Maps are living reminders of our changing sense of place. Though new worlds are discovered and borders change, maps tell us not so much about what the world looks like at any given time as they do about how we look at the world. “Treasured Maps,” an exhibition that opens tomorrow at the New York Public Library, brings a number of those viewpoints into clear and competing focus.

Curated by Alice Hudson, chief of the library’s map division, the show comprises approximately 80 works from the 17th century to the present, all culled from the library’s collection of some 500,000 maps and 20,000 atlases. These maps – some humdrum, some hypnotic, many works of art – are densely detailed and informative. They also say a lot about how we relate to our surroundings.

These maps brought back memories of the Americentric maps that hung over the chalkboards in my own grade-school classrooms, as well as the mix of nationalism and confusion they inspired. Growing up in the middle of Kansas, it took me quite a while to question why the United States – and my hometown – was at the exact center of the world. I imagine it was the pride I took in my own birthplace that kept me from questioning why Asia was cut in half, or why Japan, which was supposedly part of the Far East, looked like a group of islands west of Hawaii.

Maps must emphasize some things at the expense of others. The world, in order to be seen, must be made smaller, more compact: Simplification becomes a matter of reduction. What is fascinating about the works in “Treasured Maps” is what is put in and what is left out. The best works, which are generally older, are in the first half of the exhibition, but what the last half of the show – devoted to maps of New York City – lacks in quality is made up for by location, location, location.

The exhibition begins with the section “Ways of Looking at the World.” In it are gorgeous 17th- and 18th-century star charts and heliocentric, geocentric, and hemispheric engravings from atlases by Andreas Cellarius, Covens & Mortier, and John Seller. I was particularly struck by the six small chronological lithos from Edward Quin’s 1857 atlas, in which we are presented with a God’s-eye view of the changing world. Enveloped by blackness, the earth is at once an island surrounded by surf and a planet surrounded by clouds. Quin’s beautiful series begins with “Eden BC 2348, The Deluge,” and the world gets gradually larger until we end with “AD 1, The Roman Empire in the Augustan Age.”

We also see Edmund Halley’s “A New & Correct Sea Chart of the Whole World Shewing the Variation of Ye Compass …” (1705). It is supposedly the very first map or scientific paper to use the arrow as a symbol of direction.

Often, what goes on around the continents in the show’s maps and cartouches is much more interesting than what goes on within their borders. Extremely elaborate works, such as the “1660’s Sea Atlases” by Pieter Goos, Willem Blaeu’s “The Holy Land” (1629), and “A New Mapp of the World” (1686) by Robert Greene, give us gold leaf and exquisite color, cherubs, billowing clouds, raging seas, and strange monsters, or personifications of the four winds, the four seasons, and the four stages of life.

Greene’s double-hemisphere “Mapp,” which shows California as a distinct island, is divided into four sections: America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Each has a vignette in which local animals and an Italianate family dressed in peculiar native dress frolic about as if on a stage. In Anthony Jacobsz’s engraving on vellum “Western Hemisphere Nautical Chart” (1650), beautiful land and sea creatures are scattered about the entire American continent, and exotic families cling together like clusters of islands. They hang on the map like the shields (those of the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottomans, France, and Spain) which designate ownership.

Emmanual Bowen’s “Bowles’s New One-sheet Map of Africa …” (c. 1813) divides the continent into areas such as the “Tooth Coast,” “Grain Coast,” “Gold Coast,” and “Slave Coast.” Most of the unexplored interior of Africa is left blank, and the Sahara, like an ocean, is a swath of soothing turquoise green. Nicholas Visscher’s 17th-century “Territory of Vienna During the Turkish/Christian Wars” gives us miniscule details such as trees and castles, all shimmering in a hilly, green field that rolls like a seascape.

One of the great maps is Johannes Baptist Homann’s “Asia” (c. 1737-44). At the bottom left, a rich engraving reminiscent of Rembrandt and Delacroix includes a Ming vase, an elephant genuflecting to the Holy Roman Emperor, and a South Seas nude reclining like a Titian odalisque.

Other maps illustrate bird’s-eye views of places that have changed tremendously since. Louis Bretez’s “Tuileries and Louvre” (1740) is crisp, detailed, and dignified, almost Germanic in feel, with each building and tree delineated. The sense of change, not only of our landscape but also of our relationship to it, is what is so intriguing about many of the New York maps on view in the exhibition.

There are views of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Central Park, the Upper West Side, and of the city’s waterways. For many, New Yorkers and tourists alike, this will be the most engaging part of the exhibition. New Yorkers certainly are not unfamiliar with the sense of being at the center of the world. We do not need Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover “A View of the World from Ninth Avenue” – in which, looking west, all that can be seen on the map of the world is the Hudson River, hints of the desolate Midwest, the Pacific Ocean, and Asia – to be reminded of where we are and of how we think of ourselves.

Until April 9, 2006 (Fifth Avenue, at 42nd Street, 212-930-0587).