The Cartographers

As modern cartography developed and science and technology progressed exponentially, mapmaking techniques and demands intensified, particularly with the rise of the automobile. As more people began driving in the early 1900s, two cartographers from the General Drafting Corporation, Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers, began to create cheap, foldable road maps that were meant to be sold at gas stations and stored in a glove compartment. This strategy was a success, leading other major map companies like Rand McNally to emulate this idea (390).

However, with the increasingly high demand for maps and detailed surveying work to create accurate cartographical representations of land and road came the need to protect against copyright infringement. Although maps are meant to be factual and to depict what is actually there, surveying by hand was hard work, and cartographers feared having their efforts stolen by competitors (151). The solution to this issue was to insert minor additions to maps that would not inconvenience consumers but would indicate locations that did not actually exist, and thus arose the concept of adding small fictitious details such as phantom settlements, trap rooms, or trap streets. This way, if such fictional data were to appear on a competitor’s map, it would prove that the map data was stolen (“Maps, Traps & Phantom Settlements.” The Future Mapping Company, 2019). This technique is still used today in the form of “Easter eggs” embedded in the data of digital maps.

In the novel, Agloe is one such phantom settlement, but its (true) story is a bit unusual, compared to other fictitious “paper towns” that exist only on maps and not in reality. As Nell learns in the novel, Agloe, a copyright trap created by General Drafting by combining Lindberg and Alpers’ initials, was depicted as being located in an empty field on a dirt road between the towns of Rockland and Beaverkill on the 1930 edition of a gas station map distributed by the Esso gas station company. Later, Lindberg found Agloe on a map printed by a rival company, Rand McNally, and sued. However, McNally defended their map, saying that Agloe was indeed a real town. When investigators drove to Agloe, they discovered that it was indeed a real place—though not in the sense that they imagined. A shop called the Agloe General Store had been constructed at the location of the supposedly phantom settlement (Krulwich, Robert. “An Imaginary Town Becomes Real, Then Not. True Story.” NPR, 2014).

The explanation was that the store owners noticed Agloe on the Esso/General Drafting map and decided to name their own establishment after the fictitious town created by Lindberg and Alpers. The store later closed and the “town” disappeared, only to be revived decades later as a tourist attraction and featured in contemporary novels and media like Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers. Agloe has also been featured on various digital maps like Google Maps, and the remains of the store are still there today (and can be seen in this video). Agloe’s current coordinates are 41.9656, -74.9064 in upstate New York. Agloe is not the only phantom settlement discovered by map users, nor are cartographers the only ones to create copyright traps; dictionaries and encyclopedias also use similar tactics (Moss, Laura. “‘Paper Towns’ and Other Lies Maps Tell You.” Treehugger, 2020).

While Shepherd’s novel remains true to the historical background of the real-life history of Agloe, Shepherd deviates from historical fact and expands upon the phantom settlement concept by indulging in magical realism and fantasy to enhance the plot of the novel. Thus, in Shepherd’s story, Agloe becomes not just a single store, but an entire empty town that can only be accessed by using that specific 1930 map (183). Cartographers like Nell and Tam can also affect the town by changing the map on which it is depicted, whether those changes are stores or coordinates (364, 377). Shepherd expands this concept further to incorporate not just phantom settlements but other copyright traps like the Sanborn room in NYPL (153) or the trap stairs at Classic (279). With just a little imagination and the right tools, she suggests, a map is not just a rendering of a place that already exists. Instead, it is the key to creating a whole new world; one merely needs to seize the opportunity.