A few years ago I stumbled upon a treasure trove of cheap books in Paris at the monthly booksale at The American Library of Paris. The first Saturday of every month I would drag my lazy butt out of bed, grab my "caddie" (a shopping bag on wheels) and make my way to the library before 10 o'clock in order to insure I was one of the first people to cross the threshhold when the doors opened.
With books costing only 1 or 2 euros, I pretty much could afford to grab anything that caught my eye and I did. I invited friends who are also bibliophiles because as much as I wanted to keep the secret to myself, the point of the booksale was to raise funds to buy new books, and I simply couldn't afford to buy them all.
My friend and "little brother" D. got his hands on a book, which would turn out to be one of the few books I would be so dismayed not to have seen first that I simply had to order it on Amazon. It captured my heart the moment I opened it, and it still hasn't let go.
This will be a multi-part series dedicated to imaginary places, the history of maps, and literature. I plan for those of you who might prefer better images and a different format to make a PDF or PDFs of the entire series and make them available to anyone who might be interested. It's an ambitious project and I am not sure where it might take me, but when you travel by imagination, the possibilities are endless.
I will be posting the first part of this series this Friday evening and then each additional part on every Friday to follow until the series is complete. But in the meantime, here is my favourite map, the carta marina made by the Swedish mapmaker Olaus Magnus in the 16th century.
With books costing only 1 or 2 euros, I pretty much could afford to grab anything that caught my eye and I did. I invited friends who are also bibliophiles because as much as I wanted to keep the secret to myself, the point of the booksale was to raise funds to buy new books, and I simply couldn't afford to buy them all.
My friend and "little brother" D. got his hands on a book, which would turn out to be one of the few books I would be so dismayed not to have seen first that I simply had to order it on Amazon. It captured my heart the moment I opened it, and it still hasn't let go.
This will be a multi-part series dedicated to imaginary places, the history of maps, and literature. I plan for those of you who might prefer better images and a different format to make a PDF or PDFs of the entire series and make them available to anyone who might be interested. It's an ambitious project and I am not sure where it might take me, but when you travel by imagination, the possibilities are endless.
I will be posting the first part of this series this Friday evening and then each additional part on every Friday to follow until the series is complete. But in the meantime, here is my favourite map, the carta marina made by the Swedish mapmaker Olaus Magnus in the 16th century.
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