This is a short story. It is fiction, though the practice at its centre is real: mapmakers have long inserted small deliberate errors, sometimes called trap streets or copyright traps, to catch copying.
Every map Halvard drew contained one lie.
A stream that bent the wrong way. A farm named for a family that had never lived there. A spur of woodland half a mile from where the woodland actually was. He put it in on the last night of the work, always, when the sheet was otherwise finished and the ink of the true parts had dried, and he never wrote down where.
It was a trap, and a good one. If another house published a map with Halvard’s lie in it, they had not surveyed the ground. They had copied him. There was no other way for a stream to bend wrongly in exactly the same wrong direction. The lie was the only proof possible in a trade where the truth was, by definition, identical for everyone, and where a man could spend two years walking a district with a chain and a theodolite and be robbed of it by an afternoon with a tracing frame.
He had caught three houses that way. One had settled, one had folded, and one had sent a lawyer who explained at length that a coincidence of error was not evidence of anything, and then settled.
He was proud of the method in the abstract way that men are proud of a habit that has stopped requiring thought.
In the spring of his fortieth year a surveyor from the ministry came to the workshop with one of his sheets rolled under his arm and a complaint about a bridge.
“There is no bridge here,” the surveyor said. He unrolled the sheet across the working table, over the sheet that was on it, which Halvard let him do. “We sent a company of men and a cart.”
Halvard looked at where the man’s finger was.
It was a district he had surveyed eleven or twelve years earlier, in a wet autumn, and he could remember the inn and he could remember a dog that had followed him for two days, and he found that he could not remember whether that had been the year of the bridge or the year of the woodland.
“How far did they carry the cart?” he asked.
“Nine miles,” the surveyor said. “And back.”
There was a silence in which several things were available to be said. Halvard found that the only honest one was a question about himself, and that he did not want to ask it in front of a stranger.
“I will correct the plate,” he said.
The surveyor, who had come prepared for an argument and had been handed an agreement, rolled the sheet up and left with the mild dissatisfaction of a man denied a scene.
That evening Halvard sat with the lamp and a new ledger, one with a clasp and a lock, and began to list them. Sheet by sheet, going backwards, as far as he could remember and then further, guessing, marking the guesses. It took him most of a month and it was not complete when he stopped, because it could not be.
He had been protecting the map from copyists for twenty years. In all that time it had not once occurred to him that somebody might simply believe it.
A note on trap streets
The practice in this story is genuine. Cartographers and directory publishers have long inserted fictitious entries, known as trap streets, paper towns or copyright traps, as evidence of copying. The best-known example is Agloe, New York, a nonexistent hamlet invented by a map company in the 1930s, which later acquired a real building put up by people who believed the map. Courts have taken varying views of whether a fictitious entry is itself protected by copyright.
A safeguard designed against bad-faith readers can still do damage to the ones who trust you.
For another story about a record and the person keeping it, read The lamp room, or The second key. For a puzzle its observer solved four months late, The 19:40 to Carlisle.
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