A few months ago I picked up The Island of Lost Maps to an Amazon order so that I would qualify for super saver postage rates. It was being hocked as part of Amazon's often amazing under $5 book section. What's surprising is that this bargain book turned out to be much more enlightening and interesting than the books I had ordered.

What Miles Harvey has produced here is for cartography and old maps what Simon Winchester did for the OED in his The Professor and the Madman. Harvey's book is a true story about a journalist's effort to track down one Gilbert Bland, an infamous map thief who makes his living on a razor's edge--meaning that the jerk cuts priceless antique maps out of the atlases and books in various university rare book rooms. However, the book is much more than that--Harvey uses this pretext to tell us all about cartography, old maps, geography, and even some of the philosophy and psychology behind map-making. I was hooked from the very first page. I'd never realized cartography could be so fascinating, nor given much thought to why we make maps--other than the obvious, of course. I've often seen old maps with their little sirens and such, but had no idea why they were there or how these old mapmakers plied their trade.

What's even more interesting, though, is the metaphorical significance of maps. What is a map, exactly? In the Middle Ages, it wasn't necessarily a representation of actual geographical data. Maps back then were more for allegorical purposes. In fact, maps were almost as mythological as practical up until the last few centuries, as we finally began eliminating the "unexplored" sections of our world.

Of course, as someone interested in new media and the net, I was constantly thinking of ways to compare ancient and modern cartography to our efforts to "map" the internet, and why we find it so often necessary to refer to geographical conventions when talking about the net (Internet Explorer, web site, etc.)

If you're looking for a book to liven up a long trip or just something to read in the tub, let me recommend this book. It's a real gem.