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Dictionary of Imaginary Places
From Atlantis to Xanadu and beyond, this Baedeker of make-believe takes readers on a tour of more than 1,200 realms invented by storytellers from Homer's day to our own. Here you will find Shangri-La and El Dorado; Utopia and Middle Earth; Wonderland and Freedonia. Here too are Jurassic Park, Salman Rushdie's Sea of Stories, and the fabulous world of Harry Potter. The history and behavior of the inhabitants of these lands are described in loving detail, and are supplemented by more than 200 maps and illustrations that depict the lay of the land in a host of elsewheres. A must-have for the library of every dedicated reader, fantasy fan, or passionate browser, Dictionary is a witty and acute guide for any armchair traveler's journey into the landscape of the imagination.
454 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
86 people are currently reading
4848 people want to read
About the author
Alberto Manguel
254 books1,810 followersAlberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991).
Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves.
Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 98 reviews
October 14, 2024
Alberto Manguel'in Gianni Guadalupi ile beraber yazdığı Hayali Yerler Sözlüğü'nü karıştırmayı -şimdilik- tamamladım. Bu 1000 sayfalık sözlüğü baştan sona okumadım, açıkçası başta niyetim öyle yapmaktı ama okudukça her şeyin kafamda birbirine girdiğini fark edince dizini kullanarak okuduğum kitaplardaki bildiğim yerlere dair maddelere bakmaya ve açıp açıp rastgele bir şeyler okumaya karar verdim ki bu ikincisini yapmaya devam edeceğim bence, zira insanın ufkunu müthiş biçimde açan, çok çok önemli bir eser olduğunu düşünüyorum bunun.
Manguel ve Guadalupi; romanlarda, efsanelerde, filmlerde geçen yerlerin dizinini oluşturmak gibi deli işi bir projeye girişmişler. O mekanlara dair yazılmış şeyleri okuyup derlemiş, oraların coğrafyasına, sosyolojisine, siyasi durumuna dair maddeler kalem almışlar. İnanılmaz bir emek ve insanın hayal gücünün neler yapabileceğinin, ne özgün mekanlar yaratabileceğinin ispatı gibi bir kitap çıkmış ortaya.
Alberto Ruy Sanchez'in Mogador'undan Ursula K. Le Guin'in Yerdeniz'ine, Saramago'nun Körler Şehri'nden Borges'in Xiros'una, elbette ki Marquez'in Macodo'sundan Daniel Defoe'nun adasına, Casares'in Villings'inden Crichton'ın Jurassic Park'ına... Sayfalar arasında öyle çok yer gezdim ki, başım döndü resmen. Maddelere eşlik eden ve Graham Greene imzalı illüstrasyon ve haritaların da hepsi birbirinden güzel.
Çok, çok sevdim. Dediğim gibi ara ara açıp hiç duymadığım, fiziksel olarak hiç var olmamış ama onca okurun zihninde kendine yer edinmiş türlü yerlere seyahat etmeye devam edeceğim bu kitapla. Çünkü ön sözde Sir Thomas Browne'dan alıntıladıkları gibi: "Dışarıda aradığımız mucizeleri içimizde taşıyoruz. Afrika da, harikaları da içimizdedir." ❤️
Manguel ve Guadalupi; romanlarda, efsanelerde, filmlerde geçen yerlerin dizinini oluşturmak gibi deli işi bir projeye girişmişler. O mekanlara dair yazılmış şeyleri okuyup derlemiş, oraların coğrafyasına, sosyolojisine, siyasi durumuna dair maddeler kalem almışlar. İnanılmaz bir emek ve insanın hayal gücünün neler yapabileceğinin, ne özgün mekanlar yaratabileceğinin ispatı gibi bir kitap çıkmış ortaya.
Alberto Ruy Sanchez'in Mogador'undan Ursula K. Le Guin'in Yerdeniz'ine, Saramago'nun Körler Şehri'nden Borges'in Xiros'una, elbette ki Marquez'in Macodo'sundan Daniel Defoe'nun adasına, Casares'in Villings'inden Crichton'ın Jurassic Park'ına... Sayfalar arasında öyle çok yer gezdim ki, başım döndü resmen. Maddelere eşlik eden ve Graham Greene imzalı illüstrasyon ve haritaların da hepsi birbirinden güzel.
Çok, çok sevdim. Dediğim gibi ara ara açıp hiç duymadığım, fiziksel olarak hiç var olmamış ama onca okurun zihninde kendine yer edinmiş türlü yerlere seyahat etmeye devam edeceğim bu kitapla. Çünkü ön sözde Sir Thomas Browne'dan alıntıladıkları gibi: "Dışarıda aradığımız mucizeleri içimizde taşıyoruz. Afrika da, harikaları da içimizdedir." ❤️
September 26, 2010
More of a novelty than anything else, the Dictionary of Imaginary Places is just that... a big fat alphabetized compendium of places that exist only in legends and myths and novels and other stories. It's the kind of book that aspiring novelists put on their coffee tables to impress other aspiring hipster novelists.
"What's with all those sticky notes and penciled in remarks?"
"Oh, you know. Research. Annotations."
"And this whole sheet stuffed in there?"
"I was trying to see what it would look like with my Imaginary Place in there."
It's a good time. And a bit of a guilty pleasure. And it's useful if you need to quickly brush up on who resides at Locus Solus, or the location of Valinor in relation to Middle-earth, or which countries surround Oz. But if you want to get in-depth, best to put down the Dictionary and dig into primary sources.
"What's with all those sticky notes and penciled in remarks?"
"Oh, you know. Research. Annotations."
"And this whole sheet stuffed in there?"
"I was trying to see what it would look like with my Imaginary Place in there."
It's a good time. And a bit of a guilty pleasure. And it's useful if you need to quickly brush up on who resides at Locus Solus, or the location of Valinor in relation to Middle-earth, or which countries surround Oz. But if you want to get in-depth, best to put down the Dictionary and dig into primary sources.
April 3, 2020
Niezwykła książka - czytelnicza przygoda na wiele godzin, dni i pewnie lat. Świetni tłumacze, a do tego polskie hasła dodane przez Jana Gondowicza i Andrzeja Brzozowskiego.
"Wszyscy mamy problem z listopadem. Nie chodzi tylko o to, że pogoda nas nie rozpieszcza, nagle jest ciemno, ponuro, zimno, deszczowo. Ale o ten czas, pomiędzy wspomnieniem zmarłych, smutno obchodzoną w Polsce rocznicą odzyskania niepodległości, a wybuchem świątecznego szaleństwa konsumpcjonizmu, które niekoniecznie musi wprawiać nas w dobry humor. Zbliżamy się do końca roku, nasze mózgi zaczynają pracować nad podsumowaniami, niektórzy myślą o postanowieniach. Zero radości, mówię wam. Co należy zrobić? Samemu sobie do domu radość przynieść. Lub wybrać kuriera. A ten najlepiej niech przyniesie wam „Słownik miejsc wyobrażonych”, dzieło monumentalne, dzięki któremu w każdej chwili będziecie mogli się przenieść do krajów odległych, szalonych i wyobrażonych. Najbezpieczniejsza ucieczka z dostępnych w naszej kulturze"
Więcej w empikowym magazynie Pasje.
"Wszyscy mamy problem z listopadem. Nie chodzi tylko o to, że pogoda nas nie rozpieszcza, nagle jest ciemno, ponuro, zimno, deszczowo. Ale o ten czas, pomiędzy wspomnieniem zmarłych, smutno obchodzoną w Polsce rocznicą odzyskania niepodległości, a wybuchem świątecznego szaleństwa konsumpcjonizmu, które niekoniecznie musi wprawiać nas w dobry humor. Zbliżamy się do końca roku, nasze mózgi zaczynają pracować nad podsumowaniami, niektórzy myślą o postanowieniach. Zero radości, mówię wam. Co należy zrobić? Samemu sobie do domu radość przynieść. Lub wybrać kuriera. A ten najlepiej niech przyniesie wam „Słownik miejsc wyobrażonych”, dzieło monumentalne, dzięki któremu w każdej chwili będziecie mogli się przenieść do krajów odległych, szalonych i wyobrażonych. Najbezpieczniejsza ucieczka z dostępnych w naszej kulturze"
Więcej w empikowym magazynie Pasje.
September 5, 2007
This is an absolutely fabulous book for anyone of any age. If you're capable of letting your mind wander to far off and completely fictional places, you'll be entranced immediately. Its the kind of thing you read a few pages of before bed to ensure charming and enchanting dreams.
