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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Mapping Fiction

Jan 15 – May 2, 2022
1151 Oxford Rd, San Marino, CA 91108

Do fictional worlds feel so tangible that you can conjure up their landmarks as if you’d been there? Do you still hold strange maps from childhood in your retinal memory? This exhibition immerses visitors into the imagined locales and specific landscapes of novels. Robert Louis Stevenson’s detailed delineations from Treasure Island and Kidnapped. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth maps from The Lord of the Rings. Lewis Carroll’s 1876 edition of The Hunting of the Snark. They’re all here, plus much more. The show has been timed to celebrate the centennial of James Joyce’s Ulysses, with mappings of the novel as it moves through a day in Dublin. —E.C.

McLoughlin Bros, “Round the World with Nellie Bly,” 1890. Courtesy of Jay T. Last. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.