William Spooner

This charming folding map of Europe was published as an educational game for Victorian children. Whimsical illustrations and bright colours make for a wonderfully decorative map. Five players, representing travellers from England, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Sweden, would start on the 'S' tiles arranged along the edge of the map and would race to reach their own home capital before the other players. A spinner (not included with this map and very rarely found intact) decided whether players would move north, south, east, or west.

A copy of the original rules booklet held in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum explains the game thus:

The Travellers who are of different nations, having journeyed in company through various parts of the world, agree on arriving at Alexandria to return home to the capitals of their respective countries, by embarking each from some different city in Africa, or on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Austrian (distinguished by the mark A) is to start from Jerusalem; The Russian (marked B) from Cairo; the Swede (marked C) from Alexandria; the Prussian (marked D) from Tripoli; and the Englishman (marked E) from Morocco.
Their journeys are to be pursued by the turning up of the totum, which is marked with the letters N, E, S, W representing north, east, south and west; and each traveller is to move along the lines of the pictorial map from cross to cross of the squares as may be determined by the totum.


To make the game more educational, players could be fined if they passed over the capital city of a country marked on the map without naming the country. Other forfeits and rewards are dotted across the map. Descriptions of each of the regions shown on the map were also provided with the game, though these also rarely survive to the modern day. An earlier edition was published in 1842.



Original hand-colour. Folded. [EUR1491]