Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [43]
Today, collectors might be the only people who can look at a map and still see the heroism, the sacrifice—sometimes the lifeblood—that went into the drawing of its contours. There’s no better place than the Royal Geographical Society to consider the human face of mapmaking. As I stand in the society’s main hall, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Lord Curzon, Asian explorer and viceroy of India, considers me coolly from its post above the great marble fireplace. Behind me is an intricate scale model of the Discovery, one of the last three-masted wooden ships ever built in Britain, which in 1901 took Scott and Shackleton to Antarctica, a continent from which, in the end, neither would return alive. To my right is an odd oil painting of Richard Francis Burton, spotlit in the dark, huddled under a blanket on a dirt floor. The setting might be a Mecca alley or a prison cell, but either way, as Burton stares warily out at the viewer, he gives the impression that he’d rather be somewhere else entirely.
There’s a funny disconnect between the rugged adventurers painted in oils here and the meek little men walking through the halls and poking through their maps. But then I reconsider: is the divide really all that wide? All the sweaty tropical valor of the Indian surveys was performed in the service of trigonometry, of all things—it’s hard to get nerdier than that. Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian. The great mariners of the Age of Exploration, for all their naval derring-do, never would have left home if they hadn’t been map geeks as well: Columbus etched maps in his brother’s Lisbon print shop (“God had endowed me with ingenuity and manual skill in designing spheres, and inscribing upon them in the proper places cities, rivers, and mountains, isles, and ports,” he once wrote the king of Spain), and Vespucci was a map collector from his youth. We think of trail-blazing as a tough, brawny pursuit, but there’s something solitary and nerdish at the heart of it. What is exploration if not the urge to go somewhere where there’s no one else around—where no one, in fact, has ever been?
On the wall next to Lord Curzon, Mindy points out a photograph of the current president of the Royal Geographical Society. “Is that a joke?” she asks incredulously. It’s none other than Monty Python’s Michael Palin—who, I explain to Mindy, has become a respected globetrotter and travel documentarian in recent years. He’s so influential that the travel industry speaks of a “Palin effect,” a sudden influx of tourists pouring into any destination he features on his TV programs. I guess that seals the deal regarding the nerd/explorer overlap: if a geek icon like Monty Python can take over the Royal Geographical Society, then exploration isn’t just for jocks and probably never was. But Mindy can’t stop laughing at the idea of “K-K-K-Ken” from A Fish Called Wanda having been placed in charge of British geography. I guess I can see her point; it would be like an Englishman coming to the United States only to find that William Shatner runs NASA now.
The now-valuable maps of the Age of Discovery made the world a much bigger place, but the world of map collecting itself is small. “It is a tiny subculture,” says the New York dealer Henry Taliaferro. “I’m an expert in rare maps, but saying you’re the greatest expert in rare maps is like saying you’re the best ballet dancer in Galveston, Texas.” It’s an insular, incestuous world where everyone knows everyone else. Dealers sell maps to collectors but might buy them back later when a collector moves on or decides to refine his or her collection, and then sell them again to someone else. (Many of the best maps on display here today are on consignment from private collectors looking to sell.) Dealers sell to museums and libraries