Full disclosure, I did not take this photo today, it’s a quick shot I took a couple of weeks ago and sat on, knowing that at some point I’d be too tired to pick up the camera one day and I’d come back to it.
Cartophile: (noun) A person with a love of maps.
“A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here… Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams.” — Miles Harvey
My Mom loved maps and I think she instilled that love in me. We had a globe when I was young and how I loved to spin that thing and poke my finger at a random spot to see where it landed. Then I’d look it up in our encyclopedia and learn more. I also loved great big atlases and would lay on the floor with one spread out before me, looking at all the amazing places that people lived.
I still have paper maps and map books in the glove box of the truck, and when we travelled on our motorcycle trips last year, paper maps of Washington and BC came along for the ride. You don’t always have cell service and a paper map never has a dead battery.
It’s also so nice to get the bigger picture of an area; somehow a map on a tiny iPhone screen pales in comparison.
So it made me smile when I saw this rack of paper maps at a bookstore in Fairhaven 😊
