time to revive it. I’ll bring it back with a series of literary maps. The literary map is an odd genre. Unlike a standard map, it doesn’t guide the viewer over real terrain, but through an imaginary space. It can either show a series of fictional events in a real location, or a series of events in a fictional setting.

Here, as an example of the former, is a map of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, from A Literary & Historical Atlas of Europe, by J. G. Bartholomew (Everyman’s Library, 1910). Please click to enlarge.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara is now available from Black Scat Books!

Isidore Isou, the founder of the artistic movement Letterism, was a great admirer of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. So, when Tzara died in 1963, Isou disrupted the funeral to give the great provocateur a properly raucous sendoff. Isou’s lively account of the proceedings is both a polemic against traditional funerals and a warm declaration of his affection and admiration for Tzara.

Isou’s text was originally published in 1964. My translation of it was first published in a limited edition by Black Scat Books in 2012. This revised edition is much improved and is now available to all readers interested in Isou and Tzara.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Our 34th Old Maid deck was published around 1900 by Milton Bradley. Atypically, it includes pairs of objects as well as people. Not only is there a Farmer, Golf Girl, Politician, and Red Cross Nurse, but such objects as a Yacht, Typewriter, Automobile, and this oddly-named Graphophone. And here’s the Old Maid, who seems to be in a very bad mood.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Feeding Time is now available from Black Scat Books!

This collection of Alphonse Allais’s short pieces, originally published in 1897, shows the great French humorist at his best, spinning out stories, fables, dialogues, and articles with elegance and imagination. You’ll find clandestine train stations and incandescent leeks, the rules for attending funerals with a bicycle, proposals for celluloid money and explosive confetti, the diplomatic problems of flatulence, and a gallery of swindlers, lovers, and adulterers. Allais’s most popular character, Captain Cap, appears to describe cannon billiards and to suggest replacing carrier pigeons with fish. Translated, annotated, and introduced by Doug Skinner, who also drew the frontispiece.

With this book, Black Scat Books’ editor Norman Conquest and I complete our Alphonse Allais library. It includes all eleven of the collections Allais called his “Anthumous Works,” plus six additional volumes: Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks; The Blaireau Affair (Allais’s only novel); Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais; I Am Sarcey (his stories featuring Francisque Sarcey); Alphonse Allais’s Masks: Deluxe Special Edition (an illustrated version of one of his stories); and a sampler, The Alphonse Allais Reader.

Allais’s work was praised by, among others, André Breton, René Magritte, Umberto Eco, Rachilde, Marcel Duchamp. Harry Mathews, and the Collège de ‘Pataphysique. And here it is for English readers!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The Virtuoso Parrot is now available from Black Scat Books!

Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet (1828-1900) wrote hundreds of startling articles and stories about secret societies, hidden bloodlines, and his own idiosyncratic views of history. His obsession with finding puns and rebuses, in both ancient inscriptions and modern speech, influenced generations of occultists; it was the inspiration for the “language of the birds” expounded by the enigmatic Fulcanelli.

My translation is Grasset d’Orcet’s first appearance in English. It contains five of his odd and often hilarious short stories and a contemporary obituary, as well as my introduction and detailed notes on his ideas and allusions.

At last, the virtuoso parrot speaks to English readers!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Music From Elsewhere is now available from Strange Attractor Press!

This book collects and discusses music derived from unusual sources, including music attributed to fairies, trolls, trowies, banshees, aliens, angels, spirits, time slips, and dreams. You’ll also find chapters on speculative and cryptographic music, and on music from birds and other natural sounds. It’s 272 pages, richly illustrated in green and black (designed by the remarkable Tihana Šare), with 112 pages of historical sheet music. Also available in a limited hardback edition of 300, with a signed bookplate. Purchase includes a link to an MP3 album of Doug Skinner performing some of the music, recorded by Brian Dewan. Published by Strange Attractor Press in the UK, and distributed in the US by The MIT Press.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)