The important lacuna is, surely indicative of something more serious than disciplinary focus and trans-disciplinary oversight. I think of it as a paradox that might help us to understand one of the central problem of geographical and cartographical imaginations at work. While Hall opens our eyes to the development and diffusion of new cartographic and imaging technologies and practices, andPaulston builds on his encounter with geographical texts and ideas but in the endremains committed to a modernist project of synthesis and totalizing mapping, King has cut loose the foundational tethers and allowed his readings to focus on multiple discursive formations. But he has done so at the expense of any engagement with the work of contemporary geography and cartography. While one could ask of these three authors to be more attentive to literature of geography and cartography, I prefer to turn around the problem of the lacuna and ask, instead, what is wrong with contemporary cartographic theory and practice that this can happen at a time of such growth in the mapping sciences? My short answer is what I will call the paradox of representation and its commitment to objectivist epistemologies of science, or what derek gregory has called 'the cartographic Anxiety'. This paradox brings us to the three element of the crisis of representation.