paper towns road trip map

Themes and Analysis

Paper towns, by john green.

'Paper Towns' by John Green is a well-loved novel. It uses examples of relatable themes, symbols, and interesting literary devices.

Article written by Lee-James Bovey

P.G.C.E degree.

Like most books, there are themes contained throughout the narrative of ‘ Paper Towns ‘. The novel cleverly uses extended metaphors throughout to explore its central themes. Green also makes use of numerous symbols and types of figurative language.

Paper Towns Themes

The idea of a “Paper Town” is used throughout the novel. A paper town is a town that was created by mapmakers so that their work couldn’t be stolen. What often happened is that people would discover these fictional towns on the maps and then create actual towns in those locations. This is used s a metaphor in various ways throughout the book. With the very nature of paper being that it can be shaped and changed etc. Margo uses the idea of paper towns to suggest that the people that live in these towns are far too easily shaped by their peers. She points to herself as an example as she has created a persona for herself.

Being your own person and not living up to expectations

It is fair to say that Margo, certainly in the earlier parts of the novel, lives up to the wild reputation that she has created for herself, but we see as the story progresses that she doesn’t like not being true to herself and that is part of why she runs away. To escape those expectations.

Road trips and coming of age

John Green delves into the well-trodden ground here. There are a couple of instances of road trips in the novel. One of them is the primary focus for the final section of the book. As is tradition, the act of the journey is almost a metaphor for the characters’ journey as they grow together. We see this in both Margo, who grows away from wanting to be the center of attention, and also with Q, who becomes less risk aversive and can reject his big obsession.

Paper Towns : Key Moments

The story of ‘Paper Towns’ is a quick-paced and exciting book, but some key sections help move the plot along and drive home the main themes of the book. Here they are:

Margo and Quentin discover the dead body. In many ways, this highlights the differences between the two characters and can be seen as part of the reason they drift apart as they grow older.

Margo and Q – go on their revenge mission. This takes up the majority of the first section of the book. What it does is give us a chance to see Margo’s character and Q’s reaction to that persona.

Discovering Margo is missing. This really sets off the second part of the book as Q and his pals search for clues.

Ben asks out Lacey. There aren’t many subplots in this quick-paced novel but one of them is the hugely entertaining relationship dynamic between this pair.

They discover where they think Margo is going to be. This is what prompts them to take part in the road trip.

They find Margo, and it turns out she didn’t want them to. The clues were to indicate she was okay, so they didn’t worry about him.

Style, Tone, and Figurative Language

‘Paper Towns’ is written in the first person from a teenager’s point of view. Throughout the novel, Green uses incredibly relatable language. It’s easy to read and meant to appeal to readers of similar ages. There are examples of colloquialisms and Island. Green also uses numerous metaphors, many of which come from quotes in ‘Paper Towns’ that made their way into the feature film. One of the most important metaphors is of Orlando as a “paper town,” a town that’s flimsy and with no real strength.

Paper Towns Symbols

Maps are one of the most important symbols in ‘Paper Towns’. They are seen throughout the novel as a way of taking control of a world that sometimes feels as though it’s spiraling. Maps make sense of that which feels chaotic. Margo uses them to plan her escape from the beginning of the book. They remind those looking at them that anything is possible.

Paper, like maps, is an important symbol. It’s connected to the title and the image of “paper towns.” Paper is thin and frail, it, as described on page fifty-eight, is a symbol for the fake, “paper-thin” towns and people that make up Orlando.

Join Book Analysis for Free!

Exclusive to Members

Save Your Favorites

Free newsletter, comment with literary experts.

About Lee-James Bovey

Lee-James, a.k.a. LJ, has been a Book Analysis team member since it was first created. During the day, he's an English Teacher. During the night, he provides in-depth analysis and summary of books.

About the Book

Paper Towns Introduction

In a nutshell.

There are a few essentials for every road trip:

• A car, preferably one with heated seats and lots of cup holders
• Bottled beverages to put in the cup holders (with openings large enough to pee in)
• Snacks, the crunchier the better—shaking crumbs from the floor mats at the end of the trip is a key part of the experience
• Friends, to eat your snacks and take the wheel when you're peeing in a bottle
• A map (if for some reason you're traveling in 1994), a GPS (if you're traveling in 2004), or a smartphone with a navigation app (if you're in 2014 or beyond)
• Reading material
• Dramamine, so you can actually read the reading material

We don't have any snack recommendations (although you can never have too many salt 'n' vinegar chips), but we do have a reading recommendation for those quiet moments on the road: Paper Towns by John Green. It features mystery, fun, and the best road trip this side of The Amazing Race.

