The best online map viewer I’ve ever seen, and 200,000 wonderful maps to use it on, are available from the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center. They feature a “map of the month” (Martin Waldseemüller’s 1513 world map which omits the previously proposed name of “America”) and “maps in the news” (Darfur and Iraq), but who needs library programming when you can browse? If there’s a heaven for map lovers, it has this viewer’s ability to zoom with excellent resolution.
Closer to home, new acquisitions by our old friend the Newberry Library include another 18th-century French treasure, a map if you will, of “contre dances,” described as complementing the library’s “important holdings in eighteenth-century dance notation.”