Rodney Shirley was educated at Stowe and at the Universities of Cambridge (MA) and Harvard (MBA). His main career has been in business but for many years he has been a collector and historian of early maps and associated decorative titlepages. He is past president and a current council member of the International Map Collectors' Society. His book The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps 1472-1700 is a standard reference work, as are his two books on the early maps of the British Isles. More recently, in 2004, he published a detailed descriptive work Maps in the Atlases of the British Library c. 800 AD – 1800. Rodney lives in Buckingham and is married with three grown-up children.