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     Just spotted this reviewed in my second fave newspaper, The New YOrk
     Observer, Dec. 4, 1995.
 
     James S. Romm
 
     The edges of the earth in ancient thought: geography, exploration and
     fiction. Princeton, P.U.P., 1992  [seems to have been an earlier
     edition also, accd to OCLC]
 
     isbn: 0691069336
 
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     Reviewer's comment excerpted:
 
     ..."Mr. Romm had the clever notion of taking as his subject all those
     phantasmagoric, ancient mythic geographies -- the ones about the
     fantastic, hybrid, monstrous creatures said to lurk at the edges of
     the earth. All those stories we were taught to laugh at in grade
     school because Columbus proved them wrong. Mr. Romm examines as a
     deeply revealing body of literature. Literature that reflects the way
     the very first thinkers, writers and conceptualizers tried to make
     sense of finitude and infinitude, the boundaries not just of the
     physical world but of [knowing] itself. [italics]  And how they
     projected upon the blank screen of terra incognita, shadowy, distorted
     reflections of some truths about themselves--about the unknown within,
     the terra incognita of human nature."
 
 
     Quoted as written, incomplete sentences and all. He makes this seem
     like good snowbound reading...something to help deal with lake effect
     snows and all that. Not that I know anything about lake effect
     snows...
 
     Now, this same reviewer has a picture of Bill Gates next to a sketch
     of the unabomber and asks if they have ever "been seen together in the
     same room..."
 
     ok, ok, reviewer's name is Ron Rosenbaum, and his column is The Edgy
     Enthusiast, in The New York Observer. a local weekly.
 
     Alice Hudson
     Map Division, NYPL