Back to the land…
The Booklovers Map of America Showing Certain Landmarks of Literary Geography was created by pictorial cartographer Paul M. Paine in 1933. The map zooms in on regions of special interest– and locates “The Birthplace of American Literature” squarely in the Boston/Cambridge area.
See more at Brain Pickings.
As we remind ourselves that, had the map been drawn even fifteen years later, there’d surely have been a call-out covering Southern writers, we might note that the Library of Congress’ copy of of A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, printed in 1788 by Isaiah Thomas in Worcester, Massachusetts, is inscribed “Enoch Brooks’ Book, Princeton, March 13th, 1789.”
As the Library of Congress notes: “This book was the first American version of a novelty Bible that replaced some words with pictures to encourage children’s interest as well as their reading skills. With nearly five hundred woodcuts by American artists, this Bible was also the most ambitious woodcut volume produced in America up to that time.”