In Paper Towns, eighteen-year-old Quentin Jacobson is in love with the girl next door, Margo Roth Spiegelman. Margo Roth Spiegelman isn't your typical Jessica Simpson/Alba/Biel girl next door, though. She has eclectic taste in music, likes breaking into abandoned buildings and theme parks, and… is missing. After a memorable night with Quentin (no, not that memorable—get your mind out of the gutter), Margo Roth Spiegelman runs away from home. Quentin fears that she is going to hurt herself, and he's determined to find this girl of his dreams.

Paper Towns was published in 2008, a.k.a. four years before The Fault in Our Stars . This book, John Green's third novel, debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list and won both the Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery in 2009 and the Corine International Book Prize in 2010, one of the only English-language books to win that year.

About that Edgar Award: Paper Towns is an intriguing mystery. When Margo Roth Spiegelman disappears, she leaves behind a trail of clues that leads Quentin to her whereabouts, and makes him ask a few questions: Where is Margo Roth Spiegelman? Why did Margo Roth Spiegelman disappear? Is Margo Roth Spiegelman still alive? Who is the real Margo Roth Spiegelman? And why do we always use all three of her names?

The New York Times drew parallels between Paper Towns and Casablanca , and if you're the kind of person who likes to see your books on the big screen, then you're in luck. Paper Towns is getting the deluxe film adaptation treatment, featuring Cara Delevingne and Nat Wolff as the two leads . If only we could go back in time and cast a young Lauren Bacall as Margo Roth Spiegelman… Oh well, we're sure Nat and Cara will do fine. Here's looking at you, kids.

Before you pop that popcorn, though, we suggest you hop in the car and take a road trip or two with your friends, and maybe even read a bit of Paper Towns along the way.

Why Should I Care?

Are you the person you present yourself as on Facebook? Are you always happy, hanging out with friends, playing games, and listening to Spotify? Of course not. Life has its ups and downs and twists and turns, but you probably don't post all of the bad things to social media. And if you're like lots of people, you probably paint a pretty rosy picture, hoping people will see you as you wish you were (or as you think they'll like you most), instead of as you really are, warts and all.

In Paper Towns, Margo Roth Spiegelman does just this, and it works pretty well. People think she's awesome, the elusive and mysterious cool girl that everyone wants to either date or be friends with. But note we said it works pretty well—because the thing is, Margo Roth Spiegelman gets pretty fed up with a life that's just a façade. While everyone loves her, nobody really knows her. And this—this lost-ness—sets the whole book in motion. Margo has simply got to find herself.

So pick up Paper Towns . Maybe the next time you're on Instagram you'll think twice before putting a filter on your real life.

Tired of ads?

Cite this source, logging out…, logging out....

You've been inactive for a while, logging you out in a few seconds...

W hy's T his F unny?

4 Summer Road Trip Tips We Learned from Paper Towns

Adventure starts the minute you step out of your comfort zone.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means we may receive a commission if you purchase through our links. Please read our full disclosure here .

Take a Movie’s Advice is a weekly column attempting to discover the similarities between our favorite movies and real life. Grab some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show.

Whew, hang on – let me catch my breath here. 

The last few months sure went by quickly, and I’m certain you’ve made good use of your time by catching some sun at the local pool , taking on fun DIY projects , or rocking that summer job . Fall semester will be here before we know it, but I’m not ready to let go of warm weather and backyard cookouts just yet.

(Side note: According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac , the summer season doesn’t end until September 22. Does this mean I get to keep eating grilled veggies every day till then?)

With most of us starting classes in the upcoming weeks, it can be hard to fit in those last few items on that good old summer bucket list . 

While I haven’t been able to cross off “ take a road trip ” for the past two years now, it’s never too late to wake up at the crack of dawn and set out on the open road. There’s just something so intriguing about being spontaneous and having adventures around the country with friends.

I don’t know about you, but for my next summer road trip, I’ve got a backpack full of the essentials planned out, including plenty of advice from Quentin “Q” Jacobsen (Nat Wolff) and Margo Roth Speigelman (Cara Delevingne), our favorite explorers from Paper Towns . 

Table of Contents

About the Movie 

Directed by Jake Schreier, Paper Towns (2015) is a coming-of-age film based on the John Green novel of the same name. 

