For as long as humans have had maps, we’ve also had fictional maps. Renowned cartographers of mythical terrain include Dante Alighieri, Jonathan Swift, Sir Thomas More, and, of course, JRR Tolkien, who pioneered many of the tropes that would come to characterize the fantasy genre, amongst them the inclusion of a map at the start of your story. But for all the effort those literary types put into their fictional maps, there’s probably never been anyone quite like Jerry Gretzinger. As explored in a recent video from the YouTube channel People Make Games, Gretzinger—a genial octogenarian from Michigan—has been working on the same fictional map since the 1960s. Today, the map comprises something like 4000 panels, and the channel’s video captures Gretzinger’s first attempt to assemble it in its entirety for over a decade. Gretzinger works on the map every day, and intriguingly, the nature of the labor to which he devotes any given day is determined by drawing from a deck of cards. This Rhinehart-esque randomness means that the map’s long evolution has itself changed and evolved.
On the day that People Make Games visits him, he draws a card that demands “next higher dimension.” Is this a requirement to try to marry his map to the tenets of string theory? Well, sort of. As Gretzinger explains, “Originally, [that card] was considered to be other dimensions of reality.” Wisely, though, he’s tempered his ambitions in that respect: “The whole map has moved from literal cartography to another abstract form.”
