map dealers – The Map Room

The Truth About Harry Beck: A Play About the Tube Map’s Creator

Published on 3 October 20243 October 2024 by Jonathan Crowe

Cover image from The Truth About Harry Beck, a play now on at the London Transport Museum. It’s an outline cutout image of Beck with the London Underground map in the back.

The Truth About Harry Beck, a play about the designer of London’s iconic Tube map, is at the London Transport Museum’s Cubic Theatre through January. Writer and director Andy Burden spent years working on the play. So far reviews have been mostly positive: Theatre Vibe’s Lizzie Loveridge found it “charming,” Everything Theatre “warm,” and Broadway World calls it “as reassuring as a comfy pair of slippers,” whereas The Arts Desk’s take is more mixed and The Standard dismisses it as “chock-full of mugging, direct address and chuntering dimwittery.” BBC News coverage.

Not coincidentally, it’s the 50th anniversary of Beck’s death. London map dealer The Map House has an exhibition to mark the anniversary: Mapping the Tube: 1863-2023. They’re a map dealer so the displays are for sale, including a draft copy of the map and one of only five remaining first-edition Tube map posters. Runs from 25 October to 30 November, free admission.

Kenneth Nebenzahl, 1927-2020

Published on 10 February 202010 February 2020 by Jonathan Crowe

Antiquarian map and rare book dealer Kenneth Nebenzahl died last month at the age of 92, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. The author of numerous book about antique maps and map history, most recently (as far as I can tell) Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond: 2,000 Years of Exploring the East (Phaidon, 2011), Nebenzahl also founded the Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography, in memory of his son; several of said lecture series have been published by the University of Chicago Press. His obituary. [Tony Campbell]

William Reese, 1955-2018

Published on 18 June 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

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.

Map Dealer Carole Spack Profiled

Published on 2 May 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

Last month the MetroWest Daily News profiled Framington, MA map dealer Carole Spack of Original Antique Maps, whose path to the business sounds rather familiar: “Six years ago, she bought several 150-year-old maps of Worcester County showing towns that were later submerged when the area was flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir, where she often hikes. Intrigued by their detailed evocation of a vanished time, Spack has since acquired 2,000 rare maps ranging from Colonial America to rural China all the way to hand-colored engravings of the ‘Geography of the Heavens’ by an obscure early-19th century astronomer.” [WMS]

‘I Have Been Paid to Do a Hobby’

Published on 30 May 20162 June 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

On 12 May map dealer Jonathan Potter gave a talk for the Maps and Society lectures at the Warburg Institute. A précis of that talk, “A Map Dealer’s Reflections on the Last Forty-Five Years,” is now available online. [WMS]

Encountering Map Dealers: Hudson, Arader

Published on 30 March 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Atlas Obscura profiles map collector and dealer Murray Hudson. “Today, Murray Hudson owns what is said to be the largest private collection of for-sale antique maps, prints and globes in the world. His collection, held in Halls, Tennessee, contains, in addition to some 24,000 maps, over 6700 books, 2690 prints, and 760 globes.”

Last month the Wall Street Journal’s Ralph Gardner, Jr. reported on his visit to the Arader Galleries; it’s very much a first-time-experience kind of narrative that is noteworthy for the complete absence of Graham Arader (except in the comments), whose presence usually looms quite large in stories about map collecting. [via]