Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [39]
I walk up to the Blaeu and study its hemispheres intently, as if somewhere in their crowded text hides the secret of why anyone would pay $150,000 for an old map. I know the obvious answer—because it’s rare, and they’re not making new seventeenth-century maps anymore—but I still can’t get my head around this particular variety of map love. I grew up loving maps for their completeness, their accuracy, their confident sense of order—all qualities that are conspicuously missing in these antiques.
A one-of-a-kind Italian copy of Willem Blaeu’s famous world map, making it a $150,000 item. Check out “Terra Australis” in the lower right, nonexistent but nevertheless drawn large enough to dwarf Eurasia and Africa combined.
“Why old maps?” I ask Jonathan Potter, the veteran London map dealer who is running the fair’s largest setup. Potter recently announced that he was retiring from the map game and has put his prodigious collection, which has been valued at more than $6 million, up for sale. He laughs, as if he’s been ambushed by a question too big to answer. “Well, they combine all sorts of facets of art, history, scarcity, antiquity, intrinsic interest—it’s all in one. There aren’t many things that have all of that.”
The antiquity and historical importance of these maps are certainly behind much of their popularity. Map collectors tend to specialize in a particular niche: they collect only maps of Australia, say, or Scandinavia or Texas. And they don’t just accumulate like a man with a giant ball of string in his attic; they become scholarly authorities on their niche, intently studying the period and the region the maps come from. The definitive book on niggly cartographic subjects is most often written not by a curator or an academic but by some enthusiastic amateur. Map collectors are history buffs, in other words, and often ones with deep pockets. The world’s most valuable maps aren’t necessarily the beautiful ones but rather the ones that, like the Library of Congress’s $10 million Waldseemüller map, changed history in some way. In February 2010, a Maine auction house sold a map of the siege of Yorktown for $1.15 million, a record price for a map at auction. The map is creased, somewhat roughly sketched, and not particularly colorful—but that doesn’t matter much when you find out it was George Washington’s personal copy of his most crucial victory.
But it’s not just cold matters of historical fact that give old maps their allure. Most maps on the market are, when you think about it, of comparatively recent vintage. Almost none are more than five hundred years old—a mere blip in the march of time. Yet old maps come to us with an aura of ancient mystery and romance wildly out of proportion to their actual age. Their mottled parchment is the tawny color of sandstone and mummy linen. Their novel and faintly untrust-worthy coastlines seem to have arrived from another world altogether: Atlantis, maybe, or ancient Mu. They’re not just artifacts; they are relics. National Geographic recently unveiled an “earth-toned” version of its standard world map, based on the faded palette of old sea charts. Envisioned as a bit of a novelty, it now outsells the familiar schoolroom-blue version. The message is clear: we count on our maps to be up to the minute, but we like them to seem venerable as well.
Studying the six-figure Blaeu world map