Jorge Luis Borges' short story "On Exactitude In 
Science" is about a guild of cartographers who were so fixated on perfection that they "struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it." Subsequent generations found it useless, and the map was left to crumble in the desert, where it became shelter for wild animals and derelicts. Reif Larsen recounts this story, and another, about a Grade 7 assignment in which his class was instructed to draw the world from memory.
"Some people breezed through it," he says, smiling. "I got really into it."
Reif Larsen liked his maps then - and now. "We had an atlas, an old National Geographic atlas from the '60s, and I would just pore over that. I'd make up stories about these crazy places. I think, like a good story, they give you enough to sink your teeth into. A map has place names, it has a scale, they're just so delicious to me."
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