50 years or so before Borges wrote the story under consideration, Lewis Carroll wrote a short one called The Man in the Moon (within the compilation Sylvie and Bruno Concluded). In it, a man from a unique Nation describes their map after being questioned…

-"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
-"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

More recently, Umberto Eco wrote a story called “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1″ in How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Stories. Apparently it’s a metaphor for library administration (certainly of interest to Borges).

hope this is of continued interest for ya.

…on an aside, i’m relatively new to the walker design blog, i wanted to say i appreciate all the fine posts of images/interviews/research/flat-file foraging et al. you’ve got a regular reader here for sure.

-joel