The missing pages of my borrowed copy were not lost to the mists of time, nor were they torn out, but a simple, ghostly blank. They were near the very beginning of the book and—after my first attempt at bypassing them—crucial in establishing a base of knowledge with which to decipher the rest of the text. I decided to delay my cartographic journey until my second library hold arrived, certain that the guide-pages meant to lead me deeper into Iron Age Gaul would appear.

My second library copy contained, of course, the same jarring, eerie blankness at preface pages xi-xiv; again at one through four; yet again at nine through twelve. I decided—after consulting the parabola of a pigeon’s fearless strut down Second Avenue—that the blankness filled the role of dark space of cartographic legend, a fundamental impossibility of complete, elucidative knowledge available to, or perhaps about, Celtic society.

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