My bookshelf·Index No. 0054

Archipelago An Atlas of Imagined Islands

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Huw Lewis-Jones put this together for the 300th birthday of Robinson Crusoe. The setup is simple: He handed a bunch of illustrators from all over the world the same assignment Defoe gave himself — you washed up somewhere, now draw it. Name the island. Map the coves and the peaks. Show what lives there and what got left behind. Coralie Bickford-Smith, Chris Riddell, Marion Deuchars, Hervé Tullet, Aušra Kiudulaitė, a couple dozen more, and every one goes a different direction. Lewis-Jones ties it together with the real history of imagined islands, back to the Venetian sailors who bound their island maps into books they called isolari, and Utopia and Atlantis before that. He calls the whole condition islomania, which is a real word for wanting badly to be on an island. It’s a flip-through book more than a read-through one.

Archipelago An Atlas of Imagined Islands
By Huw Lewis-Jones. Thames & Hudson, 2019. 192 pages.