The story follows Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, your average graduating senior who’s infatuated with Margo Roth Spiegelman, his not-so-average neighbor. They grew up together but went their separate ways after coming across a dead man in their subdivision when they were nine. While Q just wants to push the image to the back of his mind, Margo’s more interested in finding out who the man was.

Several years pass, and Q finds Margo tapping on his bedroom window one night during their senior year. He hesitates at first, but then joins Margo on a short trip around town in order to help her seek revenge on those who have wronged her. Armed with a minivan and the necessities – shaving cream, fish, and plastic wrap – Q and Margo set out for the city.

Excited by the possibility of being Margo’s friend again, Q heads to school the next day, only to find out that she’s been reported missing. With his friends Ben (Austin Abrams) and Radar (Justice Smith), along with Lacey (Halston Sage) and Angela (Jaz Sinclair), Q sets out to find Margo just in time for the school’s senior prom. Her subtle clues lead Q to learn more about her antics, but he ultimately discovers different sides of himself along the journey.

(Want to watch the movie before reading further? Purchase the DVD here .)

Aside from being fascinating, adorable, and well worth your time, the movie is chock full of knowledge for your summer travels.  Here’s what Paper Towns taught me about road tripping.

1. Pack the right materials.

Seems obvious, but before you head out, double check and make sure you have the necessities . 

What you pack will depend on the length and destination of your trip, but things like phone chargers for your car, snacks, first aid kits, and emergency cash are probably on the top of most lists.

Along the ride, Radar outlines a detailed list of supplies they must acquire at the mini-mart (and step-by-step process for acquiring said supplies) – gas, drinks, snacks, cleaning supplies, etc. 

You don’t have to time it down to second, but if you’re traveling with friends or family, try to coordinate what you’re packing — and where you’ll pick up other things — so you’ll have more time for other activities.

2. Let others know of your whereabouts.

Q notices small clues that Margo has left behind during her travels. From a poster in her bedroom window and marked maps to slips of paper in a door hinge, he gradually discovers these tiny hints that help him figure out where Margo could be. 

While this kind of scavenger hunt can be fun, it’s easier – and nicer of you – to send a simple text message to let everyone know you’re safe. Just sayin’. (No cell service where you’re going? Tell people ahead of time so they won’t worry, and plan a time to check in.)

3. Find new ways to stay entertained during the journey.

Don’t worry, we’re not going to insist that you play the license plate game to pass the time. 

Instead, take advantage of these long drives to bond with your friends or become better friends with acquaintances. Road trips are a chance to have deep, interesting conversations. These type of trips don’t happen very often, so make the most of them.

4. Keep an open mind.

“i can feel my heart beat in my chest.” – q, “that’s the way you should feel your whole life.” – margo.

There’s something almost calming about not knowing what the future has in store . So use your road trip as a chance to embrace spontaneity – there are probably a plethora of places you’ve never visited, much less heard of before. Why not get to know them?

In the film, Q is reluctant to join Margo on her revenge rendezvous, as he worries about the consequences and aftermath of her plan. However, she persuades him to tag along and he has an amazing — and completely life-altering — time.

For more ideas for an upcoming road trip, check out Real Simple’s Road Trip Tips  – there are tons of ideas to help you make the most of your excursion.

Are you planning a last-minute road trip before the semester starts? Do you have any tips you’d like to share? What movie is on your watch list? Comment below!

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Paper Towns

By john green, paper towns study guide.

Paper Towns is John Green 's third novel, published in 2008. It deals with similar elements of his previous works, including the presence of a beautiful yet eccentric female and a gawky, uncertain male. It is compared to his 2005 novel Looking for Alaska due to their common themes of adolescence and first love.

The inspiration for Paper Towns came from a road trip Green took during college, in which he discovered his own "paper town" called Holen, South Dakota. Paper towns, as they are referred to in the book, are fake towns that cartographers add to maps as a copyright trap.

Paper Towns became the #5 bestselling novel in the New York Times. In 2009, it won the Edgar Award for Best Adult Mystery. While Paper Towns received largely positive reviews, it was criticized for its sexual content and even removed from the summer reading list of Dr John Long Middle School in Pasco County, Florida (though it was returned to the list the next month).

A film adaptation of Paper Towns was released on July 24, 2015. Nat Wolff (who also starred in the film adaptation of Green's The Fault in Our Stars ) plays Quentin and supermodel Cara Delevingne plays Margo Roth Spiegelman .

Paper Towns Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Paper Towns is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

“Nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.”

