Years ago, I remember hearing something on TV about an island being invaded — to my bedroom I went, and found the Falkland Islands on my wall-map. I lived on a small farm in west central Minnesota, and while the horizon was flat as the ocean, I wasn’t a very worldly guy — until National Geographic arrived with its regular insert of a map. I didn’t just have a world globe in my room…I also had a globe of the moon. When we did go to town, there was a free magazine available at stores and restaurants, a guide for tourists of places to see in Fargo. Spanning the center-fold was a stylish map of Fargo, missing a huge number of things but focusing on retail, emergency, and travel-related parts of town. That map entertained me on a regular basis — here’s a copy:

I’ve always liked maps. They’re a way to look at a place as a whole, checking out how the buildings and locations relate to each other. You may find things you didn’t know before, like the creek shown on an 1890s map of Fargo that isn’t there anymore (but lines up with that weird gap in housing construction). If you’re really imaginative, you can see all kinds of things in a map, depending on how suspicious you are. Maps aren’t just about streets and directions — old maps are a way of documenting history. Of the five Ws — who, what, when, where, and why — an old map describes Where better than any paragraph in a history book can. I used to own (and somehow lost) a map of Fargo from the fifties that listed my favorite park as the County Poor Farm. Streets I rode my bike on either didn’t exist or were numbered county roads. I have a bunch of Midwest highway maps dating back to the fifties, that when overlaid in order show the progress from the old highway system to the interstate system, slowly bypassing towns and connecting others. Today’s maps emphasize different places, making old maps quite different, depending on what you’re looking at:

If you’ve ever been to a battlefield museum, you’ve seen a map that shows When and Why. Kids books, patient with the benefit of showing rather than telling, use maps to great benefit in demonstrating regions and customs, like this map of wildlife habitats that’s pleasantly short on text, but gets enormous amounts of information across:

While I’ve got lots of maps — survey maps, tourist maps, maritime maps, maps large and small — I admit I haven’t taken very good care of them. Maps are best stored in flat-drawers, the kind also used for blueprints and newspaper collections. A newspaper analogy is a good one, because maps often come originally folded, may be printed on both sides, and are on a large single sheet of paper. Maps are often printed on nicer paper than newspapers, but unless printed recently the paper cannot be assumed acid-free, and some of the most interesting maps, like this one of Chicago in the 19th century, was printed cheaply on newsprint and wasn’t intended to survive past the World’s Fair:

Stored large-format paper should be protected and separated from the acids in nearby paper, as well as from moisture and bugs and mice. If your maps should be displayed, treat them with the respect you’d give any old large print — a poster frame from Wal-Mart won’t cut it. Mount it with acid-free paper, use UV glass, and if due to size you’re unsure about the quality of your work, trust a professional with the job. Maps can be found in many, many places, depending on your pleasure: your grocery store hands out maps when they rearrange aisles, a coworker may draw a map to their house on a party invitation, your town may hand them out at the Chamber of Commerce, or your kids may be free-drawing them in school. They appeared in books of all kinds, they were on the backs of tourism brochures, and gas stations are overflowing with them. Don’t desecrate a book unless you’re certain it’s worth it, but always check books for interesting maps. Trust me, they’re there.
Since maps are all over the place, there’s plenty of collectors around. If you’re looking for more on collecting maps, here’s some places to go:

• The Map Room: A Blog About Maps
• Strange Maps: the odd and interesting
• Care and handling of old maps
• Map care from vintagemaps.com
• Road Map Collector’s Association
• International Antiquarian Mapdealers Association,
• And, lastly maphistory.info, who has a large resource section.
  

With their oddly shaped countries and delightful drawings, antique maps are fascinating and have been collected for generations. Fortunately there are plenty of great resources on the internet for those interested in collecting old charts and maps - here are a few favorites.

For those interested in educating themselves about antique maps, there’s a great tutorial about the history of maps and mapmaking. The tutorial begins with prehistoric maps carved into rocks, moves onto early Egyptian and Roman maps and covers European maps up to the 17th century with plenty of pictures to illustrate the different types of maps.

I came across this useful page for beginners which discusses the various factors that can effect the value of an antique map, such as historical importance or artistic touches like images of ships. The site also lists clues to look for that indicate a map is a reproduction rather than an antique. This dealer’s site also offers pointers to the beginning map collector, including tips for framing and caring for an antique map.

Finally, I encountered a tutorial on North American maps of the 16th and 17th centuries which discusses the interesting shapes and figures found on those maps. It seems that European mapmakers rarely traveled to the places they made maps of, especially places as far afield as the Americas, and often relied on travelers’ journals and records to make their maps - part of the reason there are so many inaccuracies on antique maps. At the time much of the land was yet to be explored and mapmakers were left with large empty spaces that needed to be filled, so in addition to the usual depictions of mountains and rivers, maps of the age often included drawings of plants and animals that were common to an area, as well as sea monsters and other fanciful creatures.

There are plenty of resources on the internet for chart and map collectors - here are a few more good map sites:

News clip about maps - scroll down
Map Collectors Magazine - Map Forum

Another site with lots of info for collectors