I was extremely fortunate to obtain a National Endowment for the Humanities cartographic research fellowship at the world-class Newberry Library, Chicago, for five weeks in summer 2009.
I held priceless old maps and atlases in my (white-gloved) hands.
We each had to present a culminating talk about our research in an old walnut-paneled library room with high ceilings that disappeared into invisibility.
My presentation was on how some of the 16th-century cartographers used the drawn characteristic of curvilinear lines on their flat world maps to create a sense of global sphericity.
So, I held up one such map which I thought was an early 18th-century copy of an early 16th-century Albrecht Durer cartographic etching that has curved meridians meeting at the North Pole which is tilted toward the viewer. It is a god's-eye view from above the globe.
"Noooo," the Newberry director of cartography gently corrected me. "Lee," he said, "you are holding a 1511 original."
In that speechless moment under a disappearing ceiling, I felt the Durer lines of global sphericity intersecting with my heretofore rectilinearly local life.
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