By P.D.A. Harvey.

The Guardian, December 28, 1991.

BRIAN HARLEY, an international authority on the history of cartography, has died suddenly in Milwaukee aged 59. A graduate of Birmingham University's Department of Geography, he began research there in 1956 under the late Professor Harry Thorpe. The subject (predictably, at that point in Thorpe's own work) was the historical geography of medieval Warwickshire, with its contrasting regions of Arden and Feldon.

My own unforgettable first meeting with him was amidst clouds of steam from Thorpe's aged car. It had boiled while climbing the hill to the County Record Office, then in Warwick's Shire Hall. In 1958 he moved to the geography department at Liverpool University. He began his life's work on the history of mapping, with research on the Ordnance Survey in the early 19th century, and on earlier private cartographers. Christopher Greenwood, County Map-Maker (which incidentally corrected a long-held belief that this important cartographer's first name was Charles) was the first of many detailed studies. The invaluable Historian's Guide To Ordnance Survey Maps (with CW Phillips, 1964), was another early product of this work.

In 1969-71 David & Charles reprinted the first edition of the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps. Its 97 sheets appeared at the rate of one per week and for each one Harley supplied a note analysing in minute detail the history of its original printing plate and successive changes made during its period of service - this was an outstanding achievement. For a year Harley worked on the staff of David & Charles but in 1970 he returned to academic life at Exeter University and soon became Montefiore Reader in Geography. Work on British maps continued: Ordnance Survey Maps: A Descriptive Manual (1975) and notable contributions to A History Of The Ordnance Survey, edited by WA Seymour (1980), deserve special mentions.

Now, however, he extended this work, first in research on North American maps of the same period, then in examining broader issues. Concepts In The History Of Cartography (written with MJ Blakemore, 1980) was a deliberately controversial account of various approaches to the subject, initiating debate that continues today.

In 1982 he published the first of a series of articles examining the meaning and purpose of 16th and 17th century maps, arguing that, like contemporary paintings, they contained a wealth of implicit symbolism that transcended their functions as simple topographical guides; on this too there is continuing discussion.

Most important of all, with Dr David Woodward, he initiated and edited the multi-volume History Of Cartography for the University of Chicago Press. Its first volume appeared in 1987 and the second is expected shortly - a milestone in this field of study, which has already stimulated much important research and new discovery.

In 1986 Harley moved to a Chair in the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and became director of the American Geographical Society's map collection. The previous year Birmingham University had recognised the importance of his work with the degree of D. Litt.

Brian Harley was a man of great charm and verve that appeared both in speech and in his writings. He was an erudite, imaginative and original scholar, as much at home with broad concepts as with detailed research on particular projects. His scholarly dedication was complete.

The death of his wife and, soon after, his son, affected him deeply, but he did not allow this to show in his professional life.

His international reputation, considerable even when his research was focused on British maps, blossomed with his work in wider fields. The cosmopolitan but close-knit world of cartographic historians will be much the poorer for the premature loss of Brian's fertile mind.

John Brian Harley, born July 24, 1932; died December 20, 1991.

By Paul Laxton (literary executor).

The Independent, December 27, 1991

John Brian Harley, cartographic historian, born Bristol 24 July 1932, Lecturer in Geography Liverpool University 1958-69, Editor David & Charles publishers 1969-70, Lecturer in Geography Exeter University 1970-72, Montefiore Reader 1972-86, Professor of Geography University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 1986-91, married 1958 Amy Chatten (died 1984; three daughters, and son deceased), died Milwaukee 20 December 1991.

GEOGRAPHERS these days tend to know more about Marx than about maps. It may surprise many observers of the humanities to know that the history of maps is not only alive but thriving. That is in no small measure due to the extraordinarily fertile mind of Brian Harley who elevated the history of cartography higher than any other scholar, rescuing it from a persistent tendency toward the philatelic and anitquarian frame of mind. He urged his colleagues towards a philosophy of the map which would draw out new levels of meaning and which is not restricted to the past nor to narrow definitions of subject matter: Harley found disciplinary boundaries absurd. After a childhood with elderly impecunious foster parents in rural Staffordshire Brian Harley attended Brewood Grammar School, near Wolverhampton, where his family circumstances were the cause of miserable treatment by schoolmates: a country boy in hand-me-down clothes but with a sharp intellect must have been an easy target. National Service was spent in the army in Trieste, Egypt and Cyprus, an experience which surfaced occasionally in hilarious stories but which, I suspect, was character-forming in every sense: the army taught him to type as a punishment.

At Birmingham University personal distractions robbed Harley of his expected First in Geography in 1955 but he won the W.A. Cadbury Prize. He also came under the influence of Harry Thorpe, known for his enthusiasm for the reading and recovery of past landscapes through maps. Working on the geography of medieval Warwickshire, Harley turned to Rodney Hilton, then researching the social structure of medieval Warwickshire, and whose Marxist approach to medieval social change chimed with Harley's own political ideology. Harley's Ph D broke new ground and before it was awarded in 1959 he had already published a paper on population and agricultural trends as seen through the Hundred Rolls of 1279 in the Economic History Review, a work still regularly cited.