In context, Quentin is alluding to the fact that though his life is comfortable and without any significant trouble... it is also lacking joy. He is somewhere in between.

How mainly do Quentin and Ben’s reactions to Margo’s disappearance differ from one another?

Margo has disappeared before so people, like Ben are not surprised. Quinten is absolutely shaken by it and is obsessed with finding her.

Margo is a high school senior and Quentin's childhood friend. Beautiful but unpredictable, she becomes the object of Quentin's love and admiration. Her flighty nature encapsulates the "manic pixie dream girl" trope; that is, a lovely yet...

Study Guide for Paper Towns

Paper Towns study guide contains a biography of John Green, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Paper Towns
• Paper Towns Summary
• Character List

Essays for Paper Towns

Paper Towns essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Paper Towns by John Green.

• The Construction of Manic Pixie Dream Girls Through the Male Gaze: Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and John Green's Paper Towns

Lesson Plan for Paper Towns

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Paper Towns
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Paper Towns Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Paper Towns

• Introduction

Paper Towns & Maddening Maps: Q&A with John Green

• Copy Link copied

We recently spoke to author John Green —who you may know better as the brain behind mega-blockbuster The Fault in Our Stars — about his bestselling novel Paper Towns ( now adapted for the big screen), one of his most memorable vacations, and his complicated relationship to the idea of “place.”

First things first: Where are you now?

I’m in beautiful Indianapolis. You?

San Francisco.

But really, we aren’t in either of these places, are we? We’re in this mutually negotiated third place, which I find completely fascinating. Like a third space that did not exist for 99.9996% of human history or whatever.

You know, that’s kind of a nice segue into the concept of paper towns. Can you explain just what those are?

A paper town is a town that exists on a map but not in real life.

Can you, um, elaborate, please?

So, in order to protect their intellectual property, cartographers often insert fictitious locations into their maps. Sometimes these take the form of streets or little ponds, but sometimes, depending on the scale of the map, they can be full towns. They do this because if they see the fictional entry on someone else’s map, then they can prove copyright infringement.

Has anyone ever won a case that way?

Well, there’s a really interesting example of a paper town—Agloe, New York. It was this paper town created by the General Drafting Company in the early 20 th century at the intersection of two dirt roads in the middle of nowhere in the Catskills in New York. Forty years after they made their map, Rand McNally made a map with Agloe, New York in it, so General Drafting called Rand McNally and said, like—hey, you guys are so sued.

And so they won a shit-load of money?

Well, so, no. General Drafting was like—we’re going to sue your pants off, and Rand McNally was like—no, that place is real.

How did they prove that?

Because people kept going to that intersection expecting there to be a place called Agloe, someone actually built a place called Agloe. It wasn’t much. A gas station, a general store, and a bar. Not a great metropolis, but it existed. What had been an imagination became physically real.

This is getting very meta.

Well, yeah, there’s a David Foster Wallace quality to it, which is why I wrote a book about this town, Agloe. One of the weirdest things is that it’s become a very minor tourist destination since the book was published. Someone created a historical marker at the site of this place. It’s a fake historical marker insofar as it was created by a person and put on a telephone pole, but it looks like a real historical marker and it is kind of real, because it is accurately marking history. There’s a waxing and waning existence of this town.

It reminds me a bit of the way neighborhoods grow. What once could just be called Brooklyn, then must be called Williamsburg. And then must be called East Williamsburg. And so on. We require more specificity to identify where we are in space. Language plays a part in that.

I’ve never thought about that but that’s really interesting. As communities grow, our language has to grow. The language isn’t merely descriptive, right? So there’s a weird collaboration between language and space when it comes to how we inhabit space. For instance, where I live, we have a neighborhood called Broad Ripple that’s quite fashionable, but the neighborhood south of Broad Ripple isn’t at all fashionable. People who live there, though, started to call it South Broad Ripple—sort of like gentrification through language.

So how did you come upon the phenomenon of a paper town? It’s like a Jeopardy-for-$1,000 fact.

I was actually on a road-trip with my college girlfriend. We embarked on this very cute and eccentric and doomed journey to visit various “World’s Largest” balls—the “World’s Largest ball of paint,” the “World’s largest ball of popcorn,” the “World’s largest ball of stamps,” etc. We were 23 and had access to a car and two weeks of vacation, so this was how we chose to spend it. We were driving through America—this was also the other thing, we didn’t take any interstates, to make it as eccentric as possible, I guess—and we saw this town called Holen, South Dakota marked on the map. I thought that was kind of funny, like “Hole in South Dakota.” We figured we could get gas there but there was nothing. No town. Zip. We ended up stopping and asking someone. She said, O h yeah, that’s happened before. I’ve heard that it’s on a map but those of us who live here have never heard of the place . When I got home from the trip I got online and started researching it. There was a good Straight Dope article that Cecil Adams wrote, and that was sort of my initial entrée into paper towns. I just fell all the way down the rabbit hole.

