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SUDDENLY, in these days of war‐waging against planners, developers, and demolition contractors, local history has come into its own. In almost any part of the country you care to name, local amenity societies are popping up to defend, conserve, preserve, and restore the little, if we are lucky, ‘they’ have still left us with. All of which is — or ought to be — very heartening for local history librarians.

‘CARTO‐BIBLIOGRAPHY’ must surely be just about the ugliest term in a cartographer's vocabulary, but to its inventor, Sir Henry George Fordham, it represented something of the very greatest significance, and it is as well for us that it did. It was in 1896 that Sir George made his decision to compile a catalogue of Hertfordshire maps, ‘little conscious’, he was later to confide, ‘of the amplitude such a work could assume’. Can there be anyone who has undertaken a carto‐bibliography since who has not echoed at some point Fordham's confession? Working alone, and without guidance from any similar previous compilations, he had no choice but to devise his own forms, methods, and arrangements, ‘digesting my materials’, as he put it, ‘according to the lights they seemed to throw upon the subject’. The resulting compilation, the first real British carto‐bibliography to see the light of day, began to appear in the Transactions of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society in October 1901. Six years later, in September 1907, it was completed and published in volume form as Hertfordshire maps: a descriptive catalogue of the maps of the county, 1579–1900. A supplement followed in 1914.

Until quite recently librarians on the whole were ill‐equipped for being custodians of maps. Even now one fears this is less rarely the case than it ought to be. Hair‐raising stories of early maps in public libraries, wrongly dated, wrongly ascribed, completely unorganised, accounts of antique atlases deposited with love by nineteenth‐century aldermanic benefactors, unguarded, rebound in buckram bindings with ‘912’ stamped on their spines — these and other horror stories are still being swopped by bemused researchers who have had the fortune to stumble on them. What makes this sort of thing the more disturbing is that the number of maps — thanks to natural wear and tear and exports to American universities — is constantly diminishing. Decreasing numbers and increasing demand spells soaring prices. A copy of Horwood's 32 sheet map of London 1792–99 went for £3 at the Gardner sale in 1924. Today one would have to pay something in the region of £250 for the same map. Just on financial grounds alone then we have something of a moral duty to know about our map stocks.