Quietly housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) since 1978, the AGS Library contains more than a million items, half of which are maps and charts, some dating to 15th century, and some that aren't available anywhere else, even at the Library of Congress.
Stories of intrigue
McColl is one of the many travelers and scholars who, in addition to the famous, have helped build the collection.
"I went to China early enough that I found some items that are terribly unique, that might have disappeared otherwise," says McColl. Through his contacts in China, he found many works and maps that might have been produced in limited quantities or pulled off the market." He also found rare books, sometimes bound in silk, in flea markets. "People were selling them for food," he says.
It's like that with the contents of the AGSL, says Baruth. Each piece testifies to the adventurers, rare circumstances and history behind them -- with as much intrigue as any work of fiction found in the other stacks of the UWM Libraries.
Notable contents include a wide range of materials, from black-and-white renderings done by hand to digital spatial data, from turn-of-the-century photographs of arctic exploration to charts used by Charles Lindbergh to fly from New York to Paris in 1927
In the mid-1970s the AGS could no longer afford to archive its holdings and chose UWM to house the collection after a national search. It took nearly five years to orchestrate the move and surmount the legal challenges.
