Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
A one-of-a-kind Italian copy of Willem Blaeu's famous world map, making it a $150,000
item. Check out “Terra Australis” in the lower right, nonexistent but nevertheless drawn
large enough to dwarf Eurasia and Africa combined.
“Why old maps?” I ask Jonathan Potter, the veteran London map dealer who is running
the fair's largest setup. Potter recently announced that he was retiring from the map game
and has put his prodigious collection, which has been valued at more than $6 million, up
for sale. He laughs, as if he's been ambushed by a question too big to answer. “Well, they
combine all sorts of facets of art, history, scarcity, antiquity, intrinsic interest—it's all in
one. There aren't many things that have all of that.”
The antiquity and historical importance of these maps are certainly behind much of their
popularity. Map collectors tend to specialize in a particular niche: they collect only maps
of Australia, say, or Scandinavia or Texas. And they don't just
accumulate
like a man with
a giant ball of string in his attic; they become scholarly authorities on their niche, intently
studying the period and the region the maps come from. The definitive book on niggly car-
tographicsubjectsismostoftenwrittennotbyacuratororanacademicbutbysomeenthu-
siastic amateur. Map collectors are history buffs, in other words, and often ones with deep
pockets.Theworld'smostvaluablemapsaren'tnecessarilythebeautifulonesbutratherthe
ones that, like the Library of Congress's $10 million Waldseemüller map, changed history
in some way. In February 2010, a Maine auction house sold a map of the siege of York-
town for $1.15 million,
a record price
for a map at auction. The map is creased, somewhat
