The Mappist

This is a complex fold-out structure in which leaves of plates are of illustrated transparent film and colour illustrations are mounted and interspersed in the printed text. Pages 11-12 are without the text of the story and composed of a USGS map that has mounted colour illustrations recto and verso made from transparent film. It is ssued in a brown faux-wood slipcase with metal label holder and label, mounted on the slipcase’s spine, with title and author printed on label. Slipcase within another corrugated slipcase along with a sheet laid in, entitled Some suggestions for looking at The Mappist.

Lopez’s story is about its narrator, Phillip Trevino’s eventual finding of the writer of a travel book which, in Trevino’s opinion, had conveyed the soul of the capital of Columbia, Bogotá. Trevino had never given up his search for the genius behind the books which had become a touchstone for his own work and world view. In a bookstore in Tokyo, Trevino finds a set of elegant hand drawn maps in a map cabinet, all unmistakably by the author of the books and all signed Corlis Benefideo. And the master mapmaker indeed turns out to be the reclusive writer. The book design and images have been created by Hobson and each book in the edition has been assembled using original United States Geographical Survey maps for the concertina binding which, when opened, creates its own vista of mountains and valleys representing the maps that figure so prominently in Lopez’s story. Covers are made of boards over which have been pasted paper reproductions of a 1911 map of Bogotá from the collection of the Library of Congress. Images of hands emulating gestures of a mapmaker at work have been reproduced as digital pigment prints on transparent film. The slipcase has been covered with wood-grained paper to suggest the map cabinet which plays a pivotal role in the story.

Priscilla Juvelis (2016) describes the complex interplay between Lopez’s multi-layered story embodied in Hobson’s constructed and illustrated book:

Themes of hidden identities searched out and deciphered, hidden intentions coded in seemingly disparate actions, and the tantalizing possibilities of bringing order to a chaotic history are beautifully served by the combination of maps that are the subject of the story and, literally, hold the story together … The reader is challenged with images thrown up by the author and artist: bits of map interspersing text, bits of map as fore-edge and gutter outside edge on any turn of the page, a phrase full of possibilities … are preceded and followed by a page of transparent film with the image of a map being passed from one hand to another. Turning the film page, the reader is confronted with the act being completed and the hand-off accomplished. … We are left wondering, where will we find our maps – and will we be able to read them – or remember what we’ve read?

Zdanevich, Ilya. Granovskii, Naum. Available on: https://www.eprarebooks.com/cgi-bin/phillips/65.html