Maps

1967 "The Tortoise & the Hare: A Pirelli Film." Combined map, advertising for the film, and for Pirelli's Cinturato tires. Film presented by Cammell Hudson & Brownjohn Associates. Produced and directed by Hugh Hudson. Starring Liz Allsopp, Gino Zottarelli, and Lucy Hornak. Script by David Cammell and Hugh Hudson, inspired by La Fontaine. Map produced by Mears Caldwell Hacker Ltd. £2.79 from Timothy Gardener, Bedhampton, UK, through eBay, June, '04.

This is a tour-de-force! The map sets the scene for a movie that seems built around a tour of its own. I gather that a sports car overtakes a truck, only to find the same truck ahead again, and again, and again. On the back of this oversized map are a number of stills from the film and photographs of the actors and settings. Prose talks about the generation of the film's idea and Pirelli's backing of it. Two of the many little panels--I think I count eighty-three of them--reproduce TH from standard text pages of Aesop and La Fontaine. Would this map have been sold in the theater on the occasion of the film? Or perhaps handed out as advertising for Pirelli's Cinturato tires (or as the brochure reads, "tyres")? Like almost every other map in the world, this one is big, unwieldy, clumsy. But besides that, it is one of the craziest of Aesopic remnants I have found. Aesop lives!