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YOU ARE HERE
Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination
Katharine Harmon

Princeton Architectural Press, 2003
Trade paperback / 192 pages / $24.95

Mapmaking fulfills one of our most ancient and deep-seated desires: understanding the world around us and our place in it. But maps need not just show continents and oceans: there are maps to heaven and hell; to happiness and despair; maps of moods, matrimony, and mythological places. You Are Here is a wide-ranging collection of such superbly inventive maps. These are charts of places you’re not expected to find, but  voyages you take in your mind: an exploration of the ideal country estate from a dog’s perspective; a guide to buried treasure on Skeleton Island; a trip down the road to success; or the world as imagined by an inmate of a mental institution. With over 100 maps from artists, cartographers, and explorers, You are Here ventures well beyond the boundaries of geography or convention. 

A dazzling, delightful atlas of the topographies of human invention.”
— A Common Reader

This colorful compendium of maps — by artists, children, hikers, and others — proves even cartography can be creative. Maps from a canine point of view, maps made of sticks or carved in stone, maps of concepts, the human body, and fictional places — they all make sense in a wonderful way that renders ‘up north’ and ‘down south’ thoroughly passé.”
— Utne Reader

Exploration is at the heart of You Are Here, Katharine Harmon’s compendium of “personal geographies,” her catch-all term for quirky maps and map-inspired art carrying a strong imprint of the individual who created it. Harmon juxtaposes work by noted artists and designers with tickling discoveries by more unlikely candidates.”
— Newsday

As any veteran traveler knows, with the right map even well-traveled terrain can yield fresh insights—which is precisely what fascinates about this book...an invaluable repository of internalized ideas made visible.”
— CMYK

Harmon showcases maps that guide us through terrains more in tune with Sigmund Freud than Rand-McNally. Her book inspires us to imagine the topography of our own worlds.”
— Raleigh News & Observer

Maps say as much about who we are as where we’ve been. In You Are Here, author-curator Harmon pays tribute to what she calls the mapping instinct—our need to make sense of the world through charts and diagrams. Examples include the familiar arcs, bows, and crosshatches of air routes and vascular webs, but also the idiosyncratic attempts of artists, mystics, and crackpots to plot the nether regions of human experience, from politics and pop culture to love, sex, and death.”
— ReadyMade

IMAGES  Header: Shan map relating to a border dispute between (British) Burma and China along the Nam Mao River; Gene expression pattern in Drosophila embryo, Dr. John Reinitz; "Coastline I" by Kevin Wilson; "A Pictorial Map of Loveland" by Ernest Dudley Chase; "Map of My Day" by Sara Fanelli; "The Maze at Woodstock" (artist unknown)

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