Mapping “The Phantom Tollbooth”
By: Emilia Ruzicka
Tags: Maps, Books, Data Visualization, Information Design, Language Analysis

Mapping “The Phantom Tollbooth”

When I was a child, I had a voracious appetite for books. I was constantly visiting the library and picking new volumes to read, but one I always came back to was The Phantom Tollbooth, written by Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer. In it, a boy named Milo arrives home from school to discover a mysterious tollbooth in his room. He drives through the tollbooth and finds himself in The Lands Beyond, a fantastical world where the Kingdom of Wisdom has fallen into disarray. The Princesses of Wisdom — Rhyme and Reason — have been banished to the Castle in the Air, and two dueling kings — King Azaz the Unabridged of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician of Digitopolis — have caused a rift in the kingdom. Milo and his newfound friends, Tock the Watchdog and the Humbug, set off on a quest to rescue the Princesses and restore peace to Wisdom.

The Phantom Tollbooth is still one of my favorite novels and I reread it whenever I want to escape to another world, but I’ve recently found myself trying to trace Milo’s journey through the Kingdom of Wisdom in my head. Jules Feiffer illustrated a map of The Lands Beyond for the book, and I wondered if I could record the story on the map. As a challenge, I started reading the novel again, this time with a copy of the map from the book by my side. While reading, I drew Milo’s journey.

After tracing the path on Feiffer’s map, my immediate thought was, “Can I make this more clear?” Since the map is black and white, my black pen didn’t show up well, and the original map, though descriptive and functional, didn’t encapsulate the vibrancy of the world I was imagining in my head. I knew then that I wanted to redesign Jules Feiffer’s map and make it my own, with all the flair that I was envisioning.

Jules Feiffer’s drawing of The Lands Beyond, the fantasy world that Milo explores in “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster.

Where Milo Went

I started by creating all of the geographic features — the Sea of Knowledge, the Foothills of Confusion, the Forest of Sight — and letting them shape the landscape of the map. I used color to help provide some liveliness and varied the hues to indicate depth and distance. My next step was to add the road that Milo and his fellow adventurers drive on to navigate The Lands Beyond. This resulted in a cohesive but unfinished map.

Next, I added manmade features, like cities and fortresses. Dictionopolis and Digitopolis are the most prominent, but the Old City of Wisdom, Expectations, the Soundkeeper’s Fortress, and others all appear. To top it off, I labeled every feature with a whimsical font, drew a compass to contribute an air of officiality, and completed my new map of The Lands Beyond!

My map of The Lands Beyond

Since I had already documented Milo’s journey on my copy of Feiffer’s map, I decided to add that path to my own map. Using a purple dotted line, I traced Milo, Tock, and the Humbug’s adventure, winding from the Doldrums to Dictionopolis, through the Valley of Sound to Digitopolis, and finally to the Castle in the Air.

My map of The Lands Beyond with Milo’s journey included

Who Milo Met

The path shows their progression through the Kingdom of Wisdom well, but I noticed that my map was missing any indication of what happened in the places our adventurers visited. Knowing the book, I thought that showing how many characters were introduced in each place would help the viewer understand how much activity occurred during that leg of the journey. To indicate this, I placed a circle in the location where each character in the book was introduced.

Although the plain circles helped, I knew I could add even more information. One of the first questions most people ask about a character in a story is, “Are they good or bad?” I made the question of alignment slightly more complex and categorized each character as good, bad, or neutral. But some characters change throughout the book, such as the Humbug, who is initially a nuisance but by the end of the book is Milo’s friend. To accommodate character development, I determined each characters’ alignment when the reader initially meets them in the book and then again at the end of the book.

To represent character alignment, I colored the circles I had made previously. The color on the left half of the circle shows the character’s alignment when the reader meets them and the color on the right half shows the character’s alignment at the end of the book. Red represents a bad character, purple is a neutral character, and blue shows a good character. For example, if the left half of a circle is red and the right half is blue, then the character was initially bad and turned good throughout the course of the novel. This tactic resulted in my finalized map!

My map of The Lands Beyond with Milo’s journey and character alignments included

By looking at this map, it’s easy to get a sense of where much of the action takes place. Milo spends multiple chapters in Dictionopolis, exploring the city from the market to the castle and even attending a royal banquet. He also makes many stops throughout the Forest of Sight and the Valley of Sound, meeting benevolent individuals along the way. In contrast, Milo, Tock, and the Humbug encounter many demons in the Mountains of Ignorance who wish to keep Rhyme and Reason imprisoned and hinder the adventurers on their quest.

What Milo Did

Despite all the wonderful information embedded in the map, geography is just one way to tell a story. Words are data just as much as locations or categorizations, so I decided to use Voyant Tools to dig up what I could from The Phantom Tollbooth. Voyant is a free online tool that allows users to upload or type in a text and automatically performs a variety of language analyses on it. I specifically used the “document terms” tab, which reports the number of instances of each word in the given text and ranks them from most to least used.

To get a sense of the book as a whole, I uploaded the full text of The Phantom Tollbooth to Voyant. Looking at just the top five terms, the words tell a clear story. From most to least used, the top five terms in the entire book are, “milo,” “said,” “just,” “tock,” and “humbug.” These words encapsulate the three most prominent characters (Milo, Tock, and the Humbug) as well as begin to indicate what these characters do — talk to people. To visualize these five terms, I made a simple line chart of their use throughout each chapter of the book.