Where you are: A Book of Maps That Will Leave You Completely Lost

WHERE YOU ARE: A Book of Maps That Will Leave You Completely Lost. By Chloe Aridjis, Lila Azam Zanganeh, Alain de Botton, James Bridle, Joe Dunthorne, Geoff Dyer, Olafur Eliasson, Sheila Heti, Ted Mineo, Tao Lin, Valeria Luiselli, Leanne Shapton, John Simpson, Adam Thirlwell, Peter Turchi, Will Wiles, and Denis Wood. Box of booklets: maps, ills. London, U.K.: Visual Editions, 2013. $50.00, isbn 9780956569240. Where You Are is no ordinary book: in fact, except for having an isbn, it is not a book at all. Rather, it is a collection of sixteen booklets packaged in an 8.6 by 5.3 inch (21.8 by 13.5 cm) box that is 2.2 inches (5.6 cm) deep. Each booklet has a different author, none of whom is identified as the lead author, editor, or compiler; hence the byline with sixteen names, much like papers in particle physics. The only physical commonality of the booklets is their typefaces, thick paper, and fold size: all sixteen fit neatly in a two-part container, with a top and bottom that fit together like a typical gift box. Even so, four are not booklets but large sheets--all different sizes--folded to fit neatly in the box, although one of them (Tao Lin's "The Lunar Hamsters of 8G-932," which narrates the experiences of three fictional hamsters and illustrates their interlocking burrows on a multicolored vertical cross-section) includes a small booklet stapled to one of the fold lines. What's more, most of the other contributions--I've given up calling them booklets--include foldout pages, have folded illustrations attached, or use the inside of the booklet's front and back covers for photos, maps, or other kinds of artwork. Because each contribution has a distinctive design, color, and theme, this eclectic collection is the epitome of the catchphrase "no two are alike." And because Where You Are is a mind-boggling smorgasbord of book designs, I would have appreciated some discussion, perhaps an appendix (perhaps even a URL to an online supplement or a reference to a forthcoming article) describing how the project was designed and executed, and the specifications and cost of each component. Although booklet or quasi-booklet might offend whoever inserted "Book of Maps" in the subtitle, I willingly concede that maps is an appropriate descriptor if we accept, as I do, that a map, broadly construed, is as much a spatial narrative as an attempt at the concise, understandable description of the whole or part of a planet, even a planet that exists largely in its author's imagination. Although the physical form (booklet) is so easily confused in this case with the underlying intellectual concept (map), that the sixteen contributions are indisputably maps makes the collection valuable to anyone, me included, who needs reminding that cartography is about far more than transformed geometries and standardized symbols. Where You Are is a collection of stories in which both aesthetics and spatiality compete for the reader's attention. Reviewers of multiauthored works are typically cautioned to avoid chapter-by-chapter descriptions, which could be impossible here without greatly exceeding the length of a typical GR review. More germane is a critique of the editor's (or editors') goal or overarching theme, which I had hoped to find in the short introduction printed on the underside of the top cover--the only instance here in which format compromises legibility if not content. Its author is Will Gompertz, arts editor at the BBC and a prominent figure in the British art scene, whose 435-word foreword is merely an extended promotional description, distilled into a fifteen-word blurb on the box bottom (back cover), which includes a 104-word endorsement by blogger Maria Popova. Although Gompertz compares the "wonderfully diverse and diverting ... collection of essays and images" to the "beautiful design [and] rich content" of Ordnance Survey topographic maps, he was apparently not involved directly with the project, and so reveals nothing about how contributors were recruited or how their efforts were coordinated. …