October 27, 2020
You've probably seen this book at the bookstore, on the discount shelves. It's one of those books that was meant to be on the discount shelves, for whatever reason the book trade has for that strategy.
Anyway, I bought it long ago as a reference, since I deal in imaginary worlds and imaginary places on a professional basis. And it's a decent reference source, in fact. I didn't fully realize until I decided to read it cover-to-cover that it's also a bit of a satire travel guide. That made the read amusing, rather than tedious.
As I say, I bought it years ago, figuring it might be a good thing to have on the shelf. It proved to be a good reference for various Utopias, hollow Earths, and fictional cities and islands. It's also a good one for flipping through, just to get writing or art ideas.
It's laid out as an encyclopedia and includes maps for many of the more famous venues (like Earthsea, Arkham, and Middle-Earth), including a nice one of Oz and the surrounding territories. One stipulation for inclusion is that the place is on this planet, not some other planet. Each place listed ends with the citation of the work it's from, and that has led me to many discoveries of interesting authors and unfamiliar books.
One of the amusements is that if several authors wrote about the same place, the Dictionary assumes that all of them are true. Another of the amusements is that the authors include travel advice for many of these places: "Travellers are warned that Beelzebub shoots arrows at those who have succeeded in crossing the Slough of Despond..." "...visitors are warned that not even the greatest magician can look into the eye of a dragon and live." "Captain Jason of the Argo survived an encounter with them during his famous journey but inexperienced travellers are advised to avoid them if at all possible."
Worth owning, especially for writers of speculative fiction or magical realism, or if planning a visit to any of these venues. I found that two pages a day was the best way to read it, if so inclined.
Anyway, I bought it long ago as a reference, since I deal in imaginary worlds and imaginary places on a professional basis. And it's a decent reference source, in fact. I didn't fully realize until I decided to read it cover-to-cover that it's also a bit of a satire travel guide. That made the read amusing, rather than tedious.
As I say, I bought it years ago, figuring it might be a good thing to have on the shelf. It proved to be a good reference for various Utopias, hollow Earths, and fictional cities and islands. It's also a good one for flipping through, just to get writing or art ideas.
It's laid out as an encyclopedia and includes maps for many of the more famous venues (like Earthsea, Arkham, and Middle-Earth), including a nice one of Oz and the surrounding territories. One stipulation for inclusion is that the place is on this planet, not some other planet. Each place listed ends with the citation of the work it's from, and that has led me to many discoveries of interesting authors and unfamiliar books.
One of the amusements is that if several authors wrote about the same place, the Dictionary assumes that all of them are true. Another of the amusements is that the authors include travel advice for many of these places: "Travellers are warned that Beelzebub shoots arrows at those who have succeeded in crossing the Slough of Despond..." "...visitors are warned that not even the greatest magician can look into the eye of a dragon and live." "Captain Jason of the Argo survived an encounter with them during his famous journey but inexperienced travellers are advised to avoid them if at all possible."
Worth owning, especially for writers of speculative fiction or magical realism, or if planning a visit to any of these venues. I found that two pages a day was the best way to read it, if so inclined.
December 13, 2019
Perełka dla fanów fantastyki, fantastycznych słowników i wspaniałości wyobraźni. Idealny jako towarzysz sentymentalnych podróży po dawnych lekturach, źródło niesamowitych odkryć na półkę do przeczytania (i sprowadzenia po angielsku) oraz jako ciekawy dodatek do bibliografii.
PS Żeby nie było - nie przeczytałem od deski do deski. Ale nadal sobie zaglądam.
PS Żeby nie było - nie przeczytałem od deski do deski. Ale nadal sobie zaglądam.
May 12, 2013
I fell upon this book when it was first published like a punter attacking an ice-cream during the interval in an over-hot theatre. Just the title had me drooling, and once inside the book I was in seventh heaven. First of all it took places described in a range of literary works as literally true by giving each a Baedeker-style travel guide entry. Then, like any good Baedeker it provided maps and charts giving visual aids to familiar and unfamiliar locations. There have been at least two revised editions since 1980 but this was the first attempt to give an overview of dystopias, utopias, fantasy worlds and comic geographies from different cultures, languages and centuries. The mock-seriousness is sometimes leavened with equally tongue-in-cheek humour though I found that at times the terseness of some entries could be wearing.
Just a few examples of entries, almost at random, may give you a flavour. Bluebeard’s Castle, for example is described as “somewhere in France; the exact location remains unknown. The castle is famed for its many riches and fine furniture, tapestries and full-length mirrors with frames of gold. Travellers – in particular female ones – should proceed with caution…” Some places are in distant lands, such as King Solomon’s Mines, “discovered by Allan Quatermain’s expedition to Kukuanaland, Africa, in 1884″, or Shangri-La, which can “only be reached on foot and visitors are infrequent.” In contrast Ruritania is “a European kingdom reached by train from Dresden” while Wonderland is “a kingdom under England, inhabited by a pack of cards and a few other creatures.”
Here you can find entries for Atlantis and Oz, Camelot and Treasure Island, Middle Earth and Erewhon, Arkham and Hyperborea, Lilliput and Gormenghast, plus a plethora of more obscure places culled from even more obscure titles. Graham Greenfield’s wonderful line drawings have an antique quality about them which only adds to the sense of strangeness and wonder, while the maps and charts by James Cook are a joy to peruse and explore. Some maps from 1980 needed revision (Narnia, for example, had some crucial omissions and misplacements), but their consistent olde-worlde look (with hachures rather than contour lines, for instance, and Renaissance-style typefaces) is charming and lends character to the whole presentation.
In addition to the alphabetical listing of places, the authors include an index of authors and titles to help you cross reference. For example, if you can’t remember some of the cities visited by Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities they are handily included here. Which only helps to underscore that The Dictionary of Imaginary Places is a treasure chest to dip into again and again.
http://wp.me/s2oNj1-places
Just a few examples of entries, almost at random, may give you a flavour. Bluebeard’s Castle, for example is described as “somewhere in France; the exact location remains unknown. The castle is famed for its many riches and fine furniture, tapestries and full-length mirrors with frames of gold. Travellers – in particular female ones – should proceed with caution…” Some places are in distant lands, such as King Solomon’s Mines, “discovered by Allan Quatermain’s expedition to Kukuanaland, Africa, in 1884″, or Shangri-La, which can “only be reached on foot and visitors are infrequent.” In contrast Ruritania is “a European kingdom reached by train from Dresden” while Wonderland is “a kingdom under England, inhabited by a pack of cards and a few other creatures.”
Here you can find entries for Atlantis and Oz, Camelot and Treasure Island, Middle Earth and Erewhon, Arkham and Hyperborea, Lilliput and Gormenghast, plus a plethora of more obscure places culled from even more obscure titles. Graham Greenfield’s wonderful line drawings have an antique quality about them which only adds to the sense of strangeness and wonder, while the maps and charts by James Cook are a joy to peruse and explore. Some maps from 1980 needed revision (Narnia, for example, had some crucial omissions and misplacements), but their consistent olde-worlde look (with hachures rather than contour lines, for instance, and Renaissance-style typefaces) is charming and lends character to the whole presentation.
In addition to the alphabetical listing of places, the authors include an index of authors and titles to help you cross reference. For example, if you can’t remember some of the cities visited by Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities they are handily included here. Which only helps to underscore that The Dictionary of Imaginary Places is a treasure chest to dip into again and again.
http://wp.me/s2oNj1-places
March 30, 2020
Prilično zabavno, a posebno cijenim ozbiljnost kojom se katalogiziraju i najbizarnija imaginarna mjesta, poput prostora iz nonsensnih pjesmica. Fun fact: cijeli niz autora (ne autorica) pisalo je o fantastičnim, izoliranim otocima ili mjestima na kojima žive samo žene, uključujući i divovske žene.... Neke od knjiga iz kojih su opisana mjesta stvarno bih voljela pročitati, a sigurno ću potražiti Rootabaga stories Carla Sandburga i ponovno pročitati priče Marka Twaina. Fun fact 2: i Krležina Blitva je na popisu!
