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By Root 879 0

State. That’s not an accident, according to map division chief John Hébert, a proud Louisiana native. “If anyone wants to, I encourage them to”—here his mild Cajun accent breaks off, and he makes a show of stamping his feet on the map, using the Texas Hill Country to dust off his shoes. Apart from the Texas-bashing twinkle in his eye, Hébert is a serious-looking sixtysomething man with round bifocals and a shock of wavy white hair above his oft-knitted brow. His eyebrows, though, still have a little pepper mixed in with the salt. We cross the patrons’ reading room and pass through a secure set of doors at the other end. “You’re in my world now,” he says.

Hébert’s world, located in the basement of the library’s James Madison Building, is a row of metal map cases so long it momentarily takes my breath away. I always feel a certain sense of reverence in libraries, even small city ones that smell like homeless Internet users. Being so close to so much laboriously gathered information gives me a strange satisfaction with the scope of human ingenuity, the way other people might feel visiting Hoover Dam or the Great Wall of China. But this library is different from any I’ve ever seen, a seemingly endless expanse straight out of a Borges story. I can follow the fluorescent-lit lines of shelves almost to a single vanishing point in each direction. There are 8,500 of these cases, with five drawers per case, two entire football fields just for maps. And they’re heavy, which is why we’re two stories underground. “We have to be on this floor,” explains Hébert, “because if we were on the sixth floor, we’d be down here pretty soon anyway.” It’s the largest map collection ever assembled in human history.

Maps have been Hébert’s passkey to a larger world ever since he was a boy growing up in the bayou country. He and his older brother stretched a ham radio antenna out the bedroom window in their Houma, Louisiana, home and attached it to a tree in the vacant lot next door, and he spent hours tapping away at the transmitter in Morse code. “I’d always have an atlas on my lap,” he remembers. “Because all of the sudden I’d be talking to Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, and where the hell is Tamaqua, Pennsylvania? Where is it?” As he tells the story, his finger traces a highway on an imaginary road atlas. But when he arrived at Georgetown to work on his master’s degree in 1965, there was no geography department—those had been unfashionable for more than a decade. He studied Latin American history instead and was already working for the Library of Congress by the time he received his doctorate in 1972. He’s been here ever since.

Most of Hébert’s staff of forty-five librarians aren’t professional geographers—they came to love maps by seeing the power of cartography in their own fields, whether that was art history or public affairs. Hébert was no different. “Maps drew out points of history that the text wouldn’t tell me,” he says.

Indeed, history seems to be all around us as we begin to trek through the geographically arranged stacks: first world maps, then (from north to south): Canada; the United States in the order of its appearance, from the Atlantic to the Pacific; Latin America; then across the Atlantic to Europe and Asia; and then Africa and Oceania at the far end of this cavernous space. It’s the world in miniature, and Hébert displays a missionary zeal in showing off his beloved collection not as some dry scholarly archive but as a vast treasure trove of Americana, from the earliest days of Spanish exploration to the present. There are maps of the Brazilian rain forest drawn by Theodore Roosevelt himself, during his nearly fatal expedition down the “River of Doubt” in 1913. There’s Welthauptstadt (“World Capital”) Germania, Albert Speer’s plan for a monumentally redesigned Berlin, recovered by American troops when Nazi Germany fell. There are the original maps that divided Europe at the end of World War I, brought back from Versailles by the American Geographical Society team that accompanied Woodrow Wilson there. “We have the original military