Map collector David Rumsey—he of the eponymous website and Stanford map center—is the subject of a new documentary directed by Italian filmmaker Andrea Gatopolous. A Stranger Quest premieres at the Torino Film Festival later this month and is scheduled for a 2024 release. The trailer, above, doesn’t reveal much. [Kottke]
Category: Map Collecting
Estate Sale Map Turns Out to Be Rare 14th-Century Portolan
The Los Angeles Times has the story of a map that turned out to be far older and more valuable than anyone expected. Ann and Gordon Getty paid £56,600 for a portolan chart in 1993, restored it and put it on display in their home. After Ann died in 2020, Alex Clausen of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps paid $239,000 for it at the estate sale. The map was dated to 1500-1525, but Clausen suspected it was older and therefore even more valuable. Hundreds of hours of research and lab tests determined a new date: circa 1360, making it the oldest portolan chart in the U.S. and the fourth oldest portolan chart known overall. As for how much more valuable, Ruderman thinks it’s worth a lot more than $239,000: they’re listing it for $7.5 million. They’ve named it the Rex Tholomeus Portolan Chart, after the single human figure appearing on the map, and you can see the listing and read the 49-page catalogue (PDF).
Maps on Stamps
Except for a couple of posts here and there, I really haven’t focused on the phenomenon of maps on postage stamps. But it’s very much a thing, and has been for some time: the CartoPhilatelic Society has been around since 1955. And there are a lot of examples of stamps with maps on them: the Society’s checklist has 41,300 entries, and there are 17,906 examples on the searchable database that is Gilad’s Maps on Stamps. Strange Maps gives the subject a proper writeup, grouping stamps by several themes.
Collection Donated to Leiden University Libraries
Two private collectors, John Steegh and Harrie Teunissen, have donated their collection of some 17,000 maps and 2,300 atlases and travel guides, mostly focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries, to Leiden University Libraries (linked page in Dutch).
Seymour Schwartz, 1928-2020
Seymour I. Schwartz was known to map aficionados as a collector, cartographic historian and author of five books on the history of cartography (The Mismapping of America and Putting “America” on the Map, among others1). He donated his collection to the University of Virginia in 2008; a smaller tranche, regional in focus, went to the University of Rochester in 2010.
But maps were his side gig, a hobby his wife got him into to give him something else to do. Schwartz was a renowned surgeon with a long and distinguished career, a professor of medicine and the co-author of what became the standard textbook on surgery. He died Friday at the age of 92. Additional coverage: Associated Press, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.
Previously: Seymour Schwartz at 90; Seymour Schwartz at 90.
Philadelphia Print Shop Reopening This Fall Under New Management
The Philadelphia Print Shop (not to be confused with the Denver-based Philadelphia Print Shop West), an antique prints, rare books and maps dealer that closed last December, is back in business. David Mackey has bought the business from Don Cresswell, who founded it in 1982, and is relocating it from Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighbourhood to nearby Wayne. A “COVID-style grand opening” is planned for October. [WMS]
Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography
The March 2020 issue (PDF) of Calafia, the journal of the California Map Society, has as its theme the mapping of space. It also has something from me in it: my review of the third edition of Nick Kanas’s Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography. An excerpt:
It’s important to remember a book’s target audience—its imagined ideal reader. In the case of Star Maps this is Kanas’s younger self, who came to map collecting via his lifelong interest in amateur astronomy. “I was frustrated that there was not a single book on celestial cartography that could inform me about the various aspects of my collecting,” he writes in the preface to the first edition. “What I needed was a book that not only was a primer for the collector but also had sufficient reference detail to allow me to identify and understand my maps. Nothing like this appeared, so I decided to write such a book some day” (p. xxi). In other words, for a compendium this is a surprisingly personal book, one that reflects his own journey into the subject and, presumably, his interests as a collector.
I’ll post the full review on The Map Room once I’ve checked my draft against the published copy. In the meantime, check out the issue of Calafia (PDF) in which it appears. (Update, 24 Jun 2020: Here it is.)
Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography
3rd edition
by Nick Kanas
Springer Praxis, Sept 2019
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Apple Books | Bookshop
2020 Miami Map Fair Cancelled
The 2020 Miami International Map Fair, originally scheduled for 13-15 March, has been cancelled. While they don’t blame the COVID-19 outbreak explicitly, it’s of a kind with many other recent event cancellations.
P. J. Mode Interviewed
JSTOR Daily interviews P. J. Mode, the map collector (and donor) behind Cornell University Library’s P. J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography. Mode began collecting maps in 1980, and proceeded in the usual manner until stumbling across what would become his niche.
When I was looking at those maps in dealers’ shops or catalogs, I often saw other maps that I thought were fun and interesting. I didn’t quite understand them all—unusual maps, strange maps of different kinds. The kind of maps that dealers refer to as “cartographic curiosities” (which basically means, “This doesn’t fit into one of my pigeon-holes…”). These were kind of fun and interesting, and they were inexpensive so, on a lark, I would buy them when I saw them and then I would kind of try to figure out what they were.
[AGS]
Previously: Persuasive Cartography; Another Look at Persuasive Cartography; Persuasive Cartography Collection Expands.
William Reese, 1955-2018
New Haven rare book dealer William Reese died earlier this month at the age of 62; he’d been suffering from prostate cancer. Reese, who founded his eponymous company in 1975, is a familiar name to map collectors; both his first significant sale and his last sale, according to the New York Times obituary, were cartographic in nature. [Tony Campbell]
Previously: Intact Atlas, Asking 165 Large; Reese Donates $100K to Yale for Map Digitization; Connecticut Public Radio on Forbes Smiley Sentence.
For Sale: Original Copy of Chicago Gangland Map
Much is being made of the sale by Daniel Crouch Rare Books of an original copy of a pictorial map of Prohibition-era Chicago. Published in 1931, A Map of Chicago’s Gangland from Authentic Sources featured the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and other episodes from Chicago’s gang wars and numerous other scenes of rum-running, police corruption and gang activity. So naturally the authorities did their best to suppress the map. The map will be on display at the London Map Fair this weekend; Daniel Crouch is asking £20,000 for it. But if you don’t have that kind of money, other copies do exist in libraries, such as Chicago’s Newberry Library, which I believe has sold facsimile reprints of the map. See coverage from Atlas Obscura, CBS Chicago and the Daily Mail. [Tony Campbell]
Peggy Osher, 1929-2018
Peggy Osher died Tuesday at the age of 88, the Portland Press-Herald reports. She had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. She and her husband, the cardiologist Dr. Harold Osher, who survives her, donated their sizeable map collection to the University of Southern Maine in 1989 and advocated the creation of a dedicated map library; the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education opened in October 1994. Her obituary notes that in 1974 she convinced her husband to buy a map on a trip to London—a decision that escalated, as it often does. The Osher family was profiled in 2011 by Maine magazine. [WMS]
The Miami Map Fair at 25
Coming this weekend, as it does every first weekend in February: the Miami International Map Fair, now in its 25th year. It’s marking that milestone without its co-founder, Marcia Kanner, who died last June at the age of 82. [WMS]
A Beginner’s Guide to Map Collecting
Two things about CityGuide’s beginner’s guide to map collecting. One, it’s not so much for beginners as written by a beginner; the author, Chris Sharp, is recounting his own journey into map collecting. Which brings me to the other thing: what kind of map collecting he’s talking about, which is to say, the “collecting all the OS Landranger maps” kind of map collecting, not the “paying exorbitant sums for a rare and ancient map that might be a forgery or sliced out of a volume from a library’s rare books collection” kind of map collecting. I don’t want to invoke Dunning-Kruger here, but I’m not sure he knows how much more there is out there. I suspect that he’s going to find out. Not being British myself, I don’t know to what extent Ordnance Survey maps are the gateway drug to a serious map collecting jones, but I have my suspicions. [WMS]
San Francisco Map Fair
A new map fair is starting up in California. The first San Francisco Map Fair will take place from 15 to 17 September 2017 at the Regency Center. It’s sponsored by the History in Your Hands Foundation, with lectures sponsored by the California Map Society. [WMS]