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September 1998Kenneth R. Johnston's Wordsworth Biography Features Maps by Graphic ServicesGraphic Services' collaboration with Kenneth R. Johnston, chair of Indiana University's Department of English, started with a big green book--the facsimile edition of Horwood's Plan of London, 1792-1799, a collection of detailed late-eighteenth-century maps of the city. Johnston had just finished the manuscript of The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy, and needed someone to produce the maps for the book. A colleague who had worked with Graphic Services recommended the unit. |
The route of Wordsworth's 1790 walking tour of Switzerland--one of nine maps Graphic Services created to illustrate the poet's travels for The Hidden Wordsworth, by IU Professor of English Kenneth R. Johnston. |
The Horwood collection turned out to be the first of many contemporaneous resources that Suzanne Hull, Director of Graphic Services, used to create original maps illustrating the travels of poet William Wordsworth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to the maps, Graphic Services produced one illustration and a genealogical chart for the book. The centrality of maps to a biography of a writer known for his long walking tours became even more apparent to Johnston as his collaboration with Graphic Services progressed. "The visual aspect of this book has turned out to be more important than I realized," he notes. The nine maps Graphic Services produced for the book had to convey graphically not just the poet's movements, but also the political dynamics of Britain and the continent during the time of the French Revolution. Of the map of the "Northern Vendée" (below), Johnston explains, "This particular view of the English Channel shows the relationship between England and France in an unusual way in order to let readers see the relationship between the West Country places that we associate with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the center of the counterrevolution in France."
Due to the idiosyncratic nature of the required views and to the fact that the events Johnston describes happened two centuries ago, most of the maps Graphic Services created for the project were adapted from several contemporary sources. In many cases, locations of towns or landmarks important to Wordsworth's tours had to be determined by additional research, then painstakingly added to the map-in-progress. "We spent an awful lot of time just getting ready to draw," Hull says; "getting the model ready that we used to make the map was really the job." The book's endpaper maps, derived from Horwood's London map book and a period Paris map book, posed the greatest challenges. Because both books contain a series of maps so detailed that even individual houses are represented, information had to be condensed and cut. First, relevant pages were photocopied, scanned, reduced, and assembled into a large composite image of the area to be represented. Then, Hull worked with Johnston to decide what details to eliminate. The process involved numerous resizings and rescalings--necessitating close scrutiny to avoid the introduction of errors. "Once files get that complicated," Hull points out, "moving objects can move other objects inadvertently." There was "a lot of proofing and reproofing" at this stage. Copyright issues also complicated the project. While maps are facts, and facts cannot be copyrighted, the style of a particular map (textures and typefaces used, for example) has the status of original artwork. To avoid copyright problems, and to maintain a uniform and appropriate style throughout the book, Hull used a computer map database to recreate or combine views. This necessitated the difficult job of correcting for differences in perspective. Johnston requested an illustration to highlight one of the most famous moments of Wordsworth's travels--his ascent of Mt. Snowdon in Wales. The experience formed the basis for the conclusion of Wordworth's epic poem The Prelude, and Johnston wanted readers to understand the precarious nature of the path to the summit. With the aid of just a photograph and Johnston's description, Jim Hull drew a picture of the Rhyd-Ddu path (below), which was inserted in the map that Graphic Services created to depict the Snowdon climb. Readers familiar with Snowdon have remarked on the illustration's accuracy. "I could write about the Snowdon climb differently knowing that I had such a clear map there," Johnston says.
Jim Hull's drawing of the Ryhd-Ddu path illustrates the precipitous nature of the route Wordsworth took to the summit of Mt. Snowdon in Wales.The genealogical chart that Hull prepared for The Hidden Wordsworth details the high degree of intermarriage among four families; it covers two hundred years and involved quite a bit of research. As with the maps, compiling the information was the bulk of the task. Johnston credits Hull with figuring out how all the pieces fit together, and considers the chart "another visual detail that became much more important than I had realized. In effect, Susie has produced an important new item of data for Wordsworth research." Johnston's book turned out to be one of the biggest single projects Hull has worked on at Graphic Services. It was also one of the best: "Ken's enthusiasm was just wonderful. And it was catching." Johnston calls the collaboration a "positive experience all the way through; I always looked forward to consulting with Susie, because it was always friendly and profitable and forwardlooking. " Johnston singles out Hull's work in the book's acknowledgements, where he thanks "Susie Hull (inventive cartographer)." For Johnston, the contribution of Graphic Services to The Hidden Wordsworth is part of an IU "synergy," involving resources from the Main Library and the Lilly Library, as well as advice from a number of IU scholars. "That's why the book is co-dedicated to IU." |
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