A Map of the Kingdom of Corsets or of Lost Laughter?

I've revisited an older post on this blog, from October 2009, on a pamphlet about selling corsets.  It has a beautiful map of a corset department:

In part:

I should think that I would like to make a Kingdom Map for his image, some day.  It looks to me ready to accept the responsibilities of landforms or ideas or statistics or changes or comparisons in place of its plain nature of counters and countertops and display cases, empty boxes waiting for something a little more invigorating to depict.  Or maybe not, maybe the chance of display of transformations is enough to suit its peculiar, perhaps singular, needs.

Or maybe on the Corset Map  instead of  substituting land and sea for corsets and boxes, one could substitute the noises of a quiet house at night, or the sound of heavy boots in a brittle-dry snow in the deep cold.  Or maybe a map of the discovery of children's laughter, or inconvenient pauses in conversations through the history of human speaking...or a map of lost ways.

Continue reading here.

Comments

[Jeff Donlan]

That corset department could easily be a library reading room with carrels and some reference shelving. It could be a map of a library that collects and catalogs the noises of a quiet house at night or inconvenient pauses in conversation, but the mapping of the actual noises and pauses might better be done topographically. Lost laughter could be projected onto a torus, providing more horizons at which to disappear and a more hopeless prospect of ever finding it again.

[John F. Ptak]

That's the ticket! I like the idea of projection on a torus.