Mystery Maps for Storytelling
I‘m always mining for inspiration across the various feeds and streams, but this past year has happily brought me back into my archive of “real” things, like these Dell mapbacks.
I was mostly in search of an antidote for the uninspiring algorithms pushing stories (content) at me and, in no-small-part, the lameness of the (user) experience that comes with those platforms (tech companies.)
One of my favorites, and something I often come back to in my collection, is this series of vintage paperbacks that was published for about a decade around WWII. I see them as an early take on “world building” around narratives.
In 1943, Dell started publishing “mapbacks” — mostly crime & mystery novels, some westerns — with their signature back covers. Every book shared the same size and approach. Front to back: the cover illustration played more with visual metaphor than storytelling; the spine used color and typography uniquely on each book, anchored consistently by their brilliant peephole colophon; and the back cover used a map-like illustration, teasing the plot and usually a key set-piece of the story.
The outside of the book is an experience designed to inspire curiosity and provide multiple points of entry that pull you into the pages. Varying illustrators tackled the covers. The typography was fast and loose. The illustrative map varied from a standard birds-eye view of the town where the story is set, to x-ray vision through a building where the crime went down. Fan of the author? Cool. Down with the theme or genre? Gotcha. Armchair detective? Here’s your map.
The thinking didn’t stop at the cover. The opening pages of each book contained several more on-ramps into the narrative, designed in a way that evokes a vintage voice over from a film noir — WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW — and, for sure, not every story was as good as the set-up, but at least they got you that far.
Dell was attempting to innovate the book format to stand out against its competitors and sink more hooks into a story-hungry audience. They were redesigning the standard at a moment in time when media was becoming more dynamic and multi-media, and they recognized that their readers were drawn to the same story for different reasons. So they designed more on-ramps to engagement, something that’s clearly missing from our mainstream storytelling channels.
I collect mapbacks when I see them and they never let me down. This time around, I ended up back in my studio after another endless scroll session on Netflix, or Amazon, or whatever, the algorithm failing (yet again) to fulfill its overwhelming need to get me to binge the next episode; cruised the latest headlines on my phone; then grabbed a mapback with a rad cover and map, opened it up to find this amazing page…
[A BALCONY… BOOKS ARE WEAPONS — in a free democracy everyone may read what he likes. Books educate, inform, inspire; they also provide entertainment, bolster morale. This book has been manufactured in confirmity with waretime restrictions — read it and pass it on. Our armed forces especially need books — you may give them to your nearest U.S.O. office, leave them at your public library, or send them directly to Commanding Headquarters, 4th Service Command, Atlanta, Ga., or any Service Command, marked ‘For Army Libraries.’]
