p. 17: I have already mentioned that there were no maps on board that were of any use to us, and that I had copied our only existing map out of Nansen’s book. Other than that volume and Kolchak’s The Ice of the Siberian Sea , we had no other relevant works. Although Lieutenant Brusilov had bought a small library for hundreds of rubles before our departure, it contained only novels, stories, and old journals—not a single book of any use to us except Nansen’s Farthest North . Nansen was our only guide, and provided everything we knew about Franz Josef Land…. Drawing all our knowledge from Nansen’s experiences, we treated his book like a precious treasure. I had reread it so often that I could cite entire passages from memory. [Albanov also mentions an English technical journal that had charts for the altitude of the sun and astronomy charts for the period (p. 18).]
David H. Stam's Anthologies of the Reading Experience