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Chapter 5

ELEVATION

n.: the height of a landform above sea level; altitude

More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.

—ELIZABETH BISHOP

Lowther Lodge, a bountifully gabled and chimneyed Queen Anne town house just south of London’s Kensington Gardens, has been home for the last century to Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. This is the crew that sent Speke and Burton up the Nile and Scott and Shackleton to the South Pole. During the age of empire, whenever a doughty, broadly mustached Briton returned to London from some manly adventure abroad, he would address his fellow explorers there and they would pass around his souvenirs, squinting appreciatively at them through their monocles. Henry Morton Stanley bequeathed them the pith helmet he was wearing when he found Livingstone. They have Charles Darwin’s pocket sextant and Edmund Hillary’s oxygen canisters.

Normally the society’s headquarters is closed to nonmembers, but today the halls are packed. For the last three years, the Royal Geographical Society has played host to the London Map Fair, Europe’s largest event for buying and selling antique maps. Thirty-five dealers are exhibiting their cartographic wares here, from both sides of the English Channel and both sides of the Atlantic: Athens, Berlin, New York, San Diego, Rome. The squeaky blond floorboards of the Victorian building are lined with card tables and makeshift booths, all covered with thousands and thousands of Mylar-sheathed maps. The most colorful samples hang from walls in no particular order: Australia continental-drifting into West Africa, the Falklands spotted off the coast of France.

The once obscure pastime of map collecting has grown, over the last thirty years or so, into a big, big business. This weekend’s sales are expected to top £750,000, a record for the fair. “Today, there are more map societies than there were map collectors when I started out,” the Chicago map dealer Ken Nebenzahl has said. Certainly the shoppers here today are a diverse bunch. Many are examples of the stereotypical private collector: middle-aged, male, bespectacled, quiet, perhaps a bit of an “anorak,” to use the Brit slang term for a niche obsessive. (It’s a sunny June day, so the anoraks, not wearing their eponymous piece of outerwear, are slightly harder to spot.) But there’s also the shaved-headed hipster with an Eels T-shirt and a huge brown poodle on a leash, not to mention the glamorous French woman with pearls, a Louis Vuitton handbag, and a baby in a stroller, flipping through a New York dealer’s map stacks. I mentally tag the first as a curiosity seeker (this year’s fair has been widely advertised to the general public) and the second as a representative of that recent addition to the map scene: the wealthy, noncognoscenti buyer. Some are poseurs who have hopped aboard the bandwagon now that maps are trendy antiques or possible investments; others are decorating a new condo and just think maps look pretty. (“Is that a 1584 Ortelius map of Burgundy? I’ll take three. Do you have it in blue?”) Map dealers often set up shop near tourist meccas, and they live or die by these impulse shoppers, who will pay exorbitant prices for even historically unremarkable maps as long as they’re handsomely matted and framed and match the sofa. Collectors, on the other hand, sniff at the nonaficionados: they don’t really care about maps, they just drive up prices.

But Ian Harvey, manning the International Map Collectors’ Society booth here, doesn’t blame them. “If you’re decorating, by and large, maps are cheaper than pictures,” he says. Unlike in the art world, map collectors can still find beautiful seventeenth- or eighteenth-century pieces for just hundreds of dollars—a steep rise from decades past but still entry level. In fact, the most attractive maps are sometimes the most affordable. They were popular, so they were widely printed and saved. “The rare ones are the scruffy little things,” says Harvey. “There are only four in the world, but they are ugly.” The