August 2, 2016
Nesta era em que cada milímetro quadrado do planeta está mapeado com rigor, observado pelo olhar lenticular dos satélites em órbita, cada recanto registado pelas suas coordenadas no espaço abstracto dos meridianos e paralelos, fotografado nos espectros do infravermelho ao ultravioleta, calcorreado por exploradores, aventureiros ou servos de gigantes tecnológicos apostados em digitalizar o planeta, traçado em atlas e mapas pixelizados, precisamos talvez mais do que nunca de espaços desconhecidos, de vazios nos mapas que prometem dragões e ao fazê-lo despertam os voos mais exóticos da imaginação humana. Foi este o meu primeiro pensamento ao folhear este delicioso tomo. Escrevi isto antes de o abrir com olhos de leitor, e só depois li o fantástico prefácio de Manguel, que espelha com precisão esta necessidade de imaginar o desconhecido na era onde as luzes do conhecimento iluminam o mais recôndito, longínquo ou obscuro. Não só, mas também o fascínio pelos voos de imaginação, pelos locais que existem em mapas que mapeiam não a geografia física mas os escolhos e penedos da imaginação sonhadora.
A lista é longa e exaustiva, itemizada de A a Z. Duvido que tenha esgotado as geografias imaginárias da literatura. Não vi por lá referências à FC, tendo os autores ido beber às especulações filosóficas, história antiga, fantástico, fantasia e surrealismo. Depois do longo mergulho nos apontamentos sobre estes mundos, há padrões que se fazem notar. Um é o óbvio encantamento dos autores por uma certa fantasia épica, bem como de alguma fantasia infantil. Richard Adams, Ursula K. LeGuin e Tolkien têm um peso muito elevado nas entradas deste dicionário. Os mundos de Oz e Dr. Doolittle não são tão interessantes quanto o peso que têm neste livro. O outro grande padrão é a evolução conceptual dos mundos de ficção. Apesar do livro não estar ordenado de forma cronológica, nota-se que há uma evolução das geografias imaginárias. Nos textos mais antigos são utilizados como parábola filosófica, utópica, satírica ou religiosa. A tónica está na mensagem que os autores pretendiam inculcar nos seus leitores, e não na coerência dos mundos ficcionais. Um elemento que se altera, com a ficção a explorar estas geografias do imaginário apenas pelo prazer de criar novos mundos, algo que caracteriza a fantasia de hoje.
A lista é longa e exaustiva, itemizada de A a Z. Duvido que tenha esgotado as geografias imaginárias da literatura. Não vi por lá referências à FC, tendo os autores ido beber às especulações filosóficas, história antiga, fantástico, fantasia e surrealismo. Depois do longo mergulho nos apontamentos sobre estes mundos, há padrões que se fazem notar. Um é o óbvio encantamento dos autores por uma certa fantasia épica, bem como de alguma fantasia infantil. Richard Adams, Ursula K. LeGuin e Tolkien têm um peso muito elevado nas entradas deste dicionário. Os mundos de Oz e Dr. Doolittle não são tão interessantes quanto o peso que têm neste livro. O outro grande padrão é a evolução conceptual dos mundos de ficção. Apesar do livro não estar ordenado de forma cronológica, nota-se que há uma evolução das geografias imaginárias. Nos textos mais antigos são utilizados como parábola filosófica, utópica, satírica ou religiosa. A tónica está na mensagem que os autores pretendiam inculcar nos seus leitores, e não na coerência dos mundos ficcionais. Um elemento que se altera, com a ficção a explorar estas geografias do imaginário apenas pelo prazer de criar novos mundos, algo que caracteriza a fantasia de hoje.
January 2, 2016
Un libro extraño. Como un atlas de literatura fantástica con mapas incluidos. Increible
July 31, 2025
I did not suddenly read this but have been picking away at it a page or two before sleep without much consistency since around January 2024. It is too dry a read to sit straight through – literally a dictionary though written more in the style of an ethno- and geographic travelogue collected from literature and a few films – and it is remarkable the speed with which the information of an entry would fall out of my head once I had moved on to the next one: faster and more unremembered than waking from a dream into a new one. And these are the dreams of kingdoms: shipwrecked islands, underground worlds, impossible castles, and every ideal of utopia to march through like a desert of mirages. Because it was inspired by Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, and every one of his is featured, perhaps it was the hope of the authors this book would distill into a similar effect, although I side with Calvino it is a more difficult read than that. A remarkable project nonetheless. It has been updated a few times since it came out, but mine was one of the earliest editions.
Currently in a gaming gap from regular reading and it will be a big one since I’m catching up on Morrowind.
Currently in a gaming gap from regular reading and it will be a big one since I’m catching up on Morrowind.
November 1, 2009
One of my favorite books for browsing. An inexhaustible index of imaginary lands in literature from The Grand Duchy of Fenwick to Burrough's Pellucidar to Carroll's Wonderland. Many entries are illustrated with maps and all come with detailed descriptions of the lands. The fact that the writers treat these entries like they are real places that you may travel to, simply lends a delightful air in the enjoyment of this book. I've had this book since its first publication in 1987 and I never fail to find something new each time I pick it up.
December 31, 2018
"This is the book that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends." This is truly how I felt in the last couple of days as I was trying to finish reading it before New Year. Even my husband was trying to figure out what was going on when I would tell him I basically had the same number of pages to finish even though I had been reading it non-stop for two hours.
As for the actual places within it I noticed that there were two different categories. The first were fictional places that everyone already knows about more or less. The second were fantastical accounts of someone who got shipwrecked while making a record of it. As a result the book was very unbalanced.
The fantastical places were everything that you would think from the serial authors of the day: Oz, Tarzan and the other series from the same author, Narnia, Middle Earth, Doctor Dolittle, Earth Sea, etc. And there were occasionally other smaller fantastical or horror settings included such as a few from H.P. Lovecraft, Toad Hall, Baskerville and Babar's Kingdom.
All of these were places that more or less I had heard about although Cthulthu's abode surprisingly wasn't mentioned for H.P. and amazingly they included Edgar Allen Poe. As such there was an over-abundance of information in some cases while in the example of Beast's Castle there was barely any information provided.
For the secondary group those were the places I was actually surprised they did include since I hadn't heard of most of them. The title of their books and/or manuscripts was a whole summary in itself while basically they were all repeats of each other with a few details changed I guess to make it a bit more authentic. Most of these locations were deeply looked into and as a result the reader got to see what the narrator believed about Socialism, religion, Communism, gender reversal, etc. These were the spots that made me want to go bury my head in the sand since they were all so preachy, man is coming to an end and a doorway to vice since who cares if you are incestuous as long as you are the only ones on your island.
As a result the telling of the entries was quite unbalanced depending upon their category that entry fell into. Furthermore the main sources for an entry were given in their native language so there were a lot of hard-to-pronounce foreign books. In this instance I wish they had translated it to English while including a notes page in the back for the actual language.
Locations unknown was quite common and so suggestions for what you should do as a visitor was a bit of a joke in these cases. Others just chose to give you a location but didn't think of including you as a guest.
All in all for those who may like to armchair travel it may be a decent read if you don't mind the wordiness. For those who enjoy more modern travel spots like Red Wall, Pippi's Island and so many more you will be quite disappointed in their missing from the pages. Then again you also have to take into consideration that they may not have been published before this came out.
As for the actual places within it I noticed that there were two different categories. The first were fictional places that everyone already knows about more or less. The second were fantastical accounts of someone who got shipwrecked while making a record of it. As a result the book was very unbalanced.
The fantastical places were everything that you would think from the serial authors of the day: Oz, Tarzan and the other series from the same author, Narnia, Middle Earth, Doctor Dolittle, Earth Sea, etc. And there were occasionally other smaller fantastical or horror settings included such as a few from H.P. Lovecraft, Toad Hall, Baskerville and Babar's Kingdom.
All of these were places that more or less I had heard about although Cthulthu's abode surprisingly wasn't mentioned for H.P. and amazingly they included Edgar Allen Poe. As such there was an over-abundance of information in some cases while in the example of Beast's Castle there was barely any information provided.
For the secondary group those were the places I was actually surprised they did include since I hadn't heard of most of them. The title of their books and/or manuscripts was a whole summary in itself while basically they were all repeats of each other with a few details changed I guess to make it a bit more authentic. Most of these locations were deeply looked into and as a result the reader got to see what the narrator believed about Socialism, religion, Communism, gender reversal, etc. These were the spots that made me want to go bury my head in the sand since they were all so preachy, man is coming to an end and a doorway to vice since who cares if you are incestuous as long as you are the only ones on your island.
As a result the telling of the entries was quite unbalanced depending upon their category that entry fell into. Furthermore the main sources for an entry were given in their native language so there were a lot of hard-to-pronounce foreign books. In this instance I wish they had translated it to English while including a notes page in the back for the actual language.
