Strange Maps is a fun blog (and now a book) by Frank Jacobs. Here is a smidgen of the proprietor’s post on Treasure Island:
“…was there a real-life model for the generically named Treasure Island – and if so, where was it? It seems to have been a chance invention by Lloyd Osbourne, RLS’s stepson, while holidaying with the family in a Scottish Highland cottage. As Osbourne later recalled:
‘… busy with a box of paints I happened to be tinting a map of an island I had drawn. Stevenson came in as I was finishing it, and with his affectionate interest in everything I was doing, leaned over my shoulder, and was soon elaborating the map and naming it. I shall never forget the thrill of Skeleton Island, Spyglass Hill, nor the heart-stirring climax of the three red crosses! And the greater climax still when he wrote down the words Treasure Island at the top right-hand corner! And he seemed to know so much about it too – the pirates, the buried treasure, the man who had been marooned on the island … . ‘Oh, for a story about it’, I exclaimed, in a heaven of enchantment …’
And that is how Stevenson got started writing Treasure Island – as a back story to the map originally drawn by his stepson.”
Cool hey?
There’s more to the story, and I encourage you to have a read of the original post |HERE|. After that you should be sufficiently primed to download the public domain audiobook version from LibriVox.org…
Treasure Island
By Robert Louis Stevenson; Read by Adrian Praetzellis
17 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 7 Hours 33 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: December 14, 2007
A mysterious map, pirates, and pieces of eight! When young Jim Hawkins finds a map to pirates’ gold he starts on an adventure that takes him from his English village to a desert island with the murderous Black Dog, half-mad Ben Gunn, and (of course) Long John Silver. Arr Jim lad! R.L. Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Scotland and travelled extensively in California and the south Pacific.
Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/treasure-island-by-robert-louis-stevenson-2.xml
iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|
A map of Treasure Island:
And the 1934 film version:
Posted by Jesse Willis
Alan Moore’s comic The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen is chock- full of public domain literary references (and characters). This is the third in a series of posts in which I root out the freely available audiobooks (at LibriVox.org) that either feature the characters in “the league” or which are at least alluded to in passing in the story. What’s especially interesting in this case is that Moore’s wasn’t the first comic book to take inspiration from Henry Jekyll’s chemically induced bipolarity. Marvel comics had its own take on Jekyll and Hyde with Bruce Banner’s transformation into The Incredible Hulk. Indeed it seems rather strange that I never saw this until I saw Moore’s own re-purposing. 
The Saturday Play: Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde
Book At Bedtime: The Rapture
