Old Routemasters
Words: Virginia Blackburn Whether it’s an 18th-century representation of Surrey or an Elizabethan passage through to the Americas, old maps have strong currency SEVEN YEARS AGO, Jeffrey Sharpe was fl icking through a collection of old maps in an antique shop when one item in particular caught his eye. It was a very simple drawing of an [...]
Words: Virginia Blackburn
Whether it’s an 18th-century representation of Surrey or an Elizabethan passage through to the Americas, old maps have strong currency
SEVEN YEARS AGO, Jeffrey Sharpe was fl icking through a collection of old maps in an antique shop when one item in particular caught his eye. It was a very simple drawing of an unnamed city situated on Australia’s Swan River. It was up for sale for £90. Quite by chance, Sharpe knew the area of the world this map portrayed. He bought the map, promptly resold it for £1,000 and then watched it sell again in 2005 for £16,000. How come? What Jeffrey Sharpe had found was nothing less than the fi rst ever map of Perth, from a British Government document of 1829. Many people hope to come across a map leading them to a treasure trove: this map turned out to be the treasure itself.
But then the values of rare and important maps have been soaring in recent years. About a decade ago, minor atlases containing maps of English city centres would have cost a couple of hundred pounds; now they go for a couple of thousand. Maps of Eastern Europe were all but worthless until the collapse of the Iron Curtain; now maps of Russia and the rest of the old Soviet Bloc are very much in demand. "Map collecting refl ects the economics of a country," explains David Park, director of books and manuscripts at the auction house Bonhams.
"For centuries, a small group of immigrant communities in Chicago and New York were the only people interested in maps of Eastern Europe. Now that money has come back to those countries, the inhabitants want to buy the maps charting their history." In other words, should you notice the emergence of a healthy economy in a previously ailing country, buy up its maps. They will soon become sought after, and jump in price.
One of the fi rst major cartographers was the Egyptian Ptolemy who lived around 100AD. "He couldn’t measure distance over land, so he devised a means of making maps by measuring a town’s distance to the sun and the moon using latitude and longitude," says Jeffrey Sharpe, the owner of Map World, a specialist London-based map dealer. "He plotted the whereabouts of 8,000 cities, and the way in which he did this was passed down by hand until printing was developed in the 1470s. This was also the time of the great explorers, Christopher Columbus and Bartholomew Diaz, and they initially used the Ptolemaic maps until, that is, they realised they were totally inaccurate."
As the explorers began to discover new worlds, map production increased, although it was not until 1570, that the fi rst atlas containing only modern maps and nothing Ptolemaic appeared.
Cartography was originally an Italian specialisation, but as Holland developed as a trading nation, the Dutch came to dominate map-making, too. One of the greatest of the Dutch cartographers, Mercator, came up with something called Mercator’s projection: a way of representing the Earth as a globe on a fl at sheet of paper and his method is still used in sea charts to this day.
After that came less innovation and more accuracy, but there were still some howlers that were made into what are now exceedingly sought- after maps. For example, John Speed an English cartographer, produced an atlas of the world in 1627 which represented California as an island: that mistake was repeated on maps for a century. Of course, these maps are now very rare and highly prized. Jeffrey Sharpe estimates that only about 20% of the maps produced throughout history have survived and of those, about half are in museums. Demand at the top end of the market remains high.
"The most popular maps these days tend to be from the 17th and 18th century," says Stephen Drake of the Cambridge-based auctioneers Willingham Auctions. "People buy the area they know or they will go for certain individual cartographers, such as John Speed. In this area, maps are bought by people interested in Cambridge University and they are attracted by hand engraving and colouring."
Indeed, these early maps and atlases are works of art in their own right. They were made by engraving copper plates a whole atlas would take months and were beautifully illustrated. Many are incredibly decorative. "You have collectors who will confi ne themselves to maps of, for example, Iceland, because they were decorated with pictures of whales and sea monsters," continues David Park. "On top of that, even though prices have risen, they are still much cheaper than pictures. You can get a good 16th-century map for £500 considerably less than you’d pay for a picture of the same period." And depending on what interests you, a really good map collection can be had for fairly modest means. Eastern Europe is now expensive, but Western European prices, on the other hand, have been stagnant over the last decade. The Middle-East and India are becoming increasingly expensive. North America is always popular; so are the Polar regions the one exception to the geographic rule as nobody lives there.
But there is practically no market at all for maps of Ethiopia, say, or Madagascar in fact, all of central Africa. For people living in those regions, spending money investing in cartography comes rather low on the list of priorities for obvious reasons. It would be possible to build up a decent collection of maps from any of these countries for well under £5,000
