• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 916 0

a wealthy London publisher sent to prison in 2009 for scalpeling hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of maps and illustrations out of rare books in London and Oxford libraries. He had no plans to resell, he told the court—he was just deeply attached to his collection and couldn’t help wanting to improve it. He testified that, on his wedding night, he even kept his new bride waiting in bed while he polished the covers of his beloved rare books. Perhaps she misunderstood when he warned her he was into “leather binding.”

The world’s most distinguished collectors of maps may keep their treasures very private, but luckily for me there’s a second tier filling out map societies around the world: the garrulous amateur enthusiasts. Leonard Rothman, a longtime Annapolis gynecologist who retired to California a decade ago, is one of them. “I love to expound,” he says as he welcomes me into his thirty-first-floor condo in San Francisco’s posh Russian Hill neighborhood. “I’m not allowed to mention maps when we have people over. I get in trouble.” In fact, he can’t help talking about every map we pass as we walk across the Persian rugs in his entry-way. The vignette on this John Tallis map is supposed to be a giraffe, but clearly the engraver was working from vague secondhand descriptions—it looks more like a kangaroo with a bad case of acne. The outline color on that map—rust and teal, like two-strip Technicolor—is a dead giveaway as to its German origins, and you can even tell how old it is by how the pigments have oxidized. A cabinet holds part of a collection of almost one hundred thirteen-inch globes. Most are antiques, but one is from the 1998 World Cup and plays the anthem of each competing nation when you press its corresponding flag.

“I’ve never seen that before,” says Phil Simon, pointing at a strangely elliptical globe on a lower shelf. Phil, a retired United pilot, is the president of the California Map Society and has come with me to take a look at his friend’s collection. In his sixties, he’s a grandfatherly man with bushy black eyebrows and a penchant for sweater-vests.

Leonard is delighted to have the oddity noticed. “You know what that is? It’s an ostrich egg!”

“That’s a beauty! Who made it?”

“Who made it? The ostrich made it.”

We sit on Leonard’s terrace, which gives us a breathtaking three-hundred-degree view of San Francisco on a cloudless day, from the Golden Gate Bridge in the northwest all the way around to the Bay Bridge eastward. We’re on top of the tallest building on one of the city’s highest hills, which might make us the uppermost people in the city right now. (I can’t tell if we’re quite higher than the tip of the Trans-america Pyramid or not.) When I mention this to Leonard, he points out that there’s actually a penthouse above us; his upstairs neighbor is no less than George Shultz, longtime secretary of state under Reagan. “And his deck keeps leaking onto our ceiling!” he complains.

Yes, this is what even the middle tier of serious map collecting looks like: an elite world where the most serious annoyances are the leaky hot tubs of former Cabinet officials. There may still be entry-level maps around, but, by and large, soaring prices have made this a hobby for the affluent. But Phil and Leonard still get moony when they talk about the real elite West Coast collectors, the David Rumseys* and the Henry Wendts. “Leonard and I will never amass a collection like Wendt’s,” sighs Phil. “This man is extremely wealthy. One of his maps, there’s only five of them in the world.”

Maps have been luxury items ever since the Renaissance, when there are the first records of people collecting them. It was fashionable at the time for wealthy Dutch burghers, German nobles, and Italian merchants alike to keep “cabinets of curiosities”—little home museums full of rarities.† Back then, the idea of owning things and looking at them as a pastime was so novel that you weren’t necessarily a collector of anything specific, like coins or seashells or porcelain. You were just a collector, full stop. You wanted it all, and