Mapping “The Phantom Tollbooth”

Following Milo’s iconic journey through the Lands Beyond

When I was a child, I had a voracious appetite for books. I was constantly visiting the library and picking new volumes to read, but one I always came back to was The Phantom Tollbooth, written by Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer. In it, a boy named Milo arrives home from school to discover a mysterious tollbooth in his room. He drives through the tollbooth and finds himself in The Lands Beyond, a fantastical world where the Kingdom of Wisdom has fallen into disarray. The Princesses of Wisdom — Rhyme and Reason — have been banished to the Castle in the Air, and two dueling kings — King Azaz the Unabridged of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician of Digitopolis — have caused a rift in the kingdom. Milo and his newfound friends, Tock the Watchdog and the Humbug, set off on a quest to rescue the Princesses and restore peace to Wisdom.

The Phantom Tollbooth is still one of my favorite novels and I reread it whenever I want to escape to another world, but I’ve recently found myself trying to trace Milo’s journey through the Kingdom of Wisdom in my head. Jules Feiffer illustrated a map of The Lands Beyond for the book, and I wondered if I could record the story on the map. As a challenge, I started reading the novel again, this time with a copy of the map from the…