The Cartographers
Peng Shepherd
Author’s Note
We tend to think of maps as perfectly accurate—after all, that’s the point of them. What good would a map that lied be? But in fact, many maps do just that. Unbeknownst to almost everyone who unfolds one and trusts it to take them to where they want to go, there’s a longstanding secret practice among cartographers of hiding intentional errors—phantom settlements—in their works.
Most of the time, these intentional errors are so small and well disguised, they’re never found. But every once in a while, a phantom settlement doesn’t stay a phantom.
Sometimes, something magical happens.
The Cartographers is a work of fiction, but its inspiration is rooted in truth. This story is for anyone who’s ever opened a map and gotten lost in it.
I
The Library
I
In the dim light of her desk’s single bulb lamp, the map nearly glowed.
Fra Mauro, it was called. It had been created in 1450 a.d. by a Camaldolese monk of the same name, who had designed it in his small cartography studio in the Monastery of St. Michael, in that glittering, floating city of Venice. Fra Mauro had researched his map by interviewing merchants traveling through the area from afar, which allowed him to depict the known world of the time with far greater accuracy than those cartographers who had come before him. Even to this day, the Fra Mauro map was considered one of the finest pieces of medieval cartography in existence.
Gently, Nell traced her gaze over the painted gold circular frame, looking for blemishes, inconsistencies in color, errant lines. The Fra Mauro map was also unique in that it was drawn opposite to most other world maps—it oriented the south at the top of its design, rather than the north.
Simply put, it was nothing short of a masterpiece.
If she’d been at a workstation in the conservation lab of the New York Public Library, with the map carefully installed onto a drafting table and her personal assortment of custom restoration tools laid out beside her, she would have chosen her graphic knife edge to gently cut away a frayed edge of the vellum or faintly scrape back a layer of too-boldly restored ink. She would have delicately touched the leg of the repainted T in the ANTARTICVS of the map’s lower right legend, to nick the most minuscule width away, so that it matched the original letter beneath it more perfectly.
Instead, she simply pressed print, and went to go retrieve another copy of the map from the clunky machine.
The Fra Mauro map—the real Fra Mauro map—was on permanent exhibit in the city of its creation, in Venice’s Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. The diagrams before her were no more than a stack of cheap facsimiles.
What she was doing was not what she had trained her entire life to do: conservation and research on priceless, ancient pieces of art in a hermetically sealed museum laboratory. She was adding flourish—nonsense weathering marks and fading—to budget scans of those masterpieces at a cramped, sagging desk in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and then printing them out by the batch to be sold to casual enthusiasts to add a bit of academic flair to their decor.
Nell Young was not a scholar of cartography anymore. She was a design technician at CLASSIC MAPS AND ATLASES?, WE CAN MAKE ANY MAP!
Classic, as her boss called it for short, was the antithesis of conservation. Thousands upon thousands of reproductions of real ancient or rare works of art, mass printed onto modern, acid-free paper, then mass crinkled, or mass aged, or mass hand-decorated with anachronistic symbols, all able to be ordered with two-day shipping direct to a doorstep and hung in a living room that same afternoon.
It was also Nell’s only paycheck.
It hadn’t always been this way. Once, she’d been staring at a bright future ahead of her. She’d attended the best schools, successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation, and landed an internship at none other than the awe-inspiring main branch of the New York Public Library, in its prestigious conservation department. She was on her way to someday matching, perhaps even surpassing, the illustrious reputation of her father, one of the NYPL’s most celebrated scholars. People had even started to whisper about “the new Dr. Young” in the halls as she passed. Once, for a brief moment, she had been just a little bit famous in that tiny, overhead-fluorescent-lit, cluttered world of endless stacks and musty archive drawers.