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By Root 813 0

more personality because they’re credited to actual personalities. Modern maps have, essentially, no origin at all: they simply emerge—fully formed, as if from the mind of Zeus—onto computer screens and chain bookstore remainder tables. They are maps of something—Tuscany or Antarctica or Philadelphia—but not maps by anyone. At best, a connoisseur can glance at an atlas and derive its corporate parentage—Goode’s, Hammond, Oxford University Press—from the fonts and color scheme, but we still know nothing, imagine nothing about the hands that prepared it. Today, we might suppose (correctly, to a degree) that no hands really prepared it—that, instead of careful men with green eyeshades airbrushing artboard and scratching acetate overlays with crow-quill pens, the map was immaculately conceived of a GIS database.

By contrast, the maps at this fair are by someone. The name of the mapmaker appears in the largest type on every placard and first in every catalog listing: Pieter Goos, Nicolas de Fer, Thomas Kitchin. I’ve never heard of any of these people; they all sound to me like the fake names on Jason Bourne’s passports. But the right name on a map—Speed or Ortelius or Mercator—allows a seller to bump up its price substantially. This is the auteur theory of cartography. It draws on the memory of a time when mapmakers left fingerprints all over their maps, and it requires the expertise to tell the craftsmen from the true artists. No matter how important they were in their field, none of these mapmakers ever became a household name (except perhaps for Gerardus “Hey, ladies, how’d you like to come up and take a look at my projection?” Mercator), but in this room they are the Old Masters: the map collectors’ da Vinci and Rembrandt and van Gogh.

The early mapmakers deserve every bit of this attention. Today we’re so surrounded by high-quality maps that we have the tendency to take them for granted. Well, of course this is what my hometown looks like! See, here it is on Google Earth. Maybe we can remember or imagine a time when there was no aerial imagery or airborne radar or GPS, but 250 years ago, before John Harrison invented the marine chronometer, there wasn’t even a reliable way for sailors to measure their own longitude. Think about that for a moment: the best technology on Earth couldn’t tell you how far east or west you were at any given moment. That’s a wee bit of an obstacle when it comes to drawing reliable maps. When Ptolemy mapped the known world in the second century, he had to rely on oral histories and a series of rough mathematical guesses to gauge east-west distances. As a result, he drastically elongated the Mediterranean, making it half again as wide as it is in reality. A millennium passed without any improvement on his method, and so Columbus relied on Ptolemy’s fuzzy math to calculate the length of his proposed voyage to India. He was about ten thousand miles off, and was very lucky there was a huge unknown continent in his way, or he would never have been heard from again.

Without modern mapmaking tools, scale can be tricky. Francis Billington was a teenager when his family landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, and records of the time make him out to be the colony’s Bart Simpson, an incorrigible juvenile delinquent. He nearly blew up the Mayflower in harbor by firing his father’s musket inside a cabin where flints and gunpowder were stored.* On January 8 of the following year, Francis climbed a tree on a nearby hilltop and was surprised to see “a great sea” three miles away. This discovery led to a good deal of pilgrim excitement—could this be the famous Northwest Passage?—but when the vast “Billington Sea” (as it is still known) was explored, it turned out to be a pond only seven feet deep. Oops.

When soldiers like Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long first explored the high plains of Kansas and Nebraska, they thought the region “wholly unfit for cultivation and, of course, uninhabitable.” Pike wrote that the plains “may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa,” and Long’s map even labeled