on another island
image by J Paradise is an island. So is hell. (p6) I remember having a world map pinned on the wall of my bedroom when I was growing up. But that was before my father brought home a beach ball-sized model globe. It was a relief model, where if you ran your finger across the surface, you could "read" the mountain ridges. In the preface of Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands : Fifty islands I have never set foot on and never will , she describes a similar experience of maps, atlases and globes. While I confess it was the cover of this beautiful book (Schalansky trained as a graphic designer, and had designed the book and laid out the text) that first drew me, it was a brief read of the preface that convinced me to take it home from the bookstore. In the preface, Schalansky teases out man's fascination with the far frontier, our desire to conquer via knowledge and documentation, and the story threads behind these abandoned, conquered, disputed, cursed,...
