Map Collecting Practices - Advances in Cartography and GIScience - page 144

amongst collectors takes place. The CCS newsletter Sheetlines emphasises
the detail of the pastime, not the the social context of members participa-
tion. Its style reflects the membership: packed with detail, and almost cut-
price in comparison to lavish antiquarian publications. Lists and research
articles predominate.
6.4 Focused masculine collecting
CCS comprises an altogether more stereotypically male set of activities
and discourses. For most members beauty is less important than investiga-
tion, listing matters and serious research predominates over wider markers
of cultural taste. Most members rely upon Sheetlines , or online discussion
groups for their social contact (Jarvis 2004). Only a small percentage
regularly attend meetings and CCS surveys suggest over half rarely attend.
This rather more asocial focus is a reflection of the membership profile:
the overwhelming majority of CCS members have always been male: there
has never been more than around 15% female membership. It is men that
turn up to CCS meetings, write almost all the articles, and rifle through the
boxes of One Inch OS maps at car boot sales. A wider range of people join
CCS: wealth is not a factor limiting access. So the world of everyday
mapping is gendered and classed differently from that of the antiquarian
collector, and with different social practices.
7- Conclusions
As a format of collectable artefacts maps are ambivalently linked with
their collectors' relationship to place. This study highlights significant dif-
ferences in the nature of antiquarian and everyday collecting that stem
from different formats, and from different performances of collecting
behaviour.
The values of antiquarian collecting are inherently conservative: authentic-
ity, verified historical rarity, beauty, and the display of taste by a largely
aging and wealthy group of collectors, who sometimes value their collec-
tions as investments. Only the very rich are now able to amass significant
numbers of antiquarian maps or atlases. Despite the impacts of globalization