The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey

Here is another book review from a book I found fascinating.


"What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Man of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. Librarian - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between libido and licentious - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books.

I think most librarians, especially rare book librarians, still secretly view themselves in this way. I met dozens of them as I retraced Bland's footsteps, and in the end I came to the conclusion that most view their work as what the scholar and novelist Umberto Eco, writing about librarians of an earlier age, called a 'war with the forces of oblivion.' I think they wage this war because, like the historian Barbara Tuchman, they believe that 'books are humanity in print' and that, as the Keepers of the Books, they are safeguarding not just pieces of paper but mortal flesh. The stakes are high: if they fail the past dies."

--Pages 113-114



"Yet I came to understand that, at its most fundamental level, a discovery has less to do with revelation than declaration. Just as the word explore comes from the Latin for "to cry out," discovery is the act of making known. Christopher Columbus was not the first to arrive in America: his genius was in introducing the New World to the old one." p 322

"Any attempt, whether in writing or mapping, to fit our three-dimensional world onto the flat page leads to distortions. some elements receive too much space, others too little; still others become warped almost beyond recognition." p 324