Locations unknown was quite common and so suggestions for what you should do as a visitor was a bit of a joke in these cases. Others just chose to give you a location but didn't think of including you as a guest.
All in all for those who may like to armchair travel it may be a decent read if you don't mind the wordiness. For those who enjoy more modern travel spots like Red Wall, Pippi's Island and so many more you will be quite disappointed in their missing from the pages. Then again you also have to take into consideration that they may not have been published before this came out.
April 13, 2018
If you're like me and you hate going to the internet whenever you read about Graustark or Islandia...this is the book for you. It's a phonebook sized compendium of every fantastic land. More recent updates include Hogwarts. Worth buying for the entry on Oz alone.
(Probably not worth paying full price for, but usually fairly easy to find in used bookstores)
(Probably not worth paying full price for, but usually fairly easy to find in used bookstores)
April 18, 2020
A quick look through this book makes it one I will keep on my desk for reference.
January 9, 2026
‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’, compiled by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, is one of those rare books whose very existence feels like an argument about literature.
It proposes, with mock-scholarly seriousness and genuine erudition, that invented geographies deserve the same care, curiosity, and critical attention as real ones.
More than a reference work, the book is an act of literary cartography: a vast atlas of places that do not exist and yet have shaped how readers imagine the world, history, power, desire, exile, and belonging.
To review it properly is therefore not merely to assess its usefulness or wit, but to consider what it reveals about storytelling itself and about the human compulsion to map meaning onto space.
At first glance, ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ announces its conceit with deceptive simplicity. Alphabetically arranged entries describe fictional locations drawn from novels, epics, myths, plays, poems, utopias, dystopias, travelogues, and even jokes. Each entry adopts the tone of a gazetteer or encyclopedia, offering geography, climate, political structure, customs, notable features, and literary provenance.
Yet almost immediately, the reader senses that this is not a neutral catalog. The book is playful, ironic, and deeply self-aware. It mimics the authority of reference works while quietly undermining their claims to objectivity.
In doing so, it places itself in a long tradition of pseudo-scholarly texts—from Borges’s invented encyclopedias to Swift’s satirical travel narratives—that expose how knowledge is shaped by narrative conventions.
Comparatively, the book stands at an intersection between literary criticism, fantasy literature, and cultural history. Unlike anthologies of fantasy worlds that celebrate genre immersion, Manguel and Guadalupi’s project is meta-literary.
They are less interested in sustaining the illusion of any single world than in juxtaposing many worlds side by side, allowing their differences and similarities to speak.
In this respect, ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ resembles a museum more than a map: a curated space where artifacts from different eras and traditions are placed into conversation.
One of the book’s most striking features is its range. Ancient mythological landscapes sit alongside modern science fiction planets; medieval allegorical cities appear next to satirical islands invented for political critique.
Utopias share space with hells; dreamlands with bureaucratic nightmares. This breadth encourages a comparative reading even when the book is consulted piecemeal.
The reader begins to notice recurring patterns: the island as laboratory of social experimentation, the city as moral allegory, the frontier as site of danger and transformation. Imaginary places, it becomes clear, are rarely arbitrary.
They are shaped by historical anxieties, philosophical questions, and aesthetic traditions.
In this sense, ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ can be read as an indirect history of ideas. Each invented geography encodes assumptions about order and chaos, center and margin, purity and contamination. Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’, for example, is not merely a fictional island but a spatial argument about rational governance and communal life. Kafka’s labyrinthine bureaucratic spaces dramatize alienation and powerlessness. Tolkien’s Middle-earth revives epic geography to explore loss, memory, and moral struggle in the aftermath of modern warfare.
By placing these worlds within the same alphabetical framework, Manguel and Guadalupi flatten hierarchies of genre and prestige, inviting readers to compare texts that are rarely discussed together.
The alphabetical structure itself is a quiet joke. Alphabetization suggests neutrality, arbitrariness, and accessibility—qualities associated with dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Yet applied to imaginary places, it produces delightful absurdities. Sacred realms sit next to comic inventions; high modernist spaces neighbor pulp fantasies.
The effect is subtly subversive. It suggests that the order we impose on knowledge is always contingent, and that meaning emerges not from inherent hierarchy but from juxtaposition.
In this respect, the book aligns closely with Borges’s famous parody of classification systems, where animals are grouped according to categories that collapse under their own illogic.
Stylistically, the entries strike a careful balance between fidelity and invention. Manguel and Guadalupi adhere closely to their sources, summarizing the internal logic of each fictional world with impressive precision. At the same time, their tone is lightly ironic, occasionally edging into gentle parody.
They describe the climates, borders, and customs of imaginary places with the same seriousness one might reserve for an actual travel guide. This deadpan delivery enhances the book’s humor without reducing its respect for the texts it draws from.
The joke is never on the authors being cataloged; it is on the human impulse to systematize the infinite.
Comparatively, this distinguishes ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ from companion works such as fantasy encyclopedias or lore compendia that cater to fans of specific franchises. Manguel and Guadalupi are not extending fictional universes; they are reflecting on them.
The book assumes a reader who delights in intertextuality, who enjoys recognizing allusions and tracing genealogies of influence. It rewards literary curiosity rather than completionism.
One does not “finish” this dictionary as much as wander through it, following associative paths.
The act of wandering is itself central to the book’s philosophy. Imaginary places are, by definition, destinations of the mind. They are entered through reading, sustained through imagination, and revisited through memory. The dictionary format formalizes this process, turning reading into a form of travel.
Each entry becomes a miniature journey, complete with orientation and description.
Yet unlike real travel, this journey is unconstrained by logistics or danger. The pleasure lies in movement without consequence, exploration without exhaustion.
This metaphor of reading as travel is hardly new, but ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ revitalizes it by foregrounding geography as a narrative device. Stories do not unfold in abstraction; they occur somewhere.
Even the most interior or psychological narratives rely on spatial metaphors. Imaginary places externalize inner states and social tensions, giving them shape and boundaries.
A dystopian city makes oppression visible; a pastoral retreat embodies longing for simplicity; a labyrinth dramatizes confusion. By cataloging these spaces, the book implicitly argues that geography is one of literature’s most powerful tools.
In comparative terms, the book also engages with the politics of mapping. Real-world maps have always been instruments of power, used to claim territory, enforce borders, and impose order.
Imaginary maps, too, reflect power relations. It asks questions:
Who gets to define the center?
Who lives at the margins?
What lies beyond the known world?
Many fictional geographies reproduce colonial assumptions, casting unexplored lands as empty, dangerous, or ripe for conquest.
Others challenge these assumptions, imagining spaces that resist domination or expose its violence. By placing all these geographies within a single reference work, Manguel and Guadalupi encourage readers to see patterns of dominance and resistance that transcend individual texts.
The book’s humor often emerges from this political undercurrent. Descriptions of absurd or tyrannical societies are rendered with the same neutral tone as descriptions of idyllic realms. This flattening exposes the arbitrariness of authority.
A place governed by nonsensical laws sounds uncomfortably similar to some real ones when described in bureaucratic prose. The dictionary thus becomes a subtle tool of satire, revealing how easily language can normalize the irrational.
One of the most fascinating aspects of ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ is how it handles time. Many of the places it describes are not merely spatial constructs but temporal ones.
They exist in suspended or cyclical time, outside historical progression. Others are explicitly future-oriented or nostalgic reconstructions of a lost past.
By treating these temporalities as geographical features—eras become climates, histories become landmarks—the book underscores how deeply intertwined space and time are in narrative imagination.
This temporal dimension invites comparison with works of speculative fiction that use setting to interrogate historical possibility. Science fiction planets and futures often serve as laboratories for social thought, extrapolating present trends into imagined outcomes.
Fantasy realms frequently rework mythic pasts to comment on contemporary concerns. ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ does not analyze these strategies explicitly, but its cumulative effect makes them visible. Reading entry after entry, one senses how each era invents the places it needs in order to think.
The book also raises questions about authorship and authority. Many imaginary places are collaboratively constructed across multiple texts and adaptations.
Myths evolve, legends accumulate variations, fictional worlds expand through sequels and reinterpretations. The dictionary must choose which version to privilege, which details to include.
These editorial decisions, though often invisible, shape how readers understand the place. In this sense, Manguel and Guadalupi occupy a position similar to that of historians or mapmakers, mediating between sources and audiences.
Comparatively, this curatorial role aligns the book with anthologies and archives rather than with criticism in the narrow sense. Yet its impact is critical. By framing imaginary places as worthy of documentation, the book challenges the boundary between “serious” and “escapist” literature.
