A blog about antique map collecting.

A nice little overview of the work of the modern cartographer and cartography in the UK’s Independent can be read here.

“You have to create symbols that work with each other. There’s a hierarchy of information for each map and you have to make sure the important things stand out,” he adds. This involves communicating well with clients.

After 5 years of testing the 15th Century Vinland Map of America, a Danish expert has declared the map to be genuine.

Controversy has swirled around the map since it came to light in the 1950s, many scholars suspecting it was a hoax meant to prove that Vikings were the first Europeans to land in North America — a claim confirmed by a 1960 archaeological find.

Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, said his team carried out studies of the ink, writing, wormholes and parchment of the map, which is housed at Yale University in the United States. Among the team’s conclusions:

…claims the ink was too recent because it contained a substance called anatase titanium dioxide could be rejected because medieval maps have been found with the same substance, which probably came from sand used to dry wet ink.

Read the full article here.

Well-known antique map collector Jonathan Potter is retiring, and plans to sell off many of the antique maps in his catalog.

Antique maps for sale by Potter include:

• A 400-year-old map depicting Iceland entitled Islandia, published by Abraham Ortelius in the 16th Century for approx. $15,000 USD
• A globe by Mattaeus Greuter, produced in 1632 and priced at $180,000 USD (approx.)
• A double-hemisphere map of the world by John Speed
• An antique map of the moon, prepared in the 1720s by astronomer, geographer, mathematician and physicist, Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr for $3,000 USD (approx.)

Potter first became interested in antique maps 40 years ago, wandering the markets of London’s Portobello Road. Potter went on to establish his own gallery and amassed one of the largest collections of antique maps in the world, all of which are now for sale. The entire map collection is valued somewhere around $6 million USD.

Source: 400-year-old map collection for sale

The Texas Map Society’s Annual Spring Meeting will be held Friday thru Sunday, April 3-5, 2009 in San Antonio Texas.

This year’s focus is on Spanish Colonial Mapping and their Map Makers:

The three days will include presentations by a group of exceptional scholars focusing on “Spanish Colonial Mapping and Map Makers,” and an outstanding lineup of tours, dinners and events in and around one of Texas’ most famous tourist destinations.

Presenters include Richard Kagan, of John Hopkins University, our Keynote Speaker, as well as John Hébert of the Library of Congress, David Buisseret, formerly at the University of Texas at Arlington, Ricardo Padrón, at the University of Virginia, John Miller Morris of the University of Texas at San Antonio, John Wheat of the Center for American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and Bruce Winders, Curator and Historian of the Alamo.

Tours include the Project Urban Segment of the San Antonio River (60 million dollar improvement project), P2 Energy Solutions for digital mapping, and the Nelson Rockefeller Center for Latin American Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art.

Via: MapHist

The Brooklyn Rail has an essay by Trevor Paglen entitled “Experimental Geography: From cultural production to the production of space“.

In his article, Paglen notes several interesting thoughts:

When most people think about geography, they think about maps. Lots of maps. Maps with state capitals and national territories, maps showing mountains and rivers, forests and lakes, or maps showing population distributions and migration patterns. And indeed, that isn’t a wholly inaccurate idea of what the field is all about. It is true that modern geography and mapmaking were once inseparable.

Paglen also observes the historically indispensable use of map making as “a tool for imperial expansion”. 

Renaissance geographers like Henricus Martellus Germanus and Pedro Reinel, having rediscovered Greek texts on geography (most importantly Ptolemy’s Geography), put the ancient knowledge to work in the service of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Martellus’s maps from the late 15th Century updated the old Greek cartographic projections to include Marco Polo’s explorations of the East as well as Portuguese forays along the African coast. Reinel’s portolan maps are some of the oldest modern nautical charts.

Today, notes Paglen, a “cartographic renaissence” is taking place with the common everyday use of tools such as Google Earth or Mapquest:

we use online mapping applications to get directions to unfamiliar addresses and to virtually “explore” the globe with the aid of publicly available satellite imagery. Consumer-available global positioning systems (GPS) have made latitude and longitude coordinates a part of the cultural vernacular.

Academia, too, has been seized by the new powers of mapmaking: geographical information systems (GIS) have become a new lingua franca for collecting, collating, and representing data in fields as diverse as archaeology, biology, climatology, demography, epidemiology, and all the way to zoology.

Paglen goes on to postulate that although “geography and cartography have common intellectual and practical ancestors”, “they can suggest very different ways of seeing and understanding the world” and explains that the field of geography is no longer simply synonymous with cartography or even GIS and the observation of spaces, but has everything to do with the creation of spaces as well.

A recent article in the Financial Times of London delves into the possible motivations of those who steal rare books, antique maps and manuscripts. “What drives people to steal precious books“, by Tim Richardson, examines the exploits of some recent map thieves, such as E. Forbes Smiley and Farhad Hakimzadeh.

The article points out that for libraries,

…such thefts can be extremely difficult to notice. Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, a police officer with 23 years’ experience, has for the past eight years headed the Metropolitan Police’s Art and Antiques Unit.

“Book theft is very hard to quantify because very often pages are cut and it’s not noticed for years,” says Rapley. “Often we come across pages from books [in hauls of recovered property] and we work back from there.”

There is a call for libraries to take particular security measures and for honest library users to be vigilant. The article also touches upon the problem of “insider theft”:

A more recent “trusted insider” case is also one of the most shocking. In February, David Slade, a respected Bristol-based dealer and former president of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association, was jailed for 28 months for stealing 68 books worth £230,000 from Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, who had engaged him in 2001 to catalogue part of the family collection at Ascott, Buckinghamshire.