A relatively new book highly recommended to virtual world builders
and explorers:
 
 ECCENTRIC SPACES, by Robert Harbison.  Boston:  David R. Godine, 1988. $10.95
 
 Subtitled, "A voyage through real and imagined worlds."
 
        "This is a record of a struggle to assimilate more and more to
 the realm of delight, which takes up less and less obvious sources of
 gratification till in the end we can take the same joy in almost any
 made thing.  It is about bringing things indoors, about domesticating
 reality, and the model for all these objects is a building -- the
 palpable idea, the traversible speech, the simplest experience of being
 in more than one place at a time.  The books movement is roughly from
 things to ideas, from the real to the fictional, but it tries to make
 these states harder to distinguish.  Its boldest aim is to suggest a
 history of certain kinds of fiction, certain transformations worked by
 the imagination, and to extend our sense of the part the fictionalizing
 power plays in our lives.

        "...Like many books, it is working itself free of its material.
 The goal of learning and of this book as an act is that the critic feel
 himself a participant, that the describer become the doer.  The end is
 not an actual building but the writing by which the writer becomes as
 every learner will the exemplar of culture himself.  A book is a
 thought too big and various to be seen all at once, sturdy but unencom-
 passable ideation, and the intimate excuse for a new one after all the
 other books is this of giving the mind an existence outside itself."
 
                                       -- From the Foreword
 
 And here is a brief listing of the Contents:
 
 1.  Green Dreams:  Gardens
 
 2.  Dreaming Rooms:  Sanctums
 
 3.  Nightmares of Iron and Glass:  Machines
 
 4.  Cities Dark Places:  City Planning and Built Worlds
 
 5.  Books of Things:  Architectural Fictions
 
 6.  Books of Things:  Topographical Fictions
 
 7.  The Mind's Miniatures:  Maps
 
 8.  Contracted World:  Museums and Catalogues
 
 
 I hope it's obvious why this book is so crucial and so timely.

