Is There an Interactive H.P. Lovecraft Map?

There is, and this office keeps it: the Field Survey, the Cartography Office's interactive chart of every locality on file. It is also, deliberately, more cautious than the road atlases and tourist maps that circulate on the subject, and the reason belongs at the top of this note.

The accounts on file are firsthand and uneven. Some witnesses give a latitude and longitude. Some give a street. Some name a town that no current atlas lists, a county, and a rumour. A great many of the places concerned are filed here as SUPPRESSED, UNCHARTED or UNLOCATABLE: scrubbed from public record, never surveyed, or simply not findable twice. A chart that gave all of these the same kind of pin would claim more than any witness has said. The Survey instead marks each pin by how far the chronicle commits: an exact coordinate, a surveyed place, a reconciled pin (the Archive's best reconciliation of a suppressed town with the surviving town now on that ground), a named region with a shaded zone of doubt, or a conjecture this office offers as its reading of vague testimony.

What is on it

The waking-world chart carries the four Massachusetts towns — Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth and Dunwich — and Providence, street by street where a witness names a street. It also carries New York, the Vermont hills and the Catskills, Exham Priory in England, the Antarctic ground covered by the Miskatonic expedition, and the open Pacific where R'lyeh rises. The voyages of the Alert and the Emma are drawn as routes. The Dreamlands are on a separate, hand-drawn chart of their own, because no survey instrument this office owns will fix Ulthar or Celephaïs to a globe.

How to use it

Zoom from the whole world down to a single street; the chart adds coastlines, rivers, counties and place names only where there is a reason to. Click any pin and the map flies to the site and opens its record card, with the chronicle it comes from, the basis for its position, and a link to the full Locality record. The preset buttons jump to New England, the Arkham coast, Providence, New York, Europe, the South Pacific and Antarctica. Layers can be switched on and off, so the voyages, the Lovecraft Country pins and the remote and lost places can be read separately.

Records that cannot be charted at all — Peck Valley, the Hyde Tomb, Aira — are listed beside the chart rather than guessed onto it. If you want every town on a dot, this is not the chart. If you want one that tells you which pins are firm, it is.