(Roughly) Daily

C. J. Moran (peter-guillam123 on Github) maps the classics…

The short version: PlotLines plays classic books as journeys, on maps of their own era… PlotLines takes out-of-copyright classics and draws their characters’ journeys on a period map. Pick a book, press play, and the whole cast moves at once – or follow one person and let the map travel with them. Hover any stop and you get the place as the text itself names it, with the line that puts them there.

It began with Dracula, because Stoker wrote what is probably the best travel itinerary in Victorian fiction – a clerk crossing Europe by train, a ghost ship rounding Gibraltar with her captain lashed to the wheel, a three-pronged chase up a Romanian river at the end.

There are forty-three books now, and they are no longer all novels, or all set in Europe. A walk at Hardy’s pace across Wessex; a single London day of near-misses; a raft the length of the Mississippi; a stolen dog’s road from a Californian orchard to the Klondike ice; a two-town comedy running between Tokyo and Shikoku; a 120-chapter Chinese epic that needs five threads moving at once before it makes any sense at all; and a family driven out of a Southern town that is never once named. The shelf has turned out wider than I expected when I started, and more will follow…

Each book opens with a choice: watch the story or explore its places. A shelf of journeys: “PlotLines.”

See also: “Reading Maps“– more “journeys from fiction drawn on the real world”

* Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

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As we trace steps (and think about the ways in which travel has changed), we might recall that it was on this date in 1891 that The Hotel Hauffe in Leipzig, Germany became the first establishment to honor an American Express Travelers Cheque. Travelers cheques were first issued in 1772 by the London Credit Exchange Company for use in 90 European cities; and in 1874, Thomas Cook was issuing “circular notes” that operated in the manner of travelers cheques. But until the late 19th century, well-off travelers relied mostly on letters of credit… and less wealthy travelers risked carrying cash. American Express’ was the first system of significant scale and global scope, and offered cheques in relatively small denominations, making them available to many more travelers.