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 Archive. Texts Archive (a wide range of
searchable, out-of-copyright books, readable in various formats)
- Internet Public Library (see, for
example
Literature: Online Texts and links to Quotations sites - 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.
- The British Library's Research Resources ('Electronic text sites', under the headings: General and
world literature, Bible and religion, English language and literature, French, Greek and Latin,
Particular periods, Philosophy)
- Search Engine Watch
(checking those for the most recent developments relating to online books can bring up useful
descriptions and analysis)
