Found a magical book today.

Berliner Judith Schalansky’s illustrated book, Atlas of Remote Islands is the perfect armchair traveler’s delight during a cold winter evening..

There are still places on earth that are unknown.  

Visually stunning and uniquely designed, this wondrous book captures fifty islands that are far away in every sense-from the mainland, from people, from airports, and from holiday brochures. The author offers one page historic events , population info and scientific reports to frame each island, providing information on its distance from the mainland, whether its inhabited, its features, and the stories that have shaped its lore. With stunning full-color maps and an air of mysterious adventure, Atlas of Remote Islands is perfect for the traveler or romantic in all of us.

The stories strongly convey is that islands are not only receptacles for dreams and utopia, or testing ground for explorers, scientists and missionaries, but also, and fundamentally, sites of cruelty and violence.  Filled with tales of incest, rape, mutiny, disease, bleakness and challenge; of shipwreck and disappointing periods of time, giving explanation and further meaning to the name of some of these islands:  Deception Island in the Southern Ocean; Danger Islands in the Pacific Ocean; or Seclusion Island in the Arctic Ocean.

Shakespeare’s Prospero + Caliban would be at home.