----------------------------Original message---------------------------- 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 ---------------- 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