By David Walton
In 2003, the Library of Congress paid $10 million for the single surviving copy of the huge Waldseemuller world map of 1507, the first to recognize that the newly discovered lands across the Atlantic weren't part of Asia, but a separate continent, the long-rumored "fourth part of the world," which it called "America."
This purchase of America's "birth certificate," the highest sum ever paid for a historical document, inspired Atlantic Monthly writer Toby Lester to compile (the verb is apt) one of those offbeat, hybrid, labor-of-love books that comes along every so often and charms readers with its eclecticism and sheer love of knowledge.
"The Fourth Part of the World" begins and ends with the story of the Waldseemuller map, which was lost for centuries and rediscovered in 1901 after a painstaking search of German castles and monasteries.
In between, this book becomes a history of mapmaking; of the reclamation of Greek and Roman geographical knowledge in the Renaissance; of Europe's conception of and exploration of the rest of the world; and finally, of the life, travels and literary career of one Amerigo Vespucci and of the group of landlocked German cosmographers who gave us his name.
For centuries, the known world was divided into three parts: Asia, Europe and Africa, represented by the familiar TO map, a T inside a circle, dividing it into three parts. Interestingly, no maps have survived Greek and Roman times. Ancient texts survived by copying and had a wayward and fragmentary passage through the ages.
"The ancient authors contradicted one another in a dizzying number of specifics," Lester writes, "scribal errors had muddled everything, and the regions of the world known to the ancients and the moderns didn't fully overlap."
In the 1300s, Petrarch, known today as a poet, and his disciple Boccaccio, author of "The Decameron," took on the task of reconciling ancient geographies and place names with contemporary accounts.
Petrarch was the first writer to note the resemblance of the Italian peninsula to a boot -- an observation made possible by the development of marine charts.
In his book, Lester illuminates the symbiotic relationship between the revival of ancient knowledge and the sudden expansion of the Renaissance world as explorers moved north into the Arctic, down the coast of Africa and finally across the Atlantic.
Lester himself is a compiler and reconciler: His book is a gracefully concise, richly illustrated, wonderfully detailed compression of dozens of stories, and one of the most readable and satisfying books of the year.
"I decided," Petrarch wrote in the midst of his labors, "not to travel just once on a very long journey by ship or on horse or on foot to those lands, but many times on a tiny map, with books and the imagination."
That spirit of the armchair traveler defines the appeal of this fine, beguiling book.
David Walton is a retired professor and critic in Pittsburgh.