#daniel harmon

My two precious baby books, Plotted: A Literary Atlas from Zest Books, and Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies from Quirk Books are available for all your Christmas-y/holiday needs. You know what I like? Diagonal type!

Daniel Harmon, my Plotted co-conspirator summed it up beautifully in his essay  accompanying the map alluding the drawing of the “black spot” that meant death to the recipient, and the fact that story has subsequently been banned from some libraries. He writes “What the black spot ‘means’ means less than the fact that it is there at all. In the meantime, we will continue to write our letters and ban our books. We are not them, we promise.”

Two of the spreads from “Plotted: A Literary Atlas” and some details of the original drawings based on Melville’s great American masterpiece, Moby Dick. Part of the reason for the breakdown was relevance, and partly because there is already a fantastic illustrated map of Moby Dick by Edward Everett Henry. If you haven’t seen Henry’s work, it’s pretty incredible. My reasons for mapping the Pequod and the whale were simply to give the reader a little reference for all the terminology. As a big fan of Moby Dick, and other seagoing tales like the Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin books, and Richard Henry Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast”, I would have really liked a sail map and a little more explanation. Often these sailing books dove into paragraphs of sail trimming and rigging, much of which left the land lubbers like me with only a vague notion of what was going on. Let alone the fact that a whaleboat was it’s own idiosyncratic ship-type being half cargo ship, half floating factory. If you’ve never allowed yourself the joy of reading Moby Dick - please do so. It’s a thick sweeping concoction of magic and nature, superstition and realism. After all, Melville was a whaler himself and witnessed first hand the industry’s gruesome, blood thirsty nature, as well as the sublime beauty and hardship of a sailor’s life. 

Daniel Harmon

Daniel Harmon and his beast arms.