The content of most library exhibitions tantalises. It's like food you can look at but not eat: single spreads or isolated leaves of manuscript - nothing you can dip into or flick through. Even the aesthetic of print loses out when you can't feel the quality of the paper or get a sense of the way one page follows another.

Maps are different. An almost entirely satisfactory exhibition - Lie of the Land: The Secret Life of Maps - runs at the British Library until April. There is a book due in December - it would have been good to have it now, but at least the work which has gone into the exhibition will not go unrecorded. One could do without the punning title, and an eagerness to include anything which fits that title puts too many merely amusing items alongside what is sinister or significant. But most of what is shown is wonderfully interesting and - as much to the point - most of these single sheets are whole works not fragments. They have been chosen to show how maps enable action and enter into argument; they are there to be read.

LRB 20 September 2001 | PDF Download