Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
ELEVATION
n .: the height of a landform above sea level; altitude
More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
—ELIZABETH BISHOP
L owther Lodge, a bountifully gabled and chimneyed Queen Anne town house just south
ofLondon'sKensingtonGardens,hasbeenhomeforthelastcenturytoBritain'sRoyalGeo-
graphical Society. This is the crew that sent Speke and Burton up the Nile and Scott and
Shackleton to the South Pole. During the age of empire, whenever a doughty, broadly mus-
tached Briton returned to London from some manly adventure abroad, he would address his
fellow explorers there and they would pass around his souvenirs, squinting appreciatively
at them through their monocles. Henry Morton Stanley bequeathed them the pith helmet he
was wearing when he found Livingstone. They have Charles Darwin's pocket sextant and
Edmund Hillary's oxygen canisters.
Normally the society's headquarters is closed to nonmembers, but today the halls are
packed. For the last three years, the Royal Geographical Society has played host to the Lon-
don Map Fair, Europe's largest event for buying and selling antique maps. Thirty-five deal-
ers are exhibiting their cartographic wares here, from both sides of the English Channel and
both sides of the Atlantic: Athens, Berlin, New York, San Diego, Rome. The squeaky blond
floorboards of the Victorian building are lined with card tables and makeshift booths, all
covered with thousands and thousands of Mylar-sheathed maps. The most colorful samples
hang from walls in no particular order: Australia continental-drifting into West Africa, the
Falklands spotted off the coast of France.
The once obscure pastime of map collecting has grown, over the last thirty years or so,
into a big, big business. This weekend's sales are expected to top £750,000, a record for
the fair. “Today, there are more map societies than there were map collectors when I started
out,” the Chicago map dealer Ken Nebenzahl has said. Certainly the shoppers here today
are a diverse bunch. Many are examples of the stereotypical private collector: middle-aged,
male, bespectacled, quiet, perhaps abit ofan“anorak,” tousethe Brit slang term foraniche
obsessive. (It's a sunny June day, so the anoraks, not wearing their eponymous piece of out-
erwear, are slightly harder to spot.) But there's also the shaved-headed hipster with an Eels
T-shirt and a huge brown poodle on a leash, not to mention the glamorous French woman
with pearls, a Louis Vuitton handbag, and a baby in a stroller, flipping through a New York
dealer's map stacks. I mentally tag the first as a curiosity seeker (this year's fair has been
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