Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [44]
But that cozy world is changing. “The one thing that’s transformed everything is the Internet,” says Taliaferro’s partner, Paul Cohen. “Before, the dealers had special knowledge.” In fact, many dealers could make a living as trusted tastemakers, shepherding a small but elite clientele through the confusing world of copperplates and cartouches. Today the balance of power has swung to the collector: I can go online and comparison-shop the catalogs of dozens of antiquarians. There are now price guides and standardized condition guides. It’s hard to see this wider spread of information as a problem, but for the dealers, accustomed to their position as gatekeepers of all map lore, it’s been a bitter pill to swallow. “Collectors used to be loyal,” sighs Cohen.
That exclusivity made the rare-map world one of cliquish secrecy, and old habits die hard, as I learn every time I tell someone in the trade that I’m working on a book about maps. Stories become as vague as the South American coastline on a Sebastian Münster map; lips tighten into a single etched line of latitude. Dealers working with wealthy collectors don’t want rival sellers finding out about their golden-egg-laying clients and vice versa. Collectors don’t want their personal list of Holy Grails to be widely known, for fear they’ll be quoted higher prices when one comes up for sale. They don’t even want you to know what they already own, and maybe I wouldn’t either, if I had pieces of vellum that each cost more than my first house hanging in my den. Especially if they weren’t all insured. “It’s almost like the confidential relationship between a psychiatrist and a patient,” Cohen explains in all seriousness. “I’m limited in what I can say, like someone who’s been indicted of a crime.”
This reticence surprises me at first; in my experience, the main conversational problem with hobbyists is getting them to shut up about their odd pastime. But map knowledge has always been guarded with great secrecy. In 1504, King Manuel I of Portugal declared that anyone leaving his kingdom with a single Portuguese map would receive the death penalty. He did so for the same reason that map dealers keep mum about their clients today: to protect a trade monopoly. The geopolitical equivalent of the space race at that time was a “spice race” for Asian cinnamon, pepper, and nutmeg, and Vasco da Gama had just given Portugal a crucial edge by charting a sea route to India. Keeping Spain in the dark about his discoveries was a crucial matter of national security. Likewise, until the dawn of glasnost in 1988, the KGB was charged with making sure that essentially every detail of every publicly available map of the Soviet Union was wrong. “Almost everything was changed,” said chief mapmaker Viktor Yashchenko. “On the tourist map of Moscow, only the contours of the capital are accurate.” Visitors to the city would invariably rely upon the CIA’s Moscow map, the only one that actually got the streets right.
You might assume that falsified maps are a Cold War relic that could never survive in the age of satellite photography, but you’d be wrong. For most of the decade my family lived in Seoul, we lived less than a mile from Yongsan Garrison, the largest U.S. military installation on the Korean Peninsula. Yongsan is a bustling miniature city, home to more than seven thousand troops stationed in Seoul. My family wasn’t military, but lots of my friends’ parents were, and my mom worked at the high school there, so I spent more time on that post than many GIs did. Today, when I look at maps of Yongsan on Google Earth, little has changed—I can see the barracks, the bowling alley, the chapel where I played in my sixth-grade