Fantasy, satire, and allegory are treated with the same respect as canonical realism. This democratizing impulse reflects Manguel’s broader intellectual project, evident in his other works, which consistently argue for the centrality of reading as a human activity that transcends genre and hierarchy.
The reader’s experience of the book is necessarily nonlinear. Few will read it straight through, from A to Z. Instead, one dips in, follows cross-references, gets lost, reorients. This mode of reading mirrors the experience of navigating unfamiliar terrain. Disorientation becomes part of the pleasure.
The book encourages serendipity, rewarding curiosity rather than efficiency. In an age of searchable databases and algorithmic recommendations, this kind of slow, wandering engagement feels almost radical.
Yet ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ is not without limitations. Its scope, though vast, reflects the literary canon available to its compilers at the time.
Western texts dominate, particularly European traditions. While the book includes non-Western mythologies and literary works, they are less extensively represented. This imbalance mirrors broader patterns in literary scholarship and publishing, rather than any deliberate exclusion, but it shapes the map the book presents.
Imaginary geographies from oral traditions or marginalized literatures are harder to document and therefore less visible.
This limitation, however, also opens space for imaginative extension. Readers are invited to notice absences and imagine additions. The dictionary becomes not a closed system but a provocation. What places would be included if the book were compiled today, with greater attention to global literatures, digital storytelling, and new media?
Video games, virtual worlds, and online mythologies have produced vast imaginary geographies that rival traditional literature in complexity and cultural impact.
The book’s format seems well suited to such expansion, suggesting its enduring relevance.
Comparatively, one might see ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ as a precursor to contemporary discussions about world-building. In recent years, the term has gained prominence, particularly in speculative fiction and media studies.
World-building emphasizes coherence, internal logic, and immersive detail. Manguel and Guadalupi anticipate this discourse by treating worlds as primary units of analysis rather than as mere backdrops.
Yet their emphasis is less on technical construction and more on cultural meaning. They are interested not in how worlds are built, but in why.
At a deeper level, the book speaks to a fundamental human impulse: the desire to imagine elsewhere. Imaginary places offer escape, but they also offer critique. They allow writers and readers to step outside the given order of things and see it anew.
Utopias expose flaws in existing societies; dystopias warn of potential futures; fantastical realms give form to longings that reality cannot satisfy.
By assembling these places into a dictionary, Manguel and Guadalupi affirm the legitimacy of this imaginative elsewhere as a serious object of thought.
The book’s lasting appeal lies in this affirmation. It reassures readers that loving fictional worlds is not a guilty pleasure but a meaningful engagement with ideas.
It validates the experience of being shaped by places one has never visited and never will. In doing so, it blurs the line between reality and imagination, suggesting that imagined geographies influence real ones—shaping how we conceive nations, cities, borders, and identities.
In conclusion, ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ is less a book to be reviewed than a space to be inhabited. Its scholarly playfulness, its encyclopedic ambition, and its deep affection for literature combine to create a work that is both intellectually stimulating and quietly joyful.
It invites readers to become explorers, not in search of undiscovered lands, but in search of connections between stories, ideas, and the maps they draw in the mind.
As a comparative work, it succeeds by refusing to privilege any single tradition or mode of storytelling. Instead, it creates a shared terrain where myths, novels, satires, and fantasies coexist.
In doing so, it reminds us that the world has always been larger than the one we can measure—and that some of the most influential places in human history exist only in words.
Most recommended.
It proposes, with mock-scholarly seriousness and genuine erudition, that invented geographies deserve the same care, curiosity, and critical attention as real ones.
More than a reference work, the book is an act of literary cartography: a vast atlas of places that do not exist and yet have shaped how readers imagine the world, history, power, desire, exile, and belonging.
To review it properly is therefore not merely to assess its usefulness or wit, but to consider what it reveals about storytelling itself and about the human compulsion to map meaning onto space.
At first glance, ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ announces its conceit with deceptive simplicity. Alphabetically arranged entries describe fictional locations drawn from novels, epics, myths, plays, poems, utopias, dystopias, travelogues, and even jokes. Each entry adopts the tone of a gazetteer or encyclopedia, offering geography, climate, political structure, customs, notable features, and literary provenance.
Yet almost immediately, the reader senses that this is not a neutral catalog. The book is playful, ironic, and deeply self-aware. It mimics the authority of reference works while quietly undermining their claims to objectivity.
In doing so, it places itself in a long tradition of pseudo-scholarly texts—from Borges’s invented encyclopedias to Swift’s satirical travel narratives—that expose how knowledge is shaped by narrative conventions.
Comparatively, the book stands at an intersection between literary criticism, fantasy literature, and cultural history. Unlike anthologies of fantasy worlds that celebrate genre immersion, Manguel and Guadalupi’s project is meta-literary.
They are less interested in sustaining the illusion of any single world than in juxtaposing many worlds side by side, allowing their differences and similarities to speak.
In this respect, ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ resembles a museum more than a map: a curated space where artifacts from different eras and traditions are placed into conversation.
One of the book’s most striking features is its range. Ancient mythological landscapes sit alongside modern science fiction planets; medieval allegorical cities appear next to satirical islands invented for political critique.
Utopias share space with hells; dreamlands with bureaucratic nightmares. This breadth encourages a comparative reading even when the book is consulted piecemeal.
The reader begins to notice recurring patterns: the island as laboratory of social experimentation, the city as moral allegory, the frontier as site of danger and transformation. Imaginary places, it becomes clear, are rarely arbitrary.
They are shaped by historical anxieties, philosophical questions, and aesthetic traditions.
In this sense, ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ can be read as an indirect history of ideas. Each invented geography encodes assumptions about order and chaos, center and margin, purity and contamination. Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’, for example, is not merely a fictional island but a spatial argument about rational governance and communal life. Kafka’s labyrinthine bureaucratic spaces dramatize alienation and powerlessness. Tolkien’s Middle-earth revives epic geography to explore loss, memory, and moral struggle in the aftermath of modern warfare.
By placing these worlds within the same alphabetical framework, Manguel and Guadalupi flatten hierarchies of genre and prestige, inviting readers to compare texts that are rarely discussed together.
The alphabetical structure itself is a quiet joke. Alphabetization suggests neutrality, arbitrariness, and accessibility—qualities associated with dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Yet applied to imaginary places, it produces delightful absurdities. Sacred realms sit next to comic inventions; high modernist spaces neighbor pulp fantasies.
The effect is subtly subversive. It suggests that the order we impose on knowledge is always contingent, and that meaning emerges not from inherent hierarchy but from juxtaposition.
In this respect, the book aligns closely with Borges’s famous parody of classification systems, where animals are grouped according to categories that collapse under their own illogic.
Stylistically, the entries strike a careful balance between fidelity and invention. Manguel and Guadalupi adhere closely to their sources, summarizing the internal logic of each fictional world with impressive precision. At the same time, their tone is lightly ironic, occasionally edging into gentle parody.
They describe the climates, borders, and customs of imaginary places with the same seriousness one might reserve for an actual travel guide. This deadpan delivery enhances the book’s humor without reducing its respect for the texts it draws from.
The joke is never on the authors being cataloged; it is on the human impulse to systematize the infinite.
Comparatively, this distinguishes ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ from companion works such as fantasy encyclopedias or lore compendia that cater to fans of specific franchises. Manguel and Guadalupi are not extending fictional universes; they are reflecting on them.
The book assumes a reader who delights in intertextuality, who enjoys recognizing allusions and tracing genealogies of influence. It rewards literary curiosity rather than completionism.
One does not “finish” this dictionary as much as wander through it, following associative paths.
The act of wandering is itself central to the book’s philosophy. Imaginary places are, by definition, destinations of the mind. They are entered through reading, sustained through imagination, and revisited through memory. The dictionary format formalizes this process, turning reading into a form of travel.
Each entry becomes a miniature journey, complete with orientation and description.
Yet unlike real travel, this journey is unconstrained by logistics or danger. The pleasure lies in movement without consequence, exploration without exhaustion.
This metaphor of reading as travel is hardly new, but ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ revitalizes it by foregrounding geography as a narrative device. Stories do not unfold in abstraction; they occur somewhere.
Even the most interior or psychological narratives rely on spatial metaphors. Imaginary places externalize inner states and social tensions, giving them shape and boundaries.
A dystopian city makes oppression visible; a pastoral retreat embodies longing for simplicity; a labyrinth dramatizes confusion. By cataloging these spaces, the book implicitly argues that geography is one of literature’s most powerful tools.