Roughly how many paper towns could you find in the U.S.?

Ah, it’s so hard to know. Holen is actually a good example. I have never seen a reference to it online. I started to believe that I had fictionalized this entire story somehow. Then, one day, I came across Agloe, New York and I invented some backstory that didn’t exist for my book. I spoke to the very same college girlfriend like two or three years ago. She was like, I read your book and I immediately remembered that place in South Dakota. I got to the Afterword, you mentioned me, and I really appreciate that. We had a terrible breakup but now we are old and happily married and have many children. It was 15 years ago; we are at different places.

Learn more about John Green’s Paper Towns here . And if you want to buy a copy (you should buy a copy) you can do it via the Penguin Portal .

If the Largest Balls/Hole in South Dakota road trip has got you eager to hit the road yourself, check out the AFAR staff’s favorite U.S. road trips .

Entertainment

Is 'Paper Towns' Based On A True Story?

In the new movie Paper Towns, Nat Wolff stars as Q, a high school kid with a crush on Margo, the girl next door, played by Cara Delevingne , who was his friend when they were little but now acts as if he doesn't exist. That is until one night when she recruits him for a wild excursion running around town, and then disappears the following morning. She leaves Q several clues as to her whereabouts, and the film follows his journey to find her. The story may sound like an extreme case of high school hijinks, but it definitely seems like it could be based in reality. So, is Paper Towns based on a true story?

As much as it might feel like a work of non-fiction, Paper Towns is totally fake. As many might know, it's actually based on a novel by John Green , who is quite possibly the hottest name in YA fiction right now after last year's film adaptation of his novel The Fault in Our Stars absolutely killed it at the box office. But even though the story and characters presented in Paper Towns are totally made up, parts of the film were, in fact, inspired by real life. It turns out that the title of the film is a real-life phenomenon having to do with map copyright issues, which, trust me, is a lot more interesting than it sounds.

Paper towns are places that don't really exist , but are placed on a map to keep other map makers from copying their work. That way, if a company makes a map and another company copies said map exactly and calls it their own, the original creator can point to a paper town they invented appearing on both maps as proof that the latter party plagiarized their work. Still with me? Green first heard of the concept while driving through South Dakota with his girlfriend, the author told PopSugar. After passing through an area on the map that didn't seem to be there, he stopped somewhere to ask where the town was, only to find out that it didn't exist. This experience served as his introduction to paper towns, and set him on the path to writing the bestselling novel.

But the connections between real paper towns and the movie run deeper than that. The climactic paper town featured in the film , Algoe, NY, is actually one of the most famous of these fake places. Algoe was invented as a paper town by cartographers Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers in the 1930s, only to then have it show up on a map by Rand McNally. Lindberg and Alpers sued, but Rand McNally claimed that Algoe was real because when they went to the location they found an Algoe General Store. So why was there a store named after a fake town in the same spot where the fake town was supposed to be? Because the founders of the store saw Algoe on Lindberg and Alpers' map, assumed it was real, and built there store there to represent the town.

And that's what inspired Paper Towns . See, told you it was interesting.

Images: Getty Images; Giphy (4)

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Movie Reviews

Emotional maps and 'paper towns'.

Andrew Lapin

Nat Wolff and Margo Cara Delevingne in Paper Towns . Michael Tackett/Twentieth Century Fox hide caption

Nat Wolff and Margo Cara Delevingne in Paper Towns .

As the current king of teen lit, author John Green is a barometer for what young readers respond to. His 2012 bestseller The Fault in Our Stars , about two teenagers who fall in love in a cancer support group, and its smash hit movie last year helped signal that teens were ready for big-hearted realism in their fiction after so many years of fantasy.

This summer's YA adaptation Me and Earl and the Dying Girl seemed to emerge from Green's shadow, though it came overloaded with style and snark that many found off-putting (I didn't). The new film of Green's 2008 novel Paper Towns isn't nearly as radical in form or tone as Me and Earl , but it's a diverting romp that will get the job done for the author's "nerdfighter" fans.

