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Greece) that it blackballed Macedonia’s entrance into NATO in 2008. The hottest rhetoric has come out of (surprise!) Iran, after the 2004 edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World added to the Persian Gulf a smaller parenthetical label reading “Arabian Gulf.” Iranians sensed a conspiracy and went bonkers. “Under the influence of the U.S. Zionist lobby and the oil dollars of certain Arab governments, the society has distorted an undeniable historical reality,” wrote the Tehran Times. All National Geographic publications and journalists were banned from Iran. Resourceful Internet users from the Persian global community sent National Geographic thousands of e-mails, left hundreds of angry Amazon reviews of the atlas, and even Google-bombed the phrase “Arabian Gulf,” so that the top Web result for that phrase is now a mock error page reading, “The gulf you are looking for does not exist. Try Persian Gulf.” National Geographic finally issued a correction, but tensions in the Gulf are still running high over the issue: Iran created a national “Persian Gulf Day” every April to celebrate the nomenclature, canceled the 2010 Islamic Solidarity Games when Arab nations objected to the phrase “Persian Gulf” on the medals, and has even threatened to ban any airline that doesn’t use the “right” name on its display boards.

The closest American equivalent to this kind of toponymic pride is the way we use place-names to confer insider or outsider status in our communities. Woe unto the Manhattan tourist who asks where “Avenue of the Americas” is (the official renaming is such a mouthful that New Yorkers still say “Sixth Avenue”) or pronounces “Houston Street” like the city in Texas. In my neck of the woods, the magic names are Puyallup, the Tacoma suburb that’s home to Washington’s largest state fair every fall, and Sequim, a retirement mecca on the Olympic Peninsula. To pronounce these towns “poo-YAL-lup” and “SEE-kwim,” the way they’re spelled, is to instantly brand oneself a clueless tourist or, worse, a California transplant. (I could tell you the real pronunciations, but then, under Washington State law, I’d have to kill you.)

In Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator remembers that the names on maps were often more magical for him than the places themselves. “Even on a stormy day the name Florence or Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore,” he says. The names fool him into thinking that each place he visits will be “an unknown thing, different in essence from all the rest,” and he’s disappointed when he actually visits them. “They magnified the idea that I had formed of certain places on the surface of the globe, making them more special, and in consequence more real.” A friend of mine once fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit Mongolia, and when he got home, I was excited to hear about the trip. “It’s just a horrible venture,” he said, to my surprise. “The real thrill is in your head: the name of the capital city, ‘Ulan Bator.’” Nothing he’d actually seen could live up to the strange promise of those nine letters. He shook his head and said it again slowly: “Ulan Bator . . .”

“Getting people to know what we have here is a crucial challenge,” says Hébert, pointing out a 1950s Soviet moon globe (“The only one in this hemisphere!”) sitting atop a filing cabinet next to Marie Tharp’s 3-D map of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Inside the cabinet is a fascinating collection of maps inscribed on powder horns, including one with a map of Havana harbor dating back to the French and Indian War. “My challenge is not to get those who love maps in here. It’s how to get the other people in here, the ones who don’t even know what a map is.”

Pam van Ee, one of John Hébert’s map history specialists, tells me that one of the library’s biggest influxes of congressional staffers comes at four every Friday afternoon, as weekend hikers wander into the collection looking for a trail map. This shocks me even more than the idea of a congressman visiting the