From Dante's Hell to Zelda: Rare Fantasy Maps Go on Display in Zurich
A London lawyer's private collection of maps drawn from fiction — Dante's Hell, Treasure Island, Narnia, Harry Potter and The Legend of Zelda among them — goes on public view this week at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, the central library of the University of Zurich.
The exhibition, titled "Fantastical Maps from Legendary Stories," opens on 4 September and runs until 5 December. It shows 60 pieces from the 168-item private collection of Sunderland Cohen, a lawyer living in central London, alongside additional maps from the library's own holdings The Art Newspaper.
The curator is Jost Schmid-Lanter, head of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich's map collection. At the centre of the exhibition space, historical maps that served as visual and conceptual references for fictional cartography sit alongside the imaginary ones, putting the real and the invented in direct conversation (Zentralbibliothek Zürich).
The oldest works on view are the first printed maps of Dante's Hell, dating from 1506. The exhibition also includes images of Treasure Island hand-drawn by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Maps tied to C.S. Lewis's Narnia, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh round out the literary side, while the show also ranges across myths, fairy tales and legends more broadly The Art Newspaper.
Sunderland Cohen calls her collection Ex Carta, and her one rule for what goes in is simple: every item must be printed matter. That criterion pulls the collection across centuries and formats — from a 500-year-old engraving of the Inferno to a map from the instruction manual of the original 1986 Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda. A prop map showing the Holy Grail from the 1989 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is also included; Cohen acquired it at an auction of movie ephemera The Art Newspaper.
Collecting runs in the family. Cohen's father, Neil Sunderland, built the Sunderland Collection — more than 150 rare world maps and atlases dating from 1200 to 1800. Since 2021 that collection has been available to browse digitally on a site called Oculi Mundi. Items from the elder Sunderland's holdings will also feature in "Night Mapping," an exhibition opening at the Warburg Institute in London on 21 October The Art Newspaper.
For anyone who has ever traced a finger across a fold-out map at the front of a fantasy novel, the appeal is immediate. These are the documents that told readers where the dragon slept, which road led to the castle and which island hid the treasure — objects that exist only because a writer first imagined a place worth mapping.