Fault was unapologetically a weeper, but those hoping for more of the prized emotional currency known in today's parlance as "feels" will come up short on Paper Towns . This is much lighter fare, a road trip beyond the outer reaches of a suburban teen's comfort zone, with a moral that boils down to finding empathy for others — though I guess that's just another kind of feels. The film's darkest image (apart from one edgy left-field joke about the Confederate flag) is that of a divorced man who has committed suicide, and it appears briefly in the opening scenes to establish the character of the sort of person who would discover that body as a young girl. This is a brief, devilish hint of a world that's nowhere to be found in the rest of the movie, but its survival from page to screen points to just how much power Green's storytelling quirks hold over the filmmakers.

The girl who discovers the body is Margo, a thrill-seeking youngster who later matures into the kind of high school senior who's always taking off at a moment's notice. She's played in the present day by model Cara Delevingne, whose take on the character is appropriately aloof — she seems to always be thinking of something (somewhere?) that no one else can see. And that's exactly where she winds up after disappearing from her suburban Orlando town, leaving only her admirer: her lovestruck neighbor Quentin (the supremely likable Nat Wolff), who's just shared one magical night with the girl of his dreams only to find her gone in the morning.

The disappearing act splits Paper Towns neatly into two parts. First, there's the brisk opening third, in which Quentin slavishly follows Margo around the suburban darkness helping her exact revenge against her cheating ex-boyfriend. Director Jake Schreier ( Robot & Frank ) propels us forward like Margo grabs Quentin, moving the action at an entertaining clip, with a minivans-and-manicured-lawns canvas that resembles Arcade Fire's video for The Suburbs if you squint. Particularly intriguing in this passage is the sense that we don't, and never fully could, understand the world the way Margo does — she's found another plane of reality, she's happy there, and she likes when ordinary folks like Quentin briefly stumble into it. This is subtly different from making Margo an empty cipher, although the film does skirt that line a few too many times.

After Margo leaves, we get a flatter detective/road trip hybrid, where Quentin follows a trail of clues in an attempt to track down his love and ropes in his friends to make the trip an aw-shucks bonding experience. (It speaks to the film's harmlessness that no one, not even Margo's parents, ever entertains the possibility that something truly awful has happened to her.) Though the sidekicks (played by Justice Smith and Austin Abrams) are fun, particularly when belting out the "Pokémon" theme song to overcome their fear of dark places, their characterization is flimsy and their journey is overly familiar. There's even an impossibly attractive girl (Halston Sage) who falls for one of the shrimpy guys.

Paper towns — fake destinations cartographers put on maps to protect their copyright — are a fascinating myth for Green to play with, and they make a smart parallel for the film's exploration of how people can turn into nonexistent ideals. But Green and the adaptation's co-writers (Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter, the same team behind Fault ) feel the need to underline their message with multiple references to Moby Dick and constant reminders of Quentin's naïveté. One day the target audience will graduate to more subtle metaphors and crave more complex narratives, provided they recognize that films like Paper Towns are maps for their feels, rather than destinations. If only they each had their own Margo to act as a guide into the mysterious beyond.

• Entertainment

Yes, Paper Towns Are Real, and They Are Fascinating

Paper Towns may not feel like a sequel to The Fault in Our Stars (though it does have a link or two ), but the John Green adaptation does give us a lot to think about (and what's maybe the best soundtrack of the year ). One of the surprises of the John Hughes-inspired high school movie is that it's also a road trip movie — main character Q (Nat Wolff) gathers his friends to find his enigmatic dream girl Margo (Cara Delevingne). The destination? A paper town, just like the film's namesake. Green himself first learned of the phenomenon of paper towns — fake cities printed on maps to prevent map plagiarism — on a road trip with his girlfriend in South Dakota . So in case you were wondering, yes, paper towns are real, and in fact, Agloe, the town mentioned in the film, is real as well. Here's more about Agloe and other famous "paper towns."

Agloe Is Real and So Is That Building

( Warning: movie spoiler ahead .) In the movie, Q pinpoints Margo's location to Agloe, in upstate New York. When he gets "there" — an interesting concept in itself because by definition, there should be no there there — he finds an abandoned building. Even though Agloe is just supposed to be a name printed on a map, the real Agloe in upstate New York does have a building marking its location. Or did — and it was at the center of a copyright battle . Created in the 1930s, Agloe was one of the first paper towns, its name an anagram of the initials of Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers of General Drafting Company. Then in the 1950s, Agloe General Store was built, its owners taking that name because they had seen the name on a map. So when rival mapmakers Rand McNally put Agloe on their maps, General Drafting Company threatened to sue, knowing the presence of their paper town incriminated Rand McNally. Except Rand McNally's defense was that they knew of Agloe General Store, and the claim was dropped. Oh, the irony.

