Mapping the World.

When I was just a little boy about 600 yards from my parent's house, in a section of town that hadn't yet been given over to tract-houses each with one spindly tree in front, there was an old gas station of the Goober-and-Gomer-school.

That is to say two guys ran it, not a giant corporate behemoth. Each of those guys had grease under their fingernails, on their denim and in their hair. They spent most of their days spelunking under Chevrolet, Studebaker, Ford and Plymouth chassis, and wheeled out from under only when someone needing gasoline would drive over the rubberized hose that would ring a bell twice announcing they needed two bucks' of ethylene, with no-knock lead added.

The area behind their little shack of a station was junk-strewn. It was filled with discarded auto parts and a boy with an imagination and without parental oversight (which few had in those days) could find himself repairing Gemini space craft with old spark plugs and fan belts. It was a toy store, of sorts, with toys you created with your imagination.

They also had an old Coke machine aside the garage itself. The kind that stored bottles like soldiers at attention on a ramp. If you had a dime and permission, you pulled a handle and a bottle would roll down like an earthquake, cold as a dead fish. There was a slot with a bottle opener and bottle caps fallen like snowflakes, their Jughead serrated-brimmed whoopie caps  looking up at the sky.

In those days gas stations gave out road maps the way today giant consultancies hand out white-papers. They often had maps of places I only dreamed of. Not nearby states--the states whose license plates you might see on a given day--but far away lands inhabited by cowboys, Indians, farmers and stampeding herds of long horns.

Often I'd sneak in their cramped little office find a pile of maps and like some latter-day treasure seeker, rifle through the place hoping for Arizona, or Colorado, or Idaho--which I imagined was filled to the brim with nothing but potatoes.

Over the last 65-years my love of maps has hardly abated. Though we're meant to be satisfied with advances like GPS that tell us exactly how to get from A to B, exploring maps, marveling at the topographic detail, wondering about place-names is a form of exploring in and of itself. What's more, most of the arriving people do comes from first getting lost. GPS doesn't allow lost-ness. Therefore, foundness is also obviated.

In my well-lighted yet partially-subterranean office I have dozens of books of maps. These allow me to travel to places I'll likely never go, and to time-travel too. They give me ideas about how worlds are created. How setting and space are important. And how to show people the world so you can inform, excite and persuade them. If you're an advertising person, you might think of the messages you create as a form of road map. A guide to readers to visit and explore whatever it is you're charged with selling.

There are as many different sorts of maps as there are sorts of places. I probably have 3,000 years or so in my small space. From Thucydides' accounts of the conquest of Alexander, to Strabo's compendium, to 15th Century Atlases like the Nuremberg Chronicle. 

Searchable, here.

Claude AI. Not.

My Latin is a little rusty.

Of course, Edward Tufte is a map-maker. As is David McCandless. And the less-well-known Hannah Ritchie, who works at the surpassing site "Our World in Data." She is worth following. Her site worth seeing.

This also is a map.

A map is anything that plots out a path that makes understanding easier. They don't have to be about how to get to I87 from I24. They can be about anything that could be helped by directions that show you the way.

More often than not, even if we no longer know it, that's our job.

A Dusty Corner in My Office.

One of my favorite authors is Joseph Mitchell. He wrote for the New Yorker starting in 1938, but from 1964 until he died in 1996, he published nothing. 

To be perfectly honest, I had hardly heard of Mitchell until he died. When he did, the New Yorker ran a tribute to him unlike any tribute I'd ever seen the magazine run. The New Yorker is page-parsimonious, yet they devoted six full pages (not counting cartoons) to Mitchell's work and life. This passing, they were telling me, is notable.

--

The New Yorker tribute to Mitchell appeared almost 30 years ago. Almost to the day.

Before Amazon, or even Barnes & Noble, destroyed one of life's great pleasures, browsing in a well-run book store. At the time not far from my Upper East Side aerie, there was Books & Company. It was small. Quiet. And run by people who know books, their importance and know the people who wrote and read them. It's in all likelihood now been torn down and replaced by a 974-story granite Ozymandias filled with trillionaires and empty of taste. They have Saul Steinberg cocktail parties and talk about their investments and beach houses.

There used to be humans here.

But back in 1996, Books & Company was something of an annex to the New Yorker itself. They had tables full of books by New Yorker writers and readings by them as well. I could stop by virtually any day and pick up a book written by and signed by Joseph Mitchell. I have about ten of them in all, in my New York apartment. I've sealed them in Ziploc bags against Gotham's dust. 

I even have a first edition or two, including one of Mitchell's first book, "My Ears Are Bent," which he later eschewed because of some writing and some characterizations that he grew to believe were beneath him. 

In pre-internet days tracking down a book was hard. My wife searched for the book, like Odysseus searching for Ithaka. She found a good copy with a dust cover and with uxorial solicitude spent two mortgage payments to secure it for me. (BTW, Mitchell tried to "kill" "Ears." I read it for the first time on microfiche, in one sitting at the New York Public Library, which now has trillionaires' names carved into its facade. In keeping with the tenor of the times, "Ears" has been republished by, I believe, the Modern Library. Despite Mitchell's aspersions, it's not nearly as offensive as say anything on Fox News or One amerika News.) Our rate of monetary inflation is nothing compared to our rate of "hate-flation" which rises about 40-percent annually.

All this brings me back, as promised to my tour of my Connecticut office and a book by Mitchell--my favorite of all, in fact--that's just been republished. It's a short, gloomy book perfect for a tall, gloomy man and it's called "The Bottom of the Harbor."

Any book that starts with this "children's song" on its frontispiece is ok by me. It gets darker from that point forward.

What makes this new edition interesting is, it's been illustrated by Joana Avillez, a woman I am fast falling in love with.

At first I was dismissive of this copy of "Bottom." I felt adding illustrations to something I rated so highly was almost a desecration. But soon my "I've-got-to-have-it" gene kicked in and the book arrived on Friday afternoon. Buy it here.

Here are just a few passages I'd highlighted some years ago. I print them here because in the entirety of your years, you likely won't read anything better, even a press-release from an ad agency announcing their Cannes triumphs. Even a statement like this, that had me running for a stomach-pump this morning.

I opened up this new edition of "Bottom," more for Avillez's illustrations than Mitchell's writing. Someday soon, I will bring them both together and read again and look more closely. BTW, Avillez's work can be found here.

Much as trillions have been spent by giant corporations telling us how great AI is, I'd reckon even more trillions have been spent by giant corporations telling us how great the world wide web is and how unparalleled the 'experiences' it purports to deliver.

Along the time I started this post, I also read this article in the Economist:

Here's the something that really got me.

Despite these massive outlays of someone else's money, I've never had an online experience as good as four-minutes of Joseph Mitchell. Or as good as Joseph Mitchell with Joana Avillez's illustrations. 

No matter how giant corporations have tried to tell me technology can do it.

It takes people.

Some things are better in person not pixel.