Tall tales thought to hold feathery truths

THEY say the best place to hide a book is in a library.

This is certainly true of Thesaurus Geographicus by Abraham Ortelius of Antwerp, published in 1576 and the map of the known world he published six years earlier.

Ortelius was not a traveller. Instead he collected charts and stories from sailors who passed through Antwerp. And most science historians will tell you that his problem was that he was an undiscriminating collector with a bad habit of publishing tall tales that were completely false.