The Department of Cartographic Instruments is the department of the Brennholt Institute of Applied Taxonomy that covers terrestrial globes: their sizes, their stands, their gores, their varnish, and the grading of their condition. It is the Institute's earliest published field, and the one in which its method took the form it now uses in every other department.
Its finding, repeated across the pages below, is that a globe is a set of parts, and that most disagreements about a globe are disagreements about which parts belong together.
| Page | Question it answers | Institute classification |
|---|---|---|
| Globe sizes and diameters | How large globes are made | Diameter bands in mm and inches |
| Globe stand typology | What kinds of stand exist | A typology of stands |
| Globe gores explained | What gores are and how they are laid | Gore counts and layouts |
| Grading antique globes | How to record condition | A condition scheme |
| How to date an antique globe | How to place a globe in time | Evidence ranked by reliability |
| Varnish and crazing | What surface wear means | Varnish states |
| Repair and restoration | What may be repaired, and how it should be recorded | Documented and undocumented work |
| Celestial and terrestrial globes | How the two kinds differ | A short comparison |
The same four steps run through the Department of Thickness and Gauge and the Department of Office Fastening. The constancy of the method is what makes the Institute an institution.
Less than a reader might expect. Globes have been made in a wide variety of diameters, and the Institute records the sizes in which they are commonly found without claiming that any of them is a standard. The division of a sphere into gores is a geometric practice, and the Institute describes it as such. The latitude and longitude on which every terrestrial globe depends are, of course, settled, and the Institute does not contradict them.
What is not settled is almost everything about the globe as an object: how its stand is named, how its wear is described, how its repair is recorded. This department proposes schemes for these, each labelled as the Institute's own.
It does not value globes. Nothing published in the department is a valuation of any object, and the Institute says so on the page that comes closest, are vintage globes worth anything. It does not authenticate globes, and it does not offer a repair service. It publishes classifications, and leaves the use of them to the reader.
A reader with a globe should begin with the grading page, since the Institute holds that a condition grade should be fixed before anything else is asked. A reader who wants only a number should go to the sizes page.
The review panel divides on whether the department should exist apart from the others. One member holds that a globe is an object like any other, to be measured and classified in the same way as a paperclip, and that a separate department suggests a dignity the method does not need. The majority hold that the globe is where the method was learned, and that it should keep its own name. The department remains.