In comparative terms, the book also engages with the politics of mapping. Real-world maps have always been instruments of power, used to claim territory, enforce borders, and impose order.
Imaginary maps, too, reflect power relations. It asks questions:
Who gets to define the center?
Who lives at the margins?
What lies beyond the known world?
Many fictional geographies reproduce colonial assumptions, casting unexplored lands as empty, dangerous, or ripe for conquest.
Others challenge these assumptions, imagining spaces that resist domination or expose its violence. By placing all these geographies within a single reference work, Manguel and Guadalupi encourage readers to see patterns of dominance and resistance that transcend individual texts.
The book’s humor often emerges from this political undercurrent. Descriptions of absurd or tyrannical societies are rendered with the same neutral tone as descriptions of idyllic realms. This flattening exposes the arbitrariness of authority.
A place governed by nonsensical laws sounds uncomfortably similar to some real ones when described in bureaucratic prose. The dictionary thus becomes a subtle tool of satire, revealing how easily language can normalize the irrational.
One of the most fascinating aspects of ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ is how it handles time. Many of the places it describes are not merely spatial constructs but temporal ones.
They exist in suspended or cyclical time, outside historical progression. Others are explicitly future-oriented or nostalgic reconstructions of a lost past.
By treating these temporalities as geographical features—eras become climates, histories become landmarks—the book underscores how deeply intertwined space and time are in narrative imagination.
This temporal dimension invites comparison with works of speculative fiction that use setting to interrogate historical possibility. Science fiction planets and futures often serve as laboratories for social thought, extrapolating present trends into imagined outcomes.
Fantasy realms frequently rework mythic pasts to comment on contemporary concerns. ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ does not analyze these strategies explicitly, but its cumulative effect makes them visible. Reading entry after entry, one senses how each era invents the places it needs in order to think.
The book also raises questions about authorship and authority. Many imaginary places are collaboratively constructed across multiple texts and adaptations.
Myths evolve, legends accumulate variations, fictional worlds expand through sequels and reinterpretations. The dictionary must choose which version to privilege, which details to include.
These editorial decisions, though often invisible, shape how readers understand the place. In this sense, Manguel and Guadalupi occupy a position similar to that of historians or mapmakers, mediating between sources and audiences.
Comparatively, this curatorial role aligns the book with anthologies and archives rather than with criticism in the narrow sense. Yet its impact is critical. By framing imaginary places as worthy of documentation, the book challenges the boundary between “serious” and “escapist” literature.
Fantasy, satire, and allegory are treated with the same respect as canonical realism. This democratizing impulse reflects Manguel’s broader intellectual project, evident in his other works, which consistently argue for the centrality of reading as a human activity that transcends genre and hierarchy.
The reader’s experience of the book is necessarily nonlinear. Few will read it straight through, from A to Z. Instead, one dips in, follows cross-references, gets lost, reorients. This mode of reading mirrors the experience of navigating unfamiliar terrain. Disorientation becomes part of the pleasure.
The book encourages serendipity, rewarding curiosity rather than efficiency. In an age of searchable databases and algorithmic recommendations, this kind of slow, wandering engagement feels almost radical.
Yet ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ is not without limitations. Its scope, though vast, reflects the literary canon available to its compilers at the time.
Western texts dominate, particularly European traditions. While the book includes non-Western mythologies and literary works, they are less extensively represented. This imbalance mirrors broader patterns in literary scholarship and publishing, rather than any deliberate exclusion, but it shapes the map the book presents.
Imaginary geographies from oral traditions or marginalized literatures are harder to document and therefore less visible.
This limitation, however, also opens space for imaginative extension. Readers are invited to notice absences and imagine additions. The dictionary becomes not a closed system but a provocation. What places would be included if the book were compiled today, with greater attention to global literatures, digital storytelling, and new media?
Video games, virtual worlds, and online mythologies have produced vast imaginary geographies that rival traditional literature in complexity and cultural impact.
The book’s format seems well suited to such expansion, suggesting its enduring relevance.
Comparatively, one might see ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ as a precursor to contemporary discussions about world-building. In recent years, the term has gained prominence, particularly in speculative fiction and media studies.
World-building emphasizes coherence, internal logic, and immersive detail. Manguel and Guadalupi anticipate this discourse by treating worlds as primary units of analysis rather than as mere backdrops.
Yet their emphasis is less on technical construction and more on cultural meaning. They are interested not in how worlds are built, but in why.
At a deeper level, the book speaks to a fundamental human impulse: the desire to imagine elsewhere. Imaginary places offer escape, but they also offer critique. They allow writers and readers to step outside the given order of things and see it anew.
Utopias expose flaws in existing societies; dystopias warn of potential futures; fantastical realms give form to longings that reality cannot satisfy.
By assembling these places into a dictionary, Manguel and Guadalupi affirm the legitimacy of this imaginative elsewhere as a serious object of thought.
The book’s lasting appeal lies in this affirmation. It reassures readers that loving fictional worlds is not a guilty pleasure but a meaningful engagement with ideas.
It validates the experience of being shaped by places one has never visited and never will. In doing so, it blurs the line between reality and imagination, suggesting that imagined geographies influence real ones—shaping how we conceive nations, cities, borders, and identities.
In conclusion, ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ is less a book to be reviewed than a space to be inhabited. Its scholarly playfulness, its encyclopedic ambition, and its deep affection for literature combine to create a work that is both intellectually stimulating and quietly joyful.
It invites readers to become explorers, not in search of undiscovered lands, but in search of connections between stories, ideas, and the maps they draw in the mind.
As a comparative work, it succeeds by refusing to privilege any single tradition or mode of storytelling. Instead, it creates a shared terrain where myths, novels, satires, and fantasies coexist.
In doing so, it reminds us that the world has always been larger than the one we can measure—and that some of the most influential places in human history exist only in words.
Most recommended.
Want to read
February 21, 2024Entries added since the original:
ABBEY, THE (ABBEY OF THE ROSE) (Umberto Eco, Il Nome della rosa, Milan, 1980)
ABDERA (Anonymous, Physiologus Latinus, 4th cen. BC; Christoph Martin Wieland Die Abderiten, Munich, 1774; Leopoldo Lugones, "Los Caballos de Abdera," in Los Fuerza extrañas, Buenos Aires, 1906)
ALIFBAY (Salman Rushdie, Haroum and the Sea of Stories, London, 1990)
ARTHUR, PALACE OF (Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Leipzig, 1802)
BEAUREPAIRE (Chrétien de Troyes, "Perceval chez Blanch-fleur," in Le Conte de Grall, 12th cen.)
