Two Texts: Maps and the People Who Make Them

Original texts written for Revision Library. Text 1 is original short fiction; Text 2 is original non-fiction.

TEXT 1: THE MAP BEHIND THE SHELF (fiction)

Rehan had been sorting books into cardboard boxes for two straight hours when his uncle finally called out from the front counter that they could stop for the day. The bookshop, Whitlock's Rare and Secondhand Books, was closing at the end of the month, and every shelf had to be emptied, checked and boxed before the new owners took over and turned it, according to the sign already taped in the window, into a coffee shop.

It was while he was reaching for the last few books on the highest shelf that Rehan noticed something odd: the shelf itself seemed to wobble slightly, as though it were not properly fixed to the wall behind it. Curious, he pressed his palm flat against the dusty wood and pushed. To his surprise, the whole shelf unit swung outward on a hidden hinge, revealing a narrow gap behind it, no wider than a school ruler, in the brick wall.

Inside the gap, rolled tightly and tied with a length of faded string, was a single sheet of thick, yellowed paper. Rehan's fingers trembled slightly as he worked the knot loose and unrolled it flat across the counter. It was a map, hand-drawn in careful black ink, showing streets Rehan half recognised, though the names beneath them were older, unfamiliar spellings he had never seen on any modern sign.

In one corner, someone had drawn a small, neat cross beside a symbol that looked like a bell, and beside it, in handwriting even smaller than the rest, three words: still there, listen. Rehan turned the map over, searching for anything else, a date, a name, an explanation, but the back of the paper was completely blank.

His uncle appeared in the doorway, keys jangling, ready to lock up for the night. "Whatever you've found, it'll have to wait until tomorrow," he said, glancing at the darkening window. "Whitlock's has been here since 1891, Rehan. Believe me, anything hidden in these walls has waited a great deal longer than one more night." Rehan carefully rolled the map back up, already certain that tomorrow could not come quickly enough.

TEXT 2: READING THE GROUND - A SHORT HISTORY OF MAPMAKING (non-fiction)

Long before satellites circled the Earth taking photographs from space, people were already finding ways to record the shape of the world around them. Some of the oldest known maps are not drawn on paper at all but scratched onto clay tablets, dating back nearly four thousand years, showing rivers, mountains and settlements from a bird's eye view that no ancient mapmaker could possibly have seen with their own eyes.

One of the most influential early mapmakers was Ptolemy, a scholar working in Egypt around AD 150, who collected geographical information from traders and travellers and used it to draw a map of the known world, complete with a grid of lines representing latitude and longitude. Although parts of his map were badly inaccurate, since large areas of the world were still completely unknown to him, his method of using a coordinate grid shaped mapmaking for well over a thousand years afterwards.

"What people often forget," explains Dr Naomi Foss, a historian of cartography, "is that maps were never simply neutral records of geography. Every mapmaker had to decide what mattered enough to include and what could be left out, which meant every map also carried the beliefs, priorities and limitations of the person who drew it." Medieval maps, for example, frequently placed Jerusalem at the exact centre of the world, reflecting religious belief rather than geographical accuracy.

Mapmaking changed dramatically from the fifteenth century onwards, as sailors began crossing oceans further and further from home, gradually filling in the blank spaces on the map with real, measured coastlines. By the eighteenth century, more precise instruments allowed surveyors to measure distance and elevation with far greater accuracy, and by the twentieth century, aerial photography made it possible to map entire countries from above without ever setting foot on much of the land being recorded.

Today, most people no longer unfold paper maps at all, instead relying on satellite navigation systems that update their position roughly once every second. Yet Dr Foss argues that something has been lost along the way: "A drawn map tells you what a place meant to somebody. A satellite map just tells you where you are standing right now." Whichever kind of map is being read, one thing has remained constant since those first scratched clay tablets: the basic human instinct to make sense of the world by putting it down on paper, or in a grid of light on a screen, so it can be shared with somebody else.