The Dictionary of Imaginary Places: The Newly Updated and Expanded Classic by Alberto Manguel

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places: The Newly Updated and Expanded Classic Reviews

• 
  Rob

  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.
• 
  Wojciech Szot

  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.
• 
  Megan Vaughan

  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.
• 
  Jakub

  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.
• 
  Timons Esaias

  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.
• 
  Dubravka

  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!
• 
  Chris

  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
• 
  Artur Coelho

  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.
• 
  Marvin

  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.
• 
  Montse

  Un libro extraño. Como un atlas de literatura fantástica con mapas incluidos. Increible
• 
  J

  "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.
  
• 
  John Robinson

  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)
• 
  Matt

  A quick look through this book makes it one I will keep on my desk for reference.
• 
  Emily

  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.
• 
  Hannah

  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.
• 
  Douglas Summers-Stay

  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.
• 
  Amelia, free market Puritan

  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!
• 
  Js Absher

  A 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.
• 
  Denis

  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.
• 
  Mike

  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.
• 
  Kellie

  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.
• 
  Jeremy

  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.
• 
  Terence

  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.
• 
  Michael

  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.
• 
  Howard Cincotta

  Co-author Alberto Manguel wrote one of my favorite books, A History of Reading. Here he teams up with another literary scholar, Gianni Guadalupi, to create a delightful volume that you don’t necessarily read, but dip into now and again. Most of the dictionary’s entries are fanciful fantasy worlds, but you can also find those more prosaic fictional worlds like Thomas More’s Utopia.
  
  The trick is to give each location equal consideration and factual travelogue description, however strange the flora and fauna, whether King Kong’s Skull Island, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gondor, or E. Nesbit’s Island of the Nine Whirlpools.
  
  The premise is built around imaginary places on Earth, not space, so science fiction and fantasy are represented, but earthbound only: lots of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea, but no Asimov or Heinlein. The authors love the arcane, and many of the entries are obscure indeed: the floating island of Cork, courtesy of Lucian of Samosata, 2nd century A.D.; or Lomb, a pepper-producing country concocted by John Manville in the 14th century.
  
  To balance such abstruse entries, the Dictionary has plenty of golden oldies, including Camelot, Oz, Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis, Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Pellucidar, and J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts. Part of the description of Shakespeare’s Prospero’s Island (The Tempest):
  
  The island is inhabited by the monster Caliban — something between a sea and land animal — goblins and several spirits, among them one called Ariel…. The island is full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs. A soft enchanting music can be heard sometimes and will not harm, but other sounds — such as a curious echo or the beating of a tabor — should be ignored.
  
  For me, the standout combination of high fantasy and meta-modernist fiction are the entries from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Take the city in Asia known as Despina:
  
  “The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different to him who arrives by sea.” The camel driver sees the tips of skyscrapers, red windsocks flapping and thinks of the city as a vessel that will cast off and sail away from the desert to strange ports “with lighted ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.” The sailor, however, sees a city that evokes the shape of a camel, with a pack containing “wineskins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves …” and sees himself traveling in a caravan away from the “desert” of the sea to fresh-water oases deep in the desert, to tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot.
  
  “Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so both the camel driver and the sailor have each a vision of Despina, a border city between two deserts.”
  
• 
  Ron

  A massive understaking. A whole book could be put together just with the Middle Earth places, with an appendix for all the Pellucidar references.Essays that summarize succinctly a huge number of places and locations of novels and stories, from Lilliput and Wonderland to bizarre places described by H.P. Lovecraft.
  A rather weird book, really. An enormous undertaking, for little real use.The authors try to synthesize plot elements through description of the places where the action of the plots take place. Read as bedtime reading, for which it was ideal, with its relatively short entries. The bulkof the book made reading in bad sort of a challenge.
  I will remember how unfortunate the authors were having to plow through burrows to describe all the silliness of Pellucidar. And L. Frank Baum certainly did imagine a lot of stupid stuff, silly places populated by weird anthropomorphic creatures that rather obviously relate to ideas he doesn't care for in the real world.
• 
  Eleanor

  Skimmed rather than read. It is exactly what it says it is: a dictionary of imaginary places. BUT he does not include the Land of Green Ginger, so I immediately lost interest in this book. Yes, The Tale of the Land of Green Ginger is indeed a rare book, not often read today. But it remains a children's classic (it's by Noel Langley, by the way) and to not have this imaginary place included put me right off the book.
  
  That said, if someone needs a reference book (for whatever odd reason your life kicks up and presents you with this lack), it's a handy book to have, I suppose. I should probably give it more stars, because it is well thought out, but I can't forgive it not having that magical isle that travels through the air at night (the spell it's under needs work...).
• 
  Andrew Kozma

  This is an amazing book, that I can probably only recommend to a certain audience. There is no plot, of course, because this is an imagined reference book that works as a travel guide to various imaginary places on Earth from throughout literature. The sense of humor of the authors and the depth of research for all of their sources is amazing, as are the illustrations and maps that bring the places to life. It's a joy.
• 
  Nosemonkey

  Inexplicably out of print, but an excellent addition to the reference shelf - covering fictional places from the dark mists of time up to the near-contemporary (Harry Potter etc makes it in). One of those ideal books for randomly dipping into, alongside its handy companion, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
• 
  Connor White

  I mean here's another one that I was just destined to love. 700+ pages (okay, no, I have not read the whole thing) on nearly every single fictional world in literature before 2000 (Middle Earth, for example, is a lengthy entry. So is Treasure Island and Oz).
  
  Some Greatest Hits:
  
  • Polar Bear Kingdom
  • Daddy Jones' Kingdom
  • Gramblamble Land
  • Moomin Valley (directly SE of Daddy Jones' Kingdom)