CIUDAD, see ISLA
DAY BEFORE, ISLAND OF THE (Umberto Eco, La isola del giorno primo, Milan 1994)
DEADS' TOWNS (Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, London, 1952)
DISAPPEARED (Victor Hugo, "La Ville disparue," in La Legende des siècles, Paris, 1859)
DOLLS, KINGDOM OF (Alexandre Dumas (père), Histoire d'une casse-noisette, Paris, 1845)
DREAMS, LAKE OF (George Gamow, Mr. Tompkins inside Himself, Adventuries in the New Biology, New York, 1967)
DULL (lake), see ALIFBAY
EASTWICK (John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick, New York, 1984)
ENGLAND (Julian Barnes, England, England, London, 1998)
FALUN (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Die Bergwerke zu Falun, Berlin, 1819)
FANTASTICA (Michael Ende, Die unendliche Geschichte, Stuttgart, 1979)
FELIDO, ISLAND OF, see GALLINACO
FIONAVAR (Guy Gavriel Kay, The Summer Tree, Toronto, 1984; Guy Gavriel Kay, The Wandering Fire, New York, 1986; Guy Gavriel Kay The Darkest Road, New York, 1986)
FLUORESCENTE (Tristan Tzarza, Grains et Issues, Paris, 1935)
FORBIDDEN FOREST (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, London, 1997 [Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, US])
FOREST, THE (Paul Monette, Sanctuary, New York, 1997)
GALLINACO (Yves Beauchemin, "The Banana Wars", in The Ark in the Garden: Fables for Our Times, Toronto, 1998)
GRAND DUCHY (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Der goldene Topf, Bamberg, 1814; Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Die Elixiere des Teufels, Berlin, 1816; Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Klein Zaches gennant Zinnober, Berlin 1819; Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Lebensansichten des Katers Murr, Berlin, 1822, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Prinzessin Brambilla—Ein Capriccio nach J. Callot, Breslau, 1820)
GRAVEYARD OF UNWRITTEN BOOKS (Nedim Gürsel, Son Tramway, Istanbul, 1990)
GREAT MOTHER'S or LADIES' ISLAND (Gerhart Hauptmann, Die Insel der grossen Mutter oder das Wunder von Ile des Dames. Eine Geschichte aus dem utopischen Archipelagus, Berlin, 1924)
HAV (Jan Morris, Last Letters from Hav, London, 1985)
HELL HOUSE (Richard Matheson, Hell House, New York, 1971)
HOGWARTS (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, London, 1997 [Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, US]; J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, London, 1998)
HOLLOW NEEDLE (Maurice Leblanc, L'AIguille creuse, Paris, 1909)
IOUNALAO (Derek Walcott, Omeros, New York, 1990)
ISLA (Jill paton Walsh, Knowledge of Angels, London, 1994)
JAGUAR THRONE, REALM OF THE (Margaret Atwood, "Raw Materials," in Murder in the Dark, Toronto, 1983)
JURASSIC PARK (Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park, New York, 1990)
K, VALLEY OF, see ALIFBAY
LADIES' ISLAND, see GREAT MOTHER'S ISLAND
LEIXLIP (Charles RObert Maturin, The castle Leixlip, Dublin, 1820)
LINCOLN or MYSTERIOUS (Jules Verne, L'Ile mystérieuse, Paris, 1874)
LOST TIME (Homer, The Odyssey, 9th cen. [?] BC; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Lotos-Eaters," in Poems, London, 1833)
MAHAGONNY (Bertolt Brecht, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Vienna, 1929)
MILLION WISHES, LAND OF A (André Maurois, Le Pays des trente-six mille volontés, Paris, 1928)
MOGADOR (Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Cuentos de Mogador, Mexico, 1994; Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, En los labios del agua, Mexico, 1996; Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Los nombres del aire, Mexico, 1987)
MONOMOTAPA (Jean de la Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers VIII:II, 2d ed., Paris, 1678-9)
MOODY LAND (Salman Rushdie, Haroum and the Sea of Stories, London, 1990)
MOURNFUL SEA, see ALIFBAY
MYSTERIOUS, see LINCOLN
NEVERWHERE (Niel Gaiman, Neverwhere, London, 1996)
NEW GYNIA or VIRAGINIA (Joseph Hall, Mundus alter et idem, sive Terra Australis ante hac semper incognita, London, circa 1605; Utopiae, Pars II. Mundus alter et idem, Die heutige Neue alte Welt. Darinnen ausführlich und nach Notdurf erzahlet wird, was die alte nun bald sechstausend-jährige Welt für eine neue Welt gebohren, aus der man gleichsam in einem Spiegel ihrer Mutter und Gebärerin Art, Sitten, Wandel und Gebrauch augenscheinlich mag sehen und erkennen, Leipzig, 1613)
NOAH'S REALM (Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage, Toronto 1984)
OLD MATHERS, HOUSE OF (Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, London, 1940)
OUIDAH (Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah, London, 1980)
POPO (George Büchner, "Leonce und Lena," in Telegraph fur Deutschland, No. 76-80, Hamburg, 1838)
RED HOUSE (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, The Siege of the Red House, Dublin 1863)
ROMINTEN (Michael Tournier, Le Roi des Aulnes, Paris, 1970)
ROSE (Mervyn Peake, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, London, 1939)
SAINTE BEREGONNE (Jean Ray, Le Manuscrit français, Bruseels, 1946)
SAINTE-ESPRIT (J.G. Ballrd, Rushing to Paradise, London, 1994)
SASANIA (A.S. Byatt, Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, London, 1998)
SCHILDA (Erich Kästner, Die Schildbürger, Munich, 1976)
SIMON-CRUBELLIER (Georges Perec, La Vie, mode d'emploi, Paris, 1978)
SPOON RIVER (Edgar lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, New York, 1915)
STREAMS OF STORY, OCEAN OF THE (Salman Rushdie, Haroum and the Sea of Stories, London, 1990)
TRISTE-LE-ROY (Jorge Luis Borges, "La Muerte y la brújula," in Ficciones, Buenos Aires, 1956)
UNRETURNABLE-HEAVEN (Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, London, 1952)
WOMEN'S ISLAND (Anonymous, Le livre de merveilles de l'Inde, transl. L.M. Devic, Leiden, 1883-86)
WRAITH-ISLAND (Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, London, 1952)
YOUKALI (Kurt Weill & Roger Fernay, "Youkali: Tango Habanera," New York, 1935)
ABBEY, THE (ABBEY OF THE ROSE) (Umberto Eco, Il Nome della rosa, Milan, 1980)
ABDERA (Anonymous, Physiologus Latinus, 4th cen. BC; Christoph Martin Wieland Die Abderiten, Munich, 1774; Leopoldo Lugones, "Los Caballos de Abdera," in Los Fuerza extrañas, Buenos Aires, 1906)
ALIFBAY (Salman Rushdie, Haroum and the Sea of Stories, London, 1990)
ARTHUR, PALACE OF (Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Leipzig, 1802)
BEAUREPAIRE (Chrétien de Troyes, "Perceval chez Blanch-fleur," in Le Conte de Grall, 12th cen.)
CIUDAD, see ISLA
DAY BEFORE, ISLAND OF THE (Umberto Eco, La isola del giorno primo, Milan 1994)
DEADS' TOWNS (Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, London, 1952)
DISAPPEARED (Victor Hugo, "La Ville disparue," in La Legende des siècles, Paris, 1859)
DOLLS, KINGDOM OF (Alexandre Dumas (père), Histoire d'une casse-noisette, Paris, 1845)
DREAMS, LAKE OF (George Gamow, Mr. Tompkins inside Himself, Adventuries in the New Biology, New York, 1967)
DULL (lake), see ALIFBAY
EASTWICK (John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick, New York, 1984)
ENGLAND (Julian Barnes, England, England, London, 1998)
FALUN (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Die Bergwerke zu Falun, Berlin, 1819)
FANTASTICA (Michael Ende, Die unendliche Geschichte, Stuttgart, 1979)
FELIDO, ISLAND OF, see GALLINACO
FIONAVAR (Guy Gavriel Kay, The Summer Tree, Toronto, 1984; Guy Gavriel Kay, The Wandering Fire, New York, 1986; Guy Gavriel Kay The Darkest Road, New York, 1986)
FLUORESCENTE (Tristan Tzarza, Grains et Issues, Paris, 1935)
FORBIDDEN FOREST (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, London, 1997 [Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, US])
FOREST, THE (Paul Monette, Sanctuary, New York, 1997)
GALLINACO (Yves Beauchemin, "The Banana Wars", in The Ark in the Garden: Fables for Our Times, Toronto, 1998)
GRAND DUCHY (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Der goldene Topf, Bamberg, 1814; Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Die Elixiere des Teufels, Berlin, 1816; Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Klein Zaches gennant Zinnober, Berlin 1819; Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Lebensansichten des Katers Murr, Berlin, 1822, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Prinzessin Brambilla—Ein Capriccio nach J. Callot, Breslau, 1820)
GRAVEYARD OF UNWRITTEN BOOKS (Nedim Gürsel, Son Tramway, Istanbul, 1990)
GREAT MOTHER'S or LADIES' ISLAND (Gerhart Hauptmann, Die Insel der grossen Mutter oder das Wunder von Ile des Dames. Eine Geschichte aus dem utopischen Archipelagus, Berlin, 1924)
HAV (Jan Morris, Last Letters from Hav, London, 1985)
HELL HOUSE (Richard Matheson, Hell House, New York, 1971)
HOGWARTS (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, London, 1997 [Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, US]; J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, London, 1998)
HOLLOW NEEDLE (Maurice Leblanc, L'AIguille creuse, Paris, 1909)
IOUNALAO (Derek Walcott, Omeros, New York, 1990)
ISLA (Jill paton Walsh, Knowledge of Angels, London, 1994)
JAGUAR THRONE, REALM OF THE (Margaret Atwood, "Raw Materials," in Murder in the Dark, Toronto, 1983)
JURASSIC PARK (Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park, New York, 1990)
K, VALLEY OF, see ALIFBAY
LADIES' ISLAND, see GREAT MOTHER'S ISLAND
LEIXLIP (Charles RObert Maturin, The castle Leixlip, Dublin, 1820)
LINCOLN or MYSTERIOUS (Jules Verne, L'Ile mystérieuse, Paris, 1874)
LOST TIME (Homer, The Odyssey, 9th cen. [?] BC; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Lotos-Eaters," in Poems, London, 1833)
