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into the subconscious minds of generations of hikers. The USGS began this series after World War II—in an echo of their military origins, the green woodland areas on the maps are still officially defined as “cover for small detachments of troops”—but it wasn’t completed until 1992. Today these maps depict every creek, every ridge, and every grove of trees in the fifty states in remarkable 1:24,000 detail, each mile of territory measuring almost three full inches on the map. If you were to lay out the whole country in quadrangle map form—even the blank blue maps representing the middle of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which probably aren’t ordered much—it would stretch 783 feet by 383 feet, the area of three city blocks.

But the USGS is far from the only federal agency that makes maps. In 2000, the Library of Congress was contacted by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sounds like a made-up group from 24 or Alias but is actually the mapping arm of the Department of Defense. The NGA had 360,000 map sheets sitting in a vault in Arizona that it wanted to get rid of, so Hébert sent a staffer down to take a look. It turned out to be a gold mine: 40 percent of the maps were new, so they were brought back to the library for filing. Among the stuff the NGA had relegated to its yard sale: 1:50,000 coverage of Afghanistan (that’s amazing detail, a little over an inch to a mile) that no one thought they’d need anymore. But after September 11, 2001, says Hébert, it didn’t take long before the Defense Department was knocking at his door, wondering if maybe the Library of Congress didn’t have any good tactical maps of Afghanistan, please . . . ? America’s heroic map librarians saved the country’s bacon yet again.

The Geography and Map Division serves a broad range of patrons. Some requests are vitally important to national security, as in the case of the Afghanistan maps. Hébert says the State Department has lately been checking out lots of ethnological maps of Iraq over time—where have the Sunnis and Shiites historically lived? What about the Kurds? (Sigh. Better late than never, I guess.) Other governmental requests are a lot less urgent: the most common request from members of Congress is for a classy, sepia-toned historical map of their district that they can hang in their office. Or they might want area maps to help them understand some issue in their home state: natural resources on an Indian reservation, for example, or sex offenders living near elementary schools. If all politics is local, so is all geography—to someone, anyway.

You need to be a high-ranking official to be able to check stuff out from the Geography and Map Division or any other part of the nation’s library. But even if you don’t plan on running for Congress or getting appointed to the Supreme Court anytime soon, you can still get a library card there. Anybody can. It’s called a Reader ID and it’s free, and cardholders can look at maps in the reading room to their hearts’ content. Most of the patrons here today, quietly turning atlas pages, are private researchers of one kind or another. When the division began scanning its maps and putting them on the Internet in 1995, they started with what the history buffs wanted: the Civil War, then the railroads, then the American Revolution, then World War II. More than twenty thousand maps and charts are now viewable online. My favorites are the panoramic maps, beautiful bird’s-eye lithographs of American cities and towns that were fashionable at the turn of the last century. A print of Augustus Koch’s 1891 panoramic view of Seattle, reproduced from the Library of Congress’s copy, hangs above my piano at home.

But Hébert’s most frequent request isn’t so scholarly. “Most of the time we’re getting people who think treasure maps exist,” he says with a rueful smile.

Boy’s-own-adventure pirate maps, with carefully counted paces from the gnarled tree to the big X on the sandy island shore, were a big part of my childhood love affair with maps. “Are treasure maps real?” I ask eagerly.

Hébert has evidently had some