To lovers of adventure and novelty, Africa displays a most ample field.

Love has boundaries, like a map, and I guess that makes me a cartographer. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re too topographical for my taste.

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of...

The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.

Maps codify the miracle of existence.

When someone doesn’t show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that...

To put a city in a book, to put the world on one sheet of paper — maps are the most condensed humanized spaces of all…They make the landscape fit indoors, make us masters of...