R.A. Skelton

The Harvard map collection, one of the largest in the country, numbers some 250,000 pieces, but don't expect to find the one you're looking for. Not that the sweet ladies who run the Winsor Map Room don't do their best for you. They pore over the old handwritten catalogue books and sort through the forests of wall maps, drawers crammed with charts, and stacks of old and valuable atlases. But to little avail. Everything, it seems, is out of place; nothing has been scientifically catalogued.

Now England has sent us Mr. R.A. Skelton to set things aright. He has grey hair and smiling eyes, of course, but what is more important, he is curator of maps for the British Museum and a visiting consultant charged by Paul Buck with the task of drawing up proposals for the classification, cataloguing and housing of Harvard's maps and for the procurement of new maps on a more extended scale. Since the last (and the first) Harvard map catalogue was issued in 1831 the work involved is considerable.

But Mr. Skelton believes strongly in the worth of the job. "The academic library," he says, "has a responsibility not only to the present generation of users but also to all generations. Its officers have the double task of supplying current demand and of anticipating future needs in study and research. In such a library a collection of maps is an essential component.

"A map," he continues, "can present certain kinds of information with greater precision than a textual record." Quoting the poet and traveller James Elroy Flecker, he reminds us that in a map the historian will find

....things that come not to the view

Maps, after all, though sadly neglected at Harvard are treated with great care elsewhere--and not merely by the military men. Other universities have Geography Departments in which the cartographer's skills aid the study of economic development, history, politics, anthropology, and geological and biological scientists. Mr. Skelton put the case strongly in the Adams House Oak Leaf: "Geography conditions the lives of men. It is a point of view from which the data of many sciences can and must be surveyed in spatial relationship or distribution. Maps are accordingly essential tools of the social scientist."

In 1959 a Harvard faculty committee report recommending the creation of a Geography Department was laid aside by the Dean for lack of sufficient funds. But in England, geography, perhaps because of its long association with maritime and colonial enterprises, has always occupied a respected place in scholarship. In addition to geography chairs in the major universities, there is the Hakluyt Society, which publishes the narratives of famous explorers and adventurers. Raleigh A. Skelton has been secretary of the Society for sixteen years; and to support his infectious belief in the romance of maps he might quote the Society motto:

But thou at home without or tide or gale, Canst in thy map securely sail... And from thy compast taking small advice Buy'st travel at the lowest price.