Two Paper Towns Are Named After a Football Rivalry

Michigan has two paper towns: Goblu and Beatosu, and if you look closely, you'll get it (or if you're a Michigan fan). In 1978, Michigan's State Highway Commission chairman Peter Fletcher had a cartographer add those two fake towns to the state maps. They reference "Go Blue" (the rallying cry for Michigan State) and "Beat OSU" (Ohio State University being Michigan's rival). Guess who Fletcher rooted for?

• Ask LitCharts AI
• Discussion Question Generator
• Essay Prompt Generator
• Quiz Question Generator

• Literature Guides
• Poetry Guides
• Shakespeare Translations
• Literary Terms

Paper Towns

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

It was so pathetically easy to forget about Chuck, to talk about prom even though I didn’t give a shit about prom. Such was life that morning: nothing really mattered much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.

“Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement. No planning for a career. There was no planning … And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.”

Even though I could see her there, I felt entirely alone among these big and empty buildings, like I’d survived the apocalypse and the world had been given to me, this whole and amazing and endless world, mine for the exploring.

“It’s a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anone who cares about anything that matters.

“I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back … And that’s like a promise. At least for tonight. In sickness and in health. In good times and in bad. For richer, for poorer. Till dawn do us part.”

And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me was in planning or doing or leaving: the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.

[M]aybe Margo needed to see my confidence. Maybe this time she wanted to be found, and to be found by me . Maybe — just as she had chosen me on the longest night, she had chosen be again. And maybe untold riches awaited he who found her.

I refused to feel any kind of sadness over the fact that I wasn’t going to prom, but I had — stupidly, embarrassingly — thought of finding Margo, and getting her to come home with me just in time for prom, like late on Saturday night, and we’d walk into the Hilton ballroom wearing jeans and ratty T-shirts, and we be just in time for the last dance, and we’d dance while everyone pointed at us and marveled at the return of Margo, and then we’d fox-trot the hell out of there and go get ice cream at Friendly’s.

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible … This fear is bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

YOU WILL GO TO THE PAPER TOWNS AND YOU WILL NEVER COME BACK

“Let me give you some advice: let her come home. I mean, at some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.”

“You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it’s going with my girlfriend — but I don’t give a shit, man, because you’re you.”

“I know it’s impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you’re older, you’ll start to see them — the bad kids and the good kids and all kids — as people. They’re just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self-actualized.”

“The longer I do my job … the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone who we feel.”

The fundamental mistake I had always made — and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make — was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

I couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them — it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

“I know you want to find her. I know she is t he most important thing to you. And that’s cool. But we graduate in, like, a week. I’m not asking you to abandon the search. I’m asking you to come to a party with your two best friends who you have known for half your life.”

It is so hard to leave — until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

I blame her for this ridiculous, fatal chase — for putting us at risk, for making me into the kind of jackass who would stay up all night and drive too fast. I would not be dying were it not for her. I would have stayed home, and I have always stayed home, and I would have been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always wanted to do, which is grow up.

“Oh bullshit. You didn’t come here to make sure I was okay. You came here because you wanted to save poor little Margo from her troubled little self, so that I would be oh-so-thankful to my knight in shining armor that I would strip my clothes off and beg you to ravage my body.”

“People love the idea of a paper girl. They always have. and the worst thing is that I loved it, too. I cultivated it, you know … Because it’s kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way.”

She can see it in my face — I understand now that I can’t be her and she can’t be me. Maybe Whitman had a gift I don’t have. But as for me: I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is me.

Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo’s anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in.

When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

After we kiss, our foreheads touch as we stare at each other. Yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness.

• Quizzes, saving guides, requests, plus so much more.

'Paper Towns' and Other Lies Maps Tell You

• University of South Carolina
• Architecture
• Interior Design
• Green Design
• Urban Design

There's a town on Google Maps that doesn't exist. Although it kind of existed once. Except it was never supposed to.

That town is Agloe, New York, and if you type it into Google Maps, you'll even see a marker designating the now-closed Agloe General Store.

