I am so aghast at this I have to keep reading just to see what else transpires, but (a) the author seems to think that a cartographer is someone who studies maps and (b) your work as a studier of maps means that you are a scholar, curator, and conservator like not a paper conservator, you’re a map conservator, and that (c) getting a job in the NYPL Map library is something your dad, who currently holds the job, can just give you and then (d) on top of all that, the main character, who is a purported cartographer with her own conservation tools in her lab, this person puts on DISH GLOVES to open up what she think is a priceless map. Dish gloves, I tell you. Like a gazillion times worse than cotton gloves which are already bad!!!

*please if I have fundamentally misunderstood the field of cartography or map history or map librarianship, I would welcome that information