The cartographer’s power to decide the fate of millions
I had searched for it for the better part of 20 years. An enormous trove of lost maps, the 800 or so sheets of an immense and madcap Victorian project known as the International Map of the World at the Scale of One to a Million. It had taken its makers 70 years of costly surveying, engraving and printing before it was abandoned unfinished in the 1980s. An original set of these stunningly lovely British-made maps was first deposited in the swanky Manhattan offices of the American Geographical Society. But, after falling on hard times, the AGS had to move to smaller digs in Brooklyn and had no room for