In the 1930s, Otto G. Lindberg, director of the General Drafting Co. (GDC), and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, were charged with creating a New York state map, and they plotted the fictional town of Agloe — an anagram of their initials — on a dirt road between Beaverkill and Rockland.

What they created is known as a "trap" or "paper town," a device used as a type of copyright protection.

In addition to including fake towns, roads and rivers, cartographers may also create false bends in streets or alter mountain elevations — all in an attempt to catch those who might copy their work.

A few years after the GDC published its New York map, the company noticed that Agloe appeared on a map by Rand McNally, one of its competitors. Clearly, the paper town had done its job.

Except it hadn't.

Rand McNally argued that it hadn't copied the GDC map because its mapmakers got their information from Delaware County records, which showed that the Agloe General Store existed right where Lindberg and Alpers had placed the fictional town. In fact, the store had taken its name from a map made by Esso, one of GDC's clients.

In short, even though nothing else was there, Agloe had become a real place, and by doing so the town was unable to perform the very function for which it had been created.

Real or not real?

If you've read John Green's bestselling novel "Paper Towns," you're likely familiar with Agloe, which plays an important role in the book and the movie based on it. The book's success has no doubt made Agloe even more real, which could help explain why it exists on Google Maps today.

However, it hasn't always been there. Last March, NPR's Robert Krulwich wrote about Agloe's presence on the mapping service only to discover days later that it had disappeared .

As of today, Agloe is present, complete with street-view images of a road and autumn foliage. Of course, Google has admitted that it has made mapping mistakes in the past .

In 2008, the village of Argleton in West Lancashire, England, was generating a lot of interest.

Internet searches for the village included weather reports, as well as job and real estate listings; however, in reality, "Argleton" was nothing but an empty field.

Google issued a statement that its mapping database has the occasional error, and by 2010 the town had disappeared from its maps.

People have speculated that Argleton was in fact a paper town — an anagram of "not large" or "not real" with the "G" standing for Google, but the Internet giant has never admitted to it.

Still, while it's gone now, the fake village may always exist to some degree.

"The nature of digital technologies means that Argleton will likely exist forever, passed from one database to another, a set of gently corroding place marks wandering the face of the Earth," writes Cabinet Magazine .

Plenty of copyright traps have surely gone undiscovered on numerous maps, but OpenStreetMap references many fictitious entries, including Moat Lane in London. The street appears in the TeleAtlas directory, which is the basis of Google Maps, but in reality, there's no such road.

Interestingly, although paper towns and trap streets may help mapmakers prove that copyright infringement has occurred, the fictional places and cartographic lies aren't copyrightable themselves under U.S. law.

To "treat 'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright," the law reads.

However, sometimes maps can include false information — not as a trap, but simply as a cartographic prank.

For example, consider the fictional towns of "Beatosu" and "Goblu" that the chairman of the Michigan Highway Commission — a Michigan University graduate — included on a 1979 Michigan state highway map.

The names, which were later removed, were a dig at Ohio State, Michigan's rival and stood for "Beat OSU" and "Go Blue."

Caught red-handed

Mapmakers aren't the only people who have attempted to entrap would-be copyright infringers.

The word "esquivalence," which appeared in the New Oxford American Dictionary, is supposedly defined as "the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities." However, the word existed only in that publication — and any publication that copied it.

Lillian Mountweazel, whose photos of rural mailboxes made her a celebrated American photographer before her tragic death in a 1973 explosion, is another example of a copyright trap. She never existed except in the pages of the New Columbia Encyclopedia, and today "mountweazel" has become another word for a fictitious entry. (In fact, in the book "Paper Towns," one of the main characters has a pet dog named Myrna Mountweazel.)

• Which Is Greener, a Gas or an Electric Stove?
• Electric vs. Induction Cooktop: Which Is Greener?
• Should I Buy a House That Has Lead-Based Paint?
• The 6 Best Reusable Coffee Filters
• Induction vs. Gas Cooktop: Which Is Greener?
• The History of the Bathroom Part 1: Before the Flush
• Can Flat-Pack Furniture Be Sustainable?
• The 7 Best Water-Saving Toilets
• What Is a Straw Bale House? Definition, Designs, and Examples
• How Do Incinerating Toilets Work?
• 15 Modern Sheds for the Move Home to Mom
• Recycle Your Urine to Make Invisible Ink, and Other Fascinating Uses for Pee
• 6 Reasons You Should Buy "Slow Furniture"
• How to Build a Greenhouse
• The Low Down on Home Water Makers and 7 to Choose From
• How Low-Flow Toilets Save Water