The Maps of Maladie
There is nothing quite like the feel of a real map
jjhudsson likes to work off real maps. He says that unless he has that authentic, vintage, crinkly-paper feel he can’t write about a place authentically. It’s that reality in the background material that helps him generate an honest sense of place that is so well illustrated in the Horthólary stories (or Lays, as he insists we call them) . Passages like this, from The Angel of Pessane:
“I have mentioned that the town of Pessane marks the boundary between two distinct geographies: the Basse-Maladie and the Haut-Maladie. The observation is more than a convenient short-hand. The town actually straddles these two extremes within its walls. One half of the town - that comprising the university and the medieval market around which the town formed in the twelfth century - sits proprietorially atop the residual sandstone outcrops of the Haut, watching somewhat anxiously over the other half - the merchant quarter and various ghettos which sprawl over the Basse hinterland at more leisure.”
Take a close look at the map below and you can see this geography rendered in detail - even to the level of the university and cathedral standing opposed to one another. If you look really closely you might notice a couple of other things: the crease marks in the old parchment; the library catalogue mark (top left); and the pencilled underlining, hastily scribbled by some ardent scholar no doubt!
As you can imagine, this attention to detail poses some challenges for the illustrator. Typically, jjhudsson sends me a rough pencil sketch, showing the relative positions of the various features - towns, roads, rivers etc. I take a photo of this scrap of paper and load into GIMP (the open source software we use at the Press).
After a bit of resizing, I set it as a ‘base map’ layer. Next, I add a set of layers created by RobA of The Cartographer’s Guild, that renders the parchment (I will usually add a few mildew blotches of my own at the end of the process to make each map unique).
Finally I add an empty layer that is just plain white. We’ll come to this later.
With the parchment and base-map in place, I then use transparent layers to trace the various features on top. I use four groups: ‘Geology’ (for rivers, mountains); ‘Vegetation’ (trees and gresses); ‘Symbols’ (for town walls, buildings, roads etc.); and finally, ‘Labels’ (the compass, scale, place names and legend).
What really adds to the magic are the GIMP brushes. Each mark on the map is ‘stamped’ onto its respective layer using a special ‘brush’. I use one of about five brush sets I have downloaded from KMAlexander. For example, the ‘mountain’ symbol I use on the Hortholary maps is from his ‘Vischer Cartography’ set (brush abr-765, if you’re interested), and the fonts I use are his ‘Kauffer (regular)’, although I also use others.
Finding the right brush set (or sets) is what gives a map its vibe. The only other advice I can offer is the old addage that ‘less is more’ - I’ve lost count of the times jjhudsson has sent a map back with the words ‘too cluttered’ pencilled across it. Much like good writing, the trick is to outline the idea; the reader will fill in their own detail.
If you’ve read the Hortholary stories you will know that the maps there are more formal affairs: no parchment, no librarian’s graffiti, and nice numbered legends instead of hand-written annotations. You can use the slider in the image above to compare the two versions.
These changes have been made to help the reader. You’d be surprised at how much light is aborbed even by today’s e-readers: when we viewed the ‘parchment’ maps in a Kobo and a Kindle they were almost illegible. This is where that white layer I mentioned comes in.
Providing you place the the white layer above the base map, but below the parchment group of layers, you can easily turn off the parchment layers to give your map a plain white background. Likewise, the black and white numbered circles that form the legend in the book maps, are in their own group under the ‘Labels’ block; they can be turned on or off at will.
This arrangement makes it relatively easy to switch from an ‘ebook map’ to a ‘parchment map’, and back again. Realism and clarity!
Notes
The image Two versions of the Pays Maladie map featured in the Lays of Maladie was created by The Tricky Genre Press (2026); the slide-over effect was created using JuxtaposeJS software.
