The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980, 1987, 1999) is a book written by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. It takes the form of a catalogue of fantasy lands, islands, cities, and other locations from world literature—"a Baedecker or traveller's guide...a nineteenth-century gazetteer" for mental travelling. Originally published in 1980 and expanded in 1987 and 1999, the Dictionary covers the terrains that readers of literature would expect—R... more

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980, 1987, 1999) is a book written by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. It takes the form of a catalogue of fantasy lands, islands, cities, and other locations from world literature—"a Baedecker or traveller's guide...a nineteenth-century gazetteer" for mental travelling. Originally published in 1980 and expanded in 1987 and 1999, the Dictionary covers the terrains that readers of literature would expect—Ruritania and Shangri-La, Xanadu and Atlantis, L. Frank Baum's Oz, Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, Thomas More's Utopia, Edwin Abbott's Flatland, C. S. Lewis' Narnia, and the realms of Jonathan Swift and J. R. R. Tolkien; and also a vast host of other venues, created by authors ranging from Dylan Thomas to Cervantes to Edgar Rice Burroughs, from Carl Sandburg to Rabelais to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (Plus the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, among other non-orthodox texts.) To remain of manageable size, the Dictionary excludes places that are off the planet... less