When you’re translating a work such as Jules Verne’s Mikhail Strogoff, which is such an epic journey across so much country, it’s as well as to keep a good grasp of geography, and that’s exactly what Stephanie Smee has been doing. But it’s not just maps per see she has to look at and pore over; it’s actually old maps, for while geography itself might not have changed, political geography has, and the map of the Russian Empire in 1876 looks very different to the map of the Russian Federation today. Here she is with one of those lovely old maps she’s been consulting–and next to that, a copy of the original edition of the book, which she’s been using as her base text.