After his appointment in 1958 as assistant lecturer in geography at Liverpool University, and with his thesis out of the way, Harley felt unwilling to compete with others making reputations in medieval economic history. He turned to the history of cartography. His book Christopher Greenwood, country map-maker (1962), written at Hilton's suggestion, was a milestone in English map history. With only a few exceptions all his subsequent output was on maps and map-makers: first English mapping (mostly the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and influenced by R.A. Skelton at the British Museum), then the mapping of North America (notably during the Revolutionary War), and latterly a global and more philosophical view of cartographic history. Harley once wrote that the really formative years of his life were spent at Liverpool. But in 1969, partly motivated by frustration at the lack of promotion and perhaps feeling a need for new opportunities, Harley resigned from Liverpool to become sponsoring-editor with the publishers David & Charles in Newton Abbot, Devon.

This was a bold move for a lecturer with three children, but it was not long before he had gently twisted many arms and commissioned a substantial number of works in fields entirely new for David & Charles. Yet Harley hankered after the academic life. By March the follwing year, in Micawber's terms, ''something had turned up'', a vacancy for a historical geographer at Exeter University. Harley started as a lecturer but in 1972 was appointed to the Montefiore Readership. His research output and general writing at Exeter were dominated by the history of the Ordnance Survey. His notes on the immensely popular reprints of the ''Old Series'' (regularly advertised in newspapers as ''Victorian Maps'') led to more substantial syntheses, a sort of unofficial history of the OS, written with collaborators and presented in a series of regional volumes of facsimiles, text, and carto-bibliography published by Harry Margary. The last volume remained half complete. He prepared Ordnance Survey Maps: a descriptive manual (1975) and wrote a substantial part of the official history of the OS published in 1978.

Yet despite his obvious distinction and notwithstanding a huge international body of contacts and admirers Harley failed to secure adequate recognition in British academic institutions. He was a perceptive, witty, often blunt, but sometimes angry observer of life in general and academic life in particular. His stands were courageous and principled but not always politic and he had gained a reputation for being ''difficult'' among sober establishment men.

Personal tragedy marred his latter years at Exeter. His wife Amy died and less than a year later his son John died in a tragic accident. These events were added reasons for him to think of a new life and opportunities. Long familiar with the United States through fellowships and invitations to lecture, in 1977 Harley had joined with David Woodward of the University of Wisconsin at Madison to persuade Chicago University Press to publish a multi-volume History of Cartography. Conceived in a Devon churchyard, this project then took over Harley's life. In 1986 a full professorship in geography for Harley at the Milwaukee campus of the University of Wisconsin consolidated the enterprise in one institution. This multi-disciplinary project, involving some 130 scholars from the world over, is the first comprehensive history of maps in world cultures, a synthesis of existing and new research.

The first of six lavish volumes, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean was published in 1987. Volume Two, two books on Asian cartography, is in the last stages of production. The tragedy for this monumental project is that it has now been robbed of Brian Harley's vision and panache, which would have come especially into their own in the later volumes, on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, periods in which his authority was supreme.

Harley judged people by the quality of their discourse and their capacity for conviviality. Above all he was a scholar, good at forming co-operative partnerships. He could be wonderful in an alehouse seminar but he was most content closeted at home with his books, notes, pen and typewriter, where judgements were refined and where he cherished the intellectual stimulus with a fierceness and drive fuelled, perhaps, by the hard lesson his early life had taught him: to survive and not to let opportunities slip. But beneath all the strongly-held views lay a characteristic uncertainty. This Harley would cover with the sort of self-mocking modesty which always failed to hide his enthusiasm both for the chase and the writing. And he wrote so well, with an unfailing nose for the comic and tragic sides of the heroic exploits of early cartography, often with a poet's touch.

His lectures, especially the pieces polished to disguise the great effort that produced them, always managed to turn a potentially abstruse subject into an eye- opening delight. He taught us that maps are vehicles for the imagination. One occasion in 1968 springs to my mind: as we pored over large-scale plans of early Victorian Liverpool, Harley beckoned a passing colleague (the Cornish historian John Rowe) to admire the impressive mapped mass of beer houses, spirit vaults and oyster bars around Queen's Square - as he relished the prospect of the real thing we, of course, agreed.

Harley's distinctive contribution to scholarship was to show how the map is more than a skilfully constructed artefact with geographical outlines. Absorbing ideas from art history and literary criticism, he made us aware of what he liked to call the hidden agendas in these essentially social documents: ''silences'' that speak, signs and icons with subliminal messages; some of deliberate propaganda, most reflecting cultural values unacknowledged by either the mapmaker or his society. Maps, Harley emphasised, are more than passive mirrors of landscape and society; they are potent agents of governments and tools of propaganda. He was just the man to be involved in controversies over the Christopher Columbus celebrations. He had broadcast on the topic and written the interpretative guide to a travelling exhibition of maps, ''The Columbian Encounter''. He was due to give 12 public lectures on the topic next year.

It was partly Brian Harley's own scholarly achievements which made him a big man but also (and this is crucial for an assessment of him) the fact that he had climbed a higher mountain than most men, and it was a hard climb. The naughty boy with a slightly absent manner but sharp wit was really a cover for a very substantial person.

(Map omitted)