Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [50]
“So what’s the right thing to do with an old map?” I ask.
“Sell it back to a map dealer,” says Leonard. “Or give it to a friend who will hang it up.”
But I wonder how much longer those friends will be around. I saw map lovers of all ages in London, but when you strip away the serious from the merely curious, most collectors fall solidly into a watching-the-History-Channel-under-a-Slanket demographic: sixty and up. “It’s graying,” Paul Cohen told me. “You get fewer young collectors coming in.” Phil has worked hard to recruit younger members into the California Map Society, but with little success. “They join for a year and then don’t continue it.”
Maybe, I conjecture hopefully, new collectors will continue to take up maps in middle age. “There are no young collectors, period, in anything,” Ian Harvey of the International Map Collectors’ Society had told me. “When younger, one does silly things like attend to careers. Some people have children, don’t they? When I was at university, I was in the pub, not trawling down the Portobello Road looking for antique maps.”
But Phil isn’t so sanguine. “I think it will decline once this generation is gone,” he says sadly, as we exchange good-byes. “I saw it with airline pilots too.”
In London, on a whim, I bought my first antique map: a colorful 1850 John Tallis map of Ceylon, with five beautifully decorated vignettes full of ruined temples and palm trees in the corners. It’s small and not at all valuable, but I find myself often taking it out to look at. Today the map is wrong in nearly every important respect: Ceylon is now Sri Lanka, it has nine provinces rather than five, and Adam’s Peak—now known not to be the island’s highest point, as Tallis has it—no longer looms picturesquely above the capital city’s “Lake of Colombo,” which is now walled by cement high-rises. But, even so, I’d rather look at this map than any modern-day one.
Perhaps all map love is a form of nostalgia. As a kid in Korea, I obsessed over maps of the United States, since they represented the past I was missing. Map collectors just miss a different past: theirs is the nostalgia of the silent-filmgoer, the Civil War reenactor, the chess club fedora wearer. They’re nostalgic for a past so distant they don’t even remember it. I hope Phil is wrong about the extinction of map collecting. It depresses me to imagine galleries full of perfect little objects like this one winking out of existence one by one all over the globe, like Mayda, like the island of California, like the Mountains of Kong, all vanishing into the past.
Chapter 6
LEGEND
n.: an explanatory list of the symbols on a map
Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country, but for most
of us it is only an imaginary country.
—C. S. LEWIS
In September 1931, Austin Tappan Wright was driving east across the country, returning from a visit to California at the end of his summer break at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught corporate law. A few miles outside Las Vegas, New Mexico, he was killed in a tragic car accident, leaving behind a wife and four young children. Wright had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father, a prominent Greek scholar, was the dean of Harvard’s graduate school. He studied at Harvard and Oxford, practiced law in Boston, and then turned to teaching, at Berkeley and Penn. But only his family knew that for most of his forty-eight years, he had also lived somewhere