Hiya, thanks for responding!Originally Posted by J.Edward
Hey Kanny
Welcome to the Guild.
I have wondered myself if any here would want to do a book of Guild maps.
I can already see many financial and rights issues that would be thorny but it would be interesting.
When you speak of 'donating', what does that entail? Is this involving rights for use or something?
To have professionally printed maps made and shipped to you in the UK would not be cheap and I don't know many who would be interested in doing that free of charge.
While it might be cool to know my work might be in the Cambridge U. Lib. Map room, I'm not sure if I would want to incur the cost to get it there.
By donate, I simply mean giving a copy of the item to the library for conversation and preservation purposes. This is not in anyway attached to giving over image rights or anything like that, my aim is simply to build up a collection of fantasy or sci-fi maps for future generations to enjoy.
As you say, postage to the UK is probably prohibitively expensive for many of you and thus if its something people don't want to do that is obviously totally fine. I'm basically trying to bolster our collection however I can. I view it as a great shame that so many libraries have such competitively small collections of fantasy maps. Mapping of imaginary places has historically never really been on many peoples radar in terms of things that we should keep, catalogue and store. With all that said this is ultimately a case of "if you don't ask you don't get" and I'm writing all this with the full understanding that nothing may come of it (and I'm totally fine with that). Though I would encourage anyone out there who goes on to publish any work to always consider depositing a copy within your local university library collection if possible.
The other main reason I bring this all up is as an attempt to get those of you who may be interested to consider banding together to produce a compendium of the best work produced here. It seems a shame that so many of you have produced such amazing work that will never find its way into a hard format. As someone who handles many many maps every day I can assure you there is nothing like having a world (real or imaginary) roll out before you in a tangible physical form. Even if you only make copies for yourselves I encourage you to always think of printing your finest pieces professionally.
Maps on the screen show you the fantasy they represent, but once you hold a map in your hand there is no telling where it may take you.
That is totally understandable, not all work translates to a printed format. With that said however you will also be surprised by how well a number of images can capture your work, if the shots themselves are chosen with such a goal in mind.
So Click got in touch with me and came up with an interesting idea. If I could get high res digital copies of your works I could do the printing myself and add them to our collection. I will also need a certain number of details to catalogue an item to a basic level...
Title of work
Authors name
Year of publication (or creation in this case)
Setting *
*: I'm thinking it may be useful to know if a map is from a series of unified works, so if the map pertains to a specific world/setting I think that would be (Middle Earth, for example).
I will probably want to print items at A3 or A2 size (depending on the item in question). I would then fold them so they can be stored in our standard size boxes (which support items a little larger than A4 size). Obviously I would love to store everything as a roll map, but that is just not feasible.
The works would be catalogued under the series title of "Cartographers Guild" in the first instance and will begin life stored on an access database. Later an initiative would take place to catalogue each item more fully (making it searchable via the libraries main search engine).
While I would love to take a copy of everything people here have produced I will probably have to assert some form of quality control, which I hope you can all understand. I will also be focusing on maps of worlds, continents, islands, cities or towns (probably in that order). Maps of smaller areas like dungeons, castles or other such things would be much lower priority, though I may make exception if the quality or style of the work was very high or unique. I will probably also focus upon maps of places outside existing intellectual properties (like the lord of the rings) as we likely already have maps of those places that have been produced and published for the market.
I should also reiterate that the purpose of this entire thing is not to take any forms of rights from you. Its simply an effort to store examples of such works in a physical archive.
I will probably start sending people PMs asking if they are happy to contribute their work, requesting high res images that I can print from. If your interested in the idea please feel free to contact me.
Also I'm sorry for spamming the main forums with three posts in a row!
Reply With Quote
