Around the World in 70 Maps: The International Youth Library Presents a New Traveling Exhibition Featuring Three Centuries of Cartographic Treasures from Children’s Literature

Maps are a special kind of functional literature that depicts the world in its entirety or in segments of continents, countries, oceans, mountains, islands, cities, buildings, travel routes, and much more. Yet they are more than merely useful—they are so fascinating to us because they convey history and traditions, document scientific knowledge, and visualize power relations. They lead and accompany us to unknown regions, stir our curiosity, and invite us to discover the world as we trace along their surfaces with our fingers. However, no matter how detailed and precise they aim to be, maps are never representations of “reality” but rather two-dimensional representations of how people imagine the world to be, how they perceive it and give it structure, and how they orient themselves in it, as well as what they choose to value. Sites are mapped for the purpose of making them easier to grasp and to make them more comprehensible. At the same time, they are shaped by the perspectives of the person who commissioned the map and of the map maker.

When one asks children’s book experts about maps in books for young readers, one is often met with blank stares. Some might first think of maps in non-fiction books, where they are sometimes a necessary means of transmitting information. But maps in novels or picture books? After some reflection, they might wager some initial suggestions: Isn’t there a map featured in Stevenson’s Treasure Island? What about the novels of Jules Verne, the travelogues of Joachim Heinrich Campe, or one of the first true children’s book classics, Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson?, Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, and not least, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings might round out their listing efforts.

Even these few samples show that maps in children’s and young adult books are not all that uncommon. Perhaps they are undervalued, considered unimportant supplemental material, or simply overlooked because they appear on the endpapers of a book or are tucked away as folded maps.

Since maps in children’s and young adult literature have a long history and are surprisingly diverse, a plan emerged in the International Youth Library two years ago to develop an exhibition documenting that tradition and diversity, as well as promoting maps as a special kind of book illustration. Research to assemble the exhibition proved itself to be relatively challenging as there is as yet no specialist literature covering the field. In addition, libraries only rarely note maps in their cataloguing, and keyword searches in library catalogues lead nowhere. The hunt for material to exhibit thus relied heavily on library staff recollections and memories of having seen maps in particular books, sifting through book shelves meter after meter, and leafing through countless books until cartographic treasures gradually surfaced.

When one looks at maps featured in children’s and young adult books more closely, the great range of map types and representational styles becomes evident. For instance, albeit quite rarely, there are maps made in the style of conventional political or topographical maps. They depict geographical realms in two-dimensional form, where the reader looks down at the landscape directly from above at a ninety degree angle, and they mainly rely on drawn lines, marked areas, colors, symbols, and written notations. Most maps in children’s and young adult books, in fact, mix conventional maps with book illustration; they reveal more detail, show landscapes, people, animals, and buildings, and they often have a clearly narrative form and function to the degree that they incorporate plot events. In many of these maps, the observer looks on what is being represented at a forty-five degree angle—that is, from a bird’s eye or airplane perspective—which makes the represented more or less three dimensional (i.e., realistically spatial). On the whole, whether precise and detailed, sketch-like, or painterly and expressive; modest black-and...