Maps, Footnotes, and Other Historians' Fantasies

There are books on my reading table that together add up to 1,516 pages. Of those pages, over 141 are reference material, including:

• 12 maps
• multiple glossaries
• multiple tables of names
• footnotes

Are these the Revolutionary War history books that I study? No, of course not! Academic historians must beg for a budget that covers maps. And as for footnotes on the same page instead of endnotes stuck at the back of the book (if they're stuck in at all)--well, only Bartimaeus has the power to make that possible.

Yes, the books I've dissected are all fantasy novels for young readers:

• Monster Blood Tattoo, Book One: Foundling, by D. M. Cornish
• Beka Cooper: Terrier, by Tamora Pierce
• Ptolemy's Gate, by Jonathan Stroud, the third book of the Bartimaeus Trilogy

And yes, each of these thick-enough-to-stand-in-a-high-wind books is also merely one installment in a series. There are thousands of more pages about these worlds on the shelves or in the works, quite possibly with hundreds of more pages of reference material. In fact, Monster Blood Tattoo started as notebooks of non-narrative reference material and only later turned novelistic (a journey I don't think it's completed with full success, but that's a topic for another day).

Creating a verisimilitudinous world is one of the joyous responsibilities of fantasy writers who set their stories in other universes. A map can ease that task and excite readers with the possibilities of life in that world beyond the borders of the book. But dictionary entries just aren't that much fun to read, especially when one must read them to understand a story, when they duplicate information in a story, or when they give away bits of the story--which some of these reference materials threaten to do. At the very least, they make the historian in me jealous.

One dissection of fantasy literature that reads exactly like a collection of dictionary entries--because it is--is Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland, republished last fall in trade paperback form. Originally that book was a mass-market paperback in the US, so it had to be reset and redesigned for this edition. It looks like that task was handled by a designer with the geographically evocative name of Tony Sahara.

Unfortunately, a major casualty of the shift to larger pages was the old-fashioned map in the first edition. It's been replaced with a mere thick-lined representation of a map, like something one would found on the back of a cereal box. No, no, no! Fantasy novel maps are crowded, antique affairs full of stippled mountains and far too little farmland. If this genre of fiction must include reference material, those pages should look right.