MAHAGONNY (Bertolt Brecht, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Vienna, 1929)
MILLION WISHES, LAND OF A (André Maurois, Le Pays des trente-six mille volontés, Paris, 1928)
MOGADOR (Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Cuentos de Mogador, Mexico, 1994; Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, En los labios del agua, Mexico, 1996; Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Los nombres del aire, Mexico, 1987)
MONOMOTAPA (Jean de la Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers VIII:II, 2d ed., Paris, 1678-9)
MOODY LAND (Salman Rushdie, Haroum and the Sea of Stories, London, 1990)
MOURNFUL SEA, see ALIFBAY
MYSTERIOUS, see LINCOLN
NEVERWHERE (Niel Gaiman, Neverwhere, London, 1996)
NEW GYNIA or VIRAGINIA (Joseph Hall, Mundus alter et idem, sive Terra Australis ante hac semper incognita, London, circa 1605; Utopiae, Pars II. Mundus alter et idem, Die heutige Neue alte Welt. Darinnen ausführlich und nach Notdurf erzahlet wird, was die alte nun bald sechstausend-jährige Welt für eine neue Welt gebohren, aus der man gleichsam in einem Spiegel ihrer Mutter und Gebärerin Art, Sitten, Wandel und Gebrauch augenscheinlich mag sehen und erkennen, Leipzig, 1613)
NOAH'S REALM (Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage, Toronto 1984)
OLD MATHERS, HOUSE OF (Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, London, 1940)
OUIDAH (Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah, London, 1980)
POPO (George Büchner, "Leonce und Lena," in Telegraph fur Deutschland, No. 76-80, Hamburg, 1838)
RED HOUSE (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, The Siege of the Red House, Dublin 1863)
ROMINTEN (Michael Tournier, Le Roi des Aulnes, Paris, 1970)
ROSE (Mervyn Peake, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, London, 1939)
SAINTE BEREGONNE (Jean Ray, Le Manuscrit français, Bruseels, 1946)
SAINTE-ESPRIT (J.G. Ballrd, Rushing to Paradise, London, 1994)
SASANIA (A.S. Byatt, Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, London, 1998)
SCHILDA (Erich Kästner, Die Schildbürger, Munich, 1976)
SIMON-CRUBELLIER (Georges Perec, La Vie, mode d'emploi, Paris, 1978)
SPOON RIVER (Edgar lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, New York, 1915)
STREAMS OF STORY, OCEAN OF THE (Salman Rushdie, Haroum and the Sea of Stories, London, 1990)
TRISTE-LE-ROY (Jorge Luis Borges, "La Muerte y la brújula," in Ficciones, Buenos Aires, 1956)
UNRETURNABLE-HEAVEN (Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, London, 1952)
WOMEN'S ISLAND (Anonymous, Le livre de merveilles de l'Inde, transl. L.M. Devic, Leiden, 1883-86)
WRAITH-ISLAND (Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, London, 1952)
YOUKALI (Kurt Weill & Roger Fernay, "Youkali: Tango Habanera," New York, 1935)
October 10, 2008
I first got the 1987 edition of this book as a gift from my uncle in the mid-nineties, and it has since been one of my favorite volumes to idly peruse. Though it contains lengthy entries on the most frequently visited of imaginary places, such as Middle-earth, Earthsea, and Oz, its entries on less familiar regions such as Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin are welcome, and this updated edition includes such recently-explored places as Hogwarts and Neverwhere.
This work was my first introduction to Arkham, Gormenghast, and Erewhon, and inspired me to find each source work. I've found it both a useful reference as well as fine pleasure reading due to Manguel and Guadalupi's jovial prose, which treats each place as if the reader might really be planning to travel there in the near future.
This work was my first introduction to Arkham, Gormenghast, and Erewhon, and inspired me to find each source work. I've found it both a useful reference as well as fine pleasure reading due to Manguel and Guadalupi's jovial prose, which treats each place as if the reader might really be planning to travel there in the near future.
May 12, 2013
I'm so tickled by the existence of this book. The title pretty much sums it up - this is an encyclopedia of imaginary places ranging from the fantastical (Middle Earth, Narnia, Wonderland) to the more realistic (Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe's island, Xanadu). In fact, this dictionary is worth looking at just for the extensive descriptions of Middle Earth and Narnia.
The authors treat every location as though it actually exists, which is part of the fun of reading it. There are also some wonderful maps (especially the Wonderland one!). The only downside is that my copy is outdated and doesn't contain some of the more recent fantastical locations that have popped up in fiction, such as Hogwarts.
The authors treat every location as though it actually exists, which is part of the fun of reading it. There are also some wonderful maps (especially the Wonderland one!). The only downside is that my copy is outdated and doesn't contain some of the more recent fantastical locations that have popped up in fiction, such as Hogwarts.
September 26, 2014
It's not really a dictionary; some parts are written like a tour guide, others more of an atlas. The entries describe locations from fantasy novels, from Gulliver's travels through Harry Potter. I noticed it included a few of Calvino's invisible cities, and some lands that Borges described, which is appropriate for such a Borgesian enterprise. The maps and illustrations are well done. It's a fun way to browse for new things to read. If you're willing to put up with an older edition (no Hogwarts), you can find it for just a few bucks.
October 19, 2009
This book is absolutely amazing, it is insightful, and it is a must-have for anyone attempting to write fantasy. included are:
- mythical places like Valhalla and Hades
- classical locations like Thomas More's Utopia, the places in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels...
- EVERYWHERE in the Middle Earth universe! (that alone deserves 5 stars)
- and recent locations, like J.K. Rowling's Hogwarts!!!
Ohhh and the pictures are wonderful, too!
- mythical places like Valhalla and Hades
- classical locations like Thomas More's Utopia, the places in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels...
- EVERYWHERE in the Middle Earth universe! (that alone deserves 5 stars)
- and recent locations, like J.K. Rowling's Hogwarts!!!
Ohhh and the pictures are wonderful, too!
Read
January 2, 2017A vast and entertaining encyclopedia of invented places, from Homer to the Marx Brothers' movies and Borges' Urnland, where the whole of literature and language "consists of one word, undr, which means 'wonder' and is sometimes represented by a fish and sometimes by a red pole and a disc. In that word, each and any listener will recognize his labours, his loves, his secret acts, the things he has seen, the people he has known - everything." With detailed maps and drawings.
November 21, 2008
The perfect dictionary for anyone who's a dreamer. You don't need to be a fantasy or sci-fi fan (I'm not) to appreciate this astonishing book, which opens the doors to a myriad of imaginary places you wish you could go right now. The depth of the author's knowledge is breathtaking, and he writes about those places in the most delightful way.
February 19, 2009
I certainly haven't read all of this voluminous book. It’s somewhat akin to reading and reviewing an encyclopedia, which is precisely what this book is. I was pleased to find the entries on places I’ve already read of in books, but I’m most excited about the prospect of discovering new books to read by referencing them in this book.
June 5, 2012
Wonderful book including details of a plethora of fictional places we read about every single day. Included copious maps of places like Oz, Middle Earth, Atlantis and soo many more obscure mythical places. This book hasn't been updated in a while, but I keep my copy around for nostalgia and also the articles on the fictitious cities are very informative not to mention entertaining.
May 10, 2013
This is an entertaining read, great fun. It's not anywhere near exhaustive, though, which is understandable given the subject matter. The authors try to cover all of the major imaginary worlds in literature, and world literature at that, not just anglophone. Maybe it would be good to have several different volumes, each one devoted to a different nation or language.
September 6, 2023
Un compendio muy vasto que demuestra que hay un enorme trabajo detrás, pero parece que a veces están centradas en obras muy conocidas clásicas y olvidan otras no tan conocidas o más actuales. Aún así, es un gustazo leer esta reunión de lugares imaginarios, algunos realmente fantásticos y desconocidos.
September 9, 2008
An interesting, if quirky, volume. While many mainstays of fantasy are represented -- Tolkien, Baum, etc. -- many entries are of obscure 18th and 19th century European authors who very few have heard of.
April 25, 2022
A pretty interesting (and international!) compendium of imagined worlds. Not exactly complete by any means, even for the most recent update (1999), but still fun to poke through. Definitely worth the $9.99 I originally paid for it off the Waldenbooks bargain pile.
May 26, 2024
A joy of a book, one I will flip through extensively I’m sure. Gormenghast’s entry made me happy. Other favorites are Moominland, Kafka’s Castle, Calvino’s various invisible cities, Borges’s Babel and Circular Ruine, all Earthsea entries, and Wonderland :-)
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