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lately i have been reading the book, Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schlansky. the friend who recommended it told me that it won the most beautiful book award in, i think, Germany, back in 2009. that’s a not a fact i have confirmed nor really care to because the book really does have a beautiful design that is untarnished by a garish image of an award that usually gets printed onto the cover and, without exception, ruins the design. the only thing i abhor seeing more on a cover is a large circle containing now a major motion picture.

the premise of the book is beautifully simple. in the introduction (titled Paradise is an Island. So is Hell), Schlansky describes taking comfort in atlases while growing up in East Germany. they provided the fantasy of foreign places that were out of her reach. the rest of the book is made up of descriptions and maps of islands that are incredible in the precision they have, or maybe pretend to have. Schlansky advises at the very beginning that this book borders on the edge of non-fiction and that it is a poetic project more than anything else. she takes this element of poetry and extends it everywhere she can with control of the entirety of the design and the formatting. where i have been lingering recently is on the two, very light orange, forward slashes contained within the text of each description that also get used to mark increments of time on other places. here, though, they take the place of dividing a solid block of text, usually telling a story taking place on the island, into stanzas.

this matters to me. this book is the very image of taking something that has the gall to call itself objective in its entirety and mutilates that idealism into one of the most incredible things i’ve ever read.

it is also worth noting that it makes a nice nod to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and makes herself out to be a Marco Polo that has never visited these places, and me, a Kublai Khan who didn’t how much beauty and darkness these small formations of land can hold.