The catalogue for 2017’s Texas exhibition Worlds imagined: the Maps of Imaginary Places is now available as a 70Mb free-and-public PDF download.

I expected to open a 600-page book with Tiny Footnotes. It’s actually only 92-pages of content with Big Pictures. Still, even at a relatively short-and-sweet length, the book is obviously a quality survey and a fine-starting-point for the fantasy map beginner. Or for those refreshing their memories and catching up with the best of the newer maps.

The recent 2014 map of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands features, and the book closes with a bit of one of Robert E. Howard’s maps of Conan’s world.

Sadly it can’t be OCR’d for use with local search, as the PDF’s security is tightly locked down. Also, if you wanted to quote the text you’d have to screenshot with Microsoft Office’s OneNote and then “Copy text from Picture”.

There’s also a 25 minute video tour of the exhibition, usefully SteadyCam-ed to prevent sea-sickness in viewers.