I’ve seen very detailed maps, but they’re printed too small to read anything on it. If they had maybe removed all the fancy scrollwork on the border, and maybe had a gutter that was smaller than an inch, it’d be more useful. Or perhaps spread it across two pages (with a suitable gap in the centre so the image isn’t obscured by the crease).
I’ve seen maps where the text obscures the geographical features, rendering them pretty much useless.
I’ve seen maps where the wiggly lines representing the ocean look like the wiggly lines representing the mountains, which look like the wiggly lines representing a swamp; maps where you can’t tell the difference between a river line, and a road line; and maps where you can’t tell which part is land and which part is sea.
I’ve seen maps that do not match what is written in the story whatsoever, even though they appear to have been drawn by the author. e.g they travel north to get to a town clearly marked as west of them in the map.
I see rather too often maps that show only about five or six of the twenty places mentioned in the story, but also show about forty or fifty other places that are never once referred to in the text.
And very, very rarely, I’ve seen maps that work on every level they’re supposed to.
I skip straight over the maps, get straight into the fanatasy world, and let my imagination build the landscape. Then something happens that doesn’t fit into what my head has created, so I’ve got to go to the map, establish the story in that landscape.
This drives me mad, the map where key stuff happens on the crease between the two pages. Surely the map maker knew the map was going in a book!
I love maps when reading, usually. I like to flip back to the map while I’m reading the story – I’ll look at it in the beginning but because I don’t have much context, I don’t focus on it too much. I’m also the kind of person who likes family trees in my books, I refer to those while reading as well.
And in real life, I also love maps and family trees.
There must be maps. Particularly for those epic-type fantasy series that seem to follow the LotR standard of questing across many lands.
However, I don’t like it when the map is Chekhov’s gun – where the story’s heros will be visiting every dang named location on the map. David Eddings was always really bad about that.
Funky geography drives me a bit bonkers, too. But not so much in novels as in role-playing games, for some reason. Mordor’s square mountain range doesn’t bother me so much. Legend of the Five Rings’ rivers that flow away from the sea to go mountainclimbing, emphatically do.
Those damned creases are especially annoying in paperbacks.
Another map lover here. Does the map help me understand the story? Or is the story an excuse for the map? A favorite world: Newhon, wherein you find Lahkhmar, City of the Black Bones.
Artist Lordy Rodriguez makes maps that paste together “real” places in highly unusual ways. His work is highly detailed–but these might give you an idea…
I’ll glance at a map before I start a book, but if it’s a new world that I’ve had no prior experience with, it doesn’t mean much to me. I’m extremely bad about remembering names that have no relevance to me at the time I see them. Only once I get invested in the story and I start wondering where the places are that are mentioned do I really get into the map.
I don’t tend to be obsessive on maps, but I will check them to see where places are in relation to each other as I read through the story. In Song of Ice and Fire I was always trying to see where the children were in relation to each other. I’m in the middle of Stirling’s Meeting at Corvallis, and I keep checking the map in the front, but it’s hand drawn and needs to be about 3x bigger for my ageing eyes.
I think maps really help. Maps and invented languages. Maps, invented languages and arch-type fantasy races. Maps, invented languages, arch-type fantasy races, genealogies, creation myths, etc. … Sorry about that.
Maps are great for any High Fantasy that involves war or journey. I am enough of a fan of maps to have Atlases of my county from 1850 & 1891. I own the Atlases of Middle Earth & Pern.
They really do lend to a story and I often find myself flipping back to them while reading the book. The Middle Earth map I have memorized to a scary degree.
I’m very map-oriented IRL (I spend hours on GE for fun) but I don’t really need it in my books. I mean, I do like things to be internally consistent, but I don’t need a map to make sense of things, usually. LOTR, Pern, Bas Lag, Discworld - don’t really need a map for any of those.
Of course, having said that, I do have all the Discworld mappes. But that’s for the writing, not the cartography so much.
