This German ‘Map of Bookland’ charts a bibliophilic kingdom populated by authors, genres, and readers, literalising the conceit of reading being an excursion for the mind. It is replete with publishing in-jokes, for example the Zweibelfishereien are ‘onion fisheries’, an onion-fish being an industry term for a typesetting error in which font size is mismatched. The challenges of plagiarism, censorship, and book critics are all literalised in the topography, which includes the ‘Realm of Reviewers’ and so on. There are mysterious pyramids of ‘forgotten books’ and a giant worm emerges from the ‘Caves of the Bookworms’. Overlooking all from the title cartouche is an owl, the symbol of Wisdom and Learning.

Ex Carta

This German ‘Map of Bookland’ charts a bibliophilic kingdom populated by authors, genres, and readers, literalising the conceit of reading being an excursion for the mind.

Alphons Woelfle (1884–1951) was a German illustrator and graphic artist who, by the 1930s, had work regularly appearing in satirical magazines and other commercial publications. In collaboration with Munich-based publisher Dr Ernst Heimeran (1902–1955), he developed the idea for a modern pastiche of eighteenth-century allegorical maps such as Breitkopf’s The Kingdom of Love (c.1770s).

Little is known about the origins of Alphons Woelfle’s allegorical map Karte des Bücherlandes, but it belongs to a long European tradition of ‘lands of knowledge’ and ‘maps of learning’ in which literature is visualised as a navigable landscape. Such works enjoyed renewed popularity in mid-twentieth-century Germany, when the book trade promoted imaginative maps and charts as educational and decorative items. Taking the project in a new direction, they alighted on the idea of a ‘Land of Books’, an organisation-wide collaboration that reflected what at the time was ‘the most open-minded, fun-loving and peculiar of pre-war German publishing houses’.

The Map of Bookland