About

I'm Aires Loutsaris and I've worked in marketing my whole career. But this is the thing I actually care about.

Reading Maps came out of a nagging thought that every story has happened somewhere. Odysseus crossed a real sea. The Pequod sailed real water. Phileas Fogg's eighty days ran on real railways and real steamer lines and that you could follow him in a way. However when you read a book, all that geography stays locked in your head. Once you close the cover and it goes with it.

So I started plotting them properly. Real coastlines, real ports, one journey at a time.

There are hundreds on the map now, books and films both. You can pick one up and follow it stop by stop. Where the ship left from, where it was becalmed, what happened at each landfall, etc. Some are roughly what you'd expect. Others surprised me. I didn't know until I plotted it that Blood Meridian opens with a boy drifting down the Mississippi or that Alexander's whole march east fits into a shape you can take in at one quick glance.

It's just me and Fabio Moreira, the amazing developer that makes everything work. We built it because I wanted it to exist and nobody else had.

The bit I'm fussy about

Anyone can draw a line between two dots. The hard part is making sure the line doesn't sail through Florida.

Every sea route here is checked against a high resolution coastline before it goes up and if the ship ends up crossing land, it doesn't get published. It's slow, it's a bit obsessive (very) and it's the whole point.

Where I get it wrong

The geography I can check. The books I can only read.

So the mistakes that get through are nearly always the same kind: the line is drawn correctly, but it's the wrong line. A reader wrote to tell me that The Letter of Marque ends in Sweden and my map stopped in England. He was right. Another told me the kid in Blood Meridian is twice in San Francisco and twice watches it burn with dolphins rolling through the firelit surf. I'd missed it completely. She was right too and the map goes to San Francisco now.

If you spot one, please tell me. I'd far rather be corrected than left wrong and the people who know these books best are better at this than I am.

A word about spoilers

The stop descriptions follow the story which means they give it away. If you're halfway through a book, the map will happily tell you how it ends. Consider yourself warned.