The Forgotten Lands

In 2002, I started a creative project called Geography of the Forgotten Lands. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Milorad Pavich’s Dictionary of the Khazars, Forgotten Lands was going to be my attempt to horn in on then-Girlfriend5000’s bookarts turf. There was an upcoming show with a flag theme, and my idea was to create a set of sixteen imaginary countries, print descriptions of them onto fabric, sew their flags from standard fabrics, and to bind these “pages” inside an old-fashioned accounting ledger.

It would have been a cool project, and it was great fun to work on the imaginary countries, but I was crippled by a complete lack of knowledge about bookmaking technique, and eventually the plan fizzled.  Eventually the Forgotten Lands were, well, forgotten.

I resurrected the project in early 2008, and was surprised to see how much work I had done on making up the countries. Out of the sixteen I had originally planned, there were eleven that I had completed fairly decent writeups of (plus a twelfth that stank), as well as the basic ideas for two more.  Over the next few weeks, I typed up the finished countries, wrote up drafts of the remaining ones, made simple images of the flags, and posted them all in eight installments on the Life & Times.

These country descriptions are part parody of reference-book prose, part commentary on world events, and part pure geographical fantasy.  As of this writing, at least one person has been fooled by them, which I consider the highest compliment; I fondly hope that their presence on the web will mislead students for years to come.

I consider the Forgotten Lands to be works in progress, and intend to continue editing them from time to time, as the spirit moves me.  Blogger Cartophiliac, meanwhile, was so taken by the Lands that he decided to create maps for some of them; the links are shown here.  If YOU would like to do something based on the Forgotten Lands, let me know.