Isn’t the Internet great? A discussion on MetaFilter about one of my favorite children’s books (The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin) led me to Graham Leuschke’s site which led me to Lilly Tao’s GirlHacker site where I learned a fascinating tidbit of information that has absolutely nothing to do with children’s books.

The tidbit is this: there are sometimes imaginary streets and towns on real maps. They’re called "copyright traps" and they’re put there to prevent people from copying a map from somewhere and claiming it as their own. Given my love of maps and my interest in intriguing places both real and fictitious, I found this factoid positively thrilling. I love the idea that there are imaginary places on my real maps. Even if these streets and towns exist purely for mundane copyright reasons, they still put a rather whimisical twist on reality.

In a way, I thought this tied in with another interesting thing I came across recently, also via MetaFilter (I’ve become a MetaFilter junkie). It’s the Invisible Library, which is an online collection of the titles of imaginary books - that is, books that only show up in other books. The MetaFilter discussion on books both real and imaginary is almost as good as the Invisible Library site itself and includes a lot of links to other places which would certainly be of interest to bibliophiles and imaginary-things-o-philes alike.

I hope you have some time to kill…