Another approach is to search out your own literary references to maps, aided by the increasing
volume of digitised early texts. Much of this is freely available on the web. Other web
collections, such as Thomson's 'Eighteenth Century Collection Online' and the NetLibrary, are
accessible only via a library. You could frequently use this route to check up on a quotation
whose author and book title you already knew.
Searching in hope across, say, the entire work of
an author, or even wider than that, seems usually not to be possible. However, Google Book Search returned hits for the word
'map' from over 2 million books in February 2006, from whatever source material it is using.
Worth particular mention are:
- Bartleby.com. Great Books Online
- offering a good array of fully searchable volumes: an assortment of fiction,
dictionaries of quotations, Shakespeare, the Bible, etc., though you must first select a
category
- Internet Public Library (see, for example
Literature: Online
Texts and
Quotations - University of Michigan)
- The Online Books Page
(listing 25,000 free books at April 2006; it may be possible to search the text of a title
or an author's entire work - Jane Austen, for example, apparently used the word 'map' only once [in
'Mansfield Park'] - University of Pennsylvania)
The situation is fluid, with new ventures being announced every few months. Instead of trying to
list and describe other major resources, here are a few gateways that can take you to them. The
sites they link to include material in languages other than English.
