This supernatural story about the Map Division at the New York Public Library was a natural choice for this librarian to read aloud to her geographer husband. The book was recommended to us by one of our friends.
While we are hardly experts, we do know a bit more than your average Joe about maps and mapmaking, so we were familiar with the concept of a phantom settlement - a place on a map that doesn't exist in real life. Mapmakers of yore sometimes included these "paper towns" in order to catch copyright infringers.
But what if the phantom settlements were real, if only a person had the right map that could lead them there? Some spunky graduate students (aka "The Cartographers)" discover just such a place on a decades-old gas station highway map. Nell Young discovers a rare copy of the map after her father dies in his office at the New York Public Library. Her investigation into his death leads her to some impossible places!
While the Map Division of the NYPL is at the center of this mystery, there are other libraries in this work as well:
- Nell reads her mother's obituary using old library microfilm machines.
- A robbery at a high school in Scranton, Pennsylvania left an employee with a broken leg and the geography section in shambles.
- The Cartographers, doing some research through newspapers stories in the Rockland (NY) Public Library, learn of a string of robberies nationwide in libraries, schools, gas stations, museums, and even private homes. They suspect that someone is hunting down copies of what they call the "Agloe map".
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