Where are the maps when you need them?

Jerome Weeks, over at book/daddy has in interesting post today about how much better certain books are, or would have been, with maps included to put all of their geography into context for the reader.

We're required to go to a computer or dig out a globe because the publisher wouldn't provide a map?

Which is, of course, the real matter here: the stinginess of publishers. They would have to pay Rand-McNally for the right to reprint a map or hire a cartographer to draft a new one. And then there's the extra cost of printing it.

Thus, when a color map is clearly what's called for, readers find a smudgy, black-and-white one. When two maps are needed, we get only one. And if we get both, they're crudely done.

Read the whole thing over a book/daddy...you can thank me later.