Why, in an age of digital mapping, SatNavs and GPS, do people still collect maps on paper? What is their appeal, as technological developments render them obsolescent as navigational aids?
The Medici Map room in the Palazzo Vecchio
The crowds that throng the Royal Geographical Society for the London Map Fair each summer testify to healthy public interest in the subject. Established in 1980, it is the largest antique map fair in Europe, and brings together some 40 antiquarian map dealers from all over the world, as well as hundreds of visiting dealers, collectors, curators and map aficionados from all parts of the world.
Tim Bryars has been running the fair since 2001, and has an antique map shop in Cecil Court off St Martin’s Lane in central London. He is upbeat about the future of old maps. “If you look at books or newspapers,” he tells me, “if it is made of paper, its market is shrinking. This does not appear to be the case with maps.”
Tim Bryars at his Cecil Court shop
His co-organiser, Massimo de Martini, is the proprietor of the Altea Gallery in St George’s Street in central London, which has a large and impressive stock of original antique maps dating back several hundred years.
Both men affirm that there has been a steady growth in interest in recent years, fuelled in part by the success of the British Library’s 2010 exhibition Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art, which attracted more than a quarter of a million visitors.
Massimo de Martini at the Altea gallery
The Internet has boosted both the map trade and cartographic scholarship. In the past, comparing paper maps, scattered in libraries and private collections around the world, was almost impossible. Now most major collections are catalogued online, and many old maps are illustrated on dealers’ websites. The ability to purchase maps online also facilitates the building of themed collections: maps of a specific area, marine charts, astronomical maps, or even variant editions of the same map.
The International Map Collectors’ Society, founded in 1980, attracts academics, map dealers, libraries and museums, and of cartophiles: those “suffering from a potentially contagious disease called love of maps”. IMCoS publishes a quarterly journal and organises an annual conference – this October it will take place in Seoul, and be devoted to the topic “Peace on Maps in East Asia”.
Johann Baptist Homann’s map of the Americas (Nuremberg c.1740) shows the extent of the British colonies. The northwest coast is sketch and incomplete, reflecting the state of knowledge at the time. Credit: Tim Bryars
For many aficionados, maps are like any other form of collecting: a passion, or even a mania. Far from being an obstacle, the obsolescence of an object is almost a precondition to its becoming a collector’s item; witness the enduring popularity of vintage cars. This was the case long before the arrival of digital mapping. People have been collecting old maps for hundreds of years; almost as soon as the information contained in a map becomes superseded, it acquires a historical interest.
Among the treasures of the Royal Geographical Society’s collection is a stout folio edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, printed by Johannes Reger in Ulm, Bavaria, in 1486. Its embossed leather covers are fastened by metal clasps, and within, the hand colouring on the woodcut maps is as fresh as the day it was applied. Inside the front board, a bookplate reads: “William Morris, Kelmscott House.”
Ptolemy’s Geographia, Johannes Reger, Ulm, 1486. Copy once belonging to William Morris. Credit: Royal Geographical Society.
Like other collectibles, antique maps can also be an investment. They are a finite resource, and will therefore increase in value. Counter-intuitively, though, it is rarely the items that start out rare that end up being valuable. People take care of limited editions, so their rate of preservation is high; it is the commonplace mass products that get thrown away and thus, within a few generations, become extremely rare. Early copies of Phyllis Pearsall’s groundbreaking Geographer’s A–Z of London, for example, were cheap, and routinely discarded when a new edition came out. As a result, they are now extremely scarce, and fetch high prices.
Massimo inspects a new find
Unlike many other collectables, however, old maps are decorative, and can be hung on the walls of your home. One exhibitor told me that a lot of young people are buying facsimile maps to decorate their houses, and you can still find an elegant 18th or early 19th-century county map for well under £100.
But the appeal of old maps goes far beyond the collector’s addiction. “People like to go back to their roots,” Bryars tells me, “to see the development of mapping from day one.” Old maps trace the history of our understanding of the planet we inhabit, reflect the growth of our towns and cities, and chart changing frontiers. An atlas just 25 years old is a memorial to countries that no longer exist: the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia…
The Village Of Charing, &c: From Radulphus Aggas’s Map, Taken in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 1578. Reproduced in Antiquities of the City Of Westminster by John Thomas Smith, 1807. Credit: Mapco
There are now many online map resources for historians, researchers and fans of old maps. And rather than dousing collectors’ passion for paper, they actually ignite it.
Websites such as Mapco, Cassini Maps and Old-Maps.co.uk offer high-quality scans of 18th and 19th century maps of Britain for genealogists, students and historians, as does the Institute of Historical Research’s British History Online. Old Maps Online enables the user to make a geographical search of numerous online collections of historical maps. The National Library of Scotland allows users to view free high-resolution zoomable images of more than 48,000 maps of Scotland. The David Rumsey Map Collection has more than 50,000 maps online, mostly of North and South America, while the Broer Map Library offers 2,850 scans of 19th and 20th-century maps, including 1,300 historic images of 45 US states, enlargeable to high resolution using Zoomify.
But while the value of old maps to historians and genealogists does not depend on physical possession, actually owning and displaying an old county or parish map that shows the suburb where you lived when it was open fields still holds a strong allure. As Bryars points out, “They are not just touchable items – you can buy a piece of history.”
A History of the 20th Century in 100 Maps, by Tim Bryars and Tom Harper, will be published by the British Library in September, price £25
image credit: Steve Jurvetson (Palazzo Vecchio); portraits are the subjects’ own.