Review of The Library of Lost Maps: An Archive of a World in Progress

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Like many of you, I have never set foot in the University College London (UCL) Map Library.I've never browsed its shelves, opened the drawers, or sorted through the piles of antiquated maps that are older by decades than most of us.After reading The Library of Lost Maps, however, I have a sense of nostalgia for this room I've never entered and whose (now retired) librarian I've never met.The Library of Lost Maps is not so much a book documenting a miscellaneous bunch of maps, as it is a novel about a library.It reads as if it were a memoir of the library itself, with the author James Cheshire taking on the role of dutiful biographer.Each chapter introduces a freshly rediscovered map pulled from the back of a drawer that was last opened who knows how long ago, and walks us through its background, reception, and acquisition by the archive.Through this framework we are introduced to a cast of characters (that is to say, actual cartographers) whose methodologies and motivations bring us outside the walls of UCL and into the mapmaker's own time and territories.