Serving as historical documents and elaborate works of art, rare maps and atlases have been drawing collectors and enthusiasts to Mayfair’s auction houses and specialist map stores for years
Words: Will Moffitt
Cecilie Gasseholm’s first memory of reading a map draws her back to her childhood in Denmark. She recalls flicking through a large atlas with her grandfather at his house in Svendborg, where he taught her about shifting borders. Having lived through the brutality of the Second World War, these demarcations were not abstract, he instructed, but outlines of nationhood that had been shaped by the currents of history.Now a manager and travel specialist at Peter Harrington, the rare book dealer on Dover Street that also sells maps, Gasseholm is an expert on all things travel and exploration, with a particular specialism in maps and atlases, polar exploration and travel accounts by women.
Peter Harrington has a range of maps for sale, including a quartet by the English cartographer John Speed dividing the world – as he saw it in the early 17th century – into the four known continents of Africa, America (showing California as an island), Asia and a European equivalent with the mythical island of Frisland off Iceland, featuring ships and sea monsters. Gasseholm draws my attention to a British first-edition atlas depicting Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s monumental expedition exploring the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. Taking place between 1804 and 1806, the pair ascended the Missouri to its source, travelling 8,000 miles in 28 months, crossing the Rocky Mountains and reaching the Pacific Ocean. It is valued at £27,500. Another fascinating document is a first-edition account by polar pioneer Sir James Clark Ross, who sailed HMS Erebus and Terror into the great white unknown of the Antarctic in the mid-19th century. Complete with circular maps, it is widely regarded as one of the most important works in the history of Antarctic exploration. What is it about maps that renders them an enduring source of fascination? Nostalgia and historical curiosity are key drivers; so too is our attachment to place.
According to Dr David Goldthorpe, head of the books and manuscripts department at Sotheby’s, map enthusiasts often start their collections close to home.“They often start by collecting maps of where they live… I think it gives people a sense of their place in the world,” he says. “They can be incredibly decorative as well. If you look up the Ortelius map of Iceland it’s just a beautiful piece of engraving.Some people collect maps of the London Underground because it’s a great piece of design. World maps are always very popular.
It’s interesting to see how different cartographers solve the problem of putting a spherical planet on a flat piece of paper.” Goldthorpe has presided over some landmark auctions in the category, not least the sale of the world’s first printed atlas.
The document was made in Italy more than 500 years ago based on manuscripts of the ancient geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus, known as Ptolemy, who worked in Egypt in the second century. It was formerly owned by the late Lord Wardington, a passionate collector, and was bought at Sotheby’s for more than £2.1 million in 2006 by map seller Daniel Crouch on behalf of a client. Founder of the eponymous Daniel Crouch Rare Books on Bury Street, which specialises in antique atlases, maps and voyages, Crouch began his career at a small book and map seller in Oxford and worked at Bonhams before establishing his own venture.“Maps are data visualisation,” Crouch says. “They are quite a lovely combination of scientific information displayed artistically. I love that juxtaposition between science and art and the stories that they tell.
When I sell a map or buy a map for the shop, it’s not because it shows the most accurate view but because it tells a tale.” One of the more remarkable maps in his care is titled “The land that never was”. It’s a depiction of the fictional country of Poyaisia, signed and dated by Gregor MacGregor, a 19th-century Scotsman who began life as a mercenary in Venezuela and Colombia fighting alongside Simón Bolívar.In 1820 MacGregor visited what is today Honduras, and claimed that he had obtained a grant of 12,500 square miles of fertile land from George Frederic Augustus, king of the Miskitos.
