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Authors: Michael Blanding
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evening that kicked off the 2013 Miami International Map Fair. Cartographic enthusiasts—most men, most gray haired, most wearing blue blazers—jostled their way to the bar as Latin techno-music pulsed through the crowd and what looked like S and M footage played on video screens above. One of the few women in the crowd shouted, “I need a seltzer right now!” as a bartender in a lace minidress stared unmoved. “You’re gonna hafta wait, ma’am,” she said.
Miami may seem like the least likely place on the map to host an international cartographic conference, much less the world’s largest. But in 2013, more than a thousand people were expected to attend—more than the similar map fairs in London or Paris. As the collectors mingled beneath wispy clouds, a mix of accents—southern, British, German—filled the night air. The map community is a small one, with maybe a few dozen serious dealers in the United States and fewer than a hundred worldwide. As they sipped cocktails, dealers, collectors, and tagalong spouses renewed friendships going back decades.
The next morning dawned bright and blue. Bathers had already begun to shed their tops a mile away on South Beach, as collectors filed into the whitewashed stucco building that housed the Museum of HistoryMiami. Inside, several dozen dealers had set up tables in three modest-size rooms, with hundreds of maps displayed on the walls behind them. There were huge maps of tiny stretches of coastline; postcard-size maps of the entire world; colorful eye candy from seventeenth-century Dutch atlases; crude black-and-white woodblocks from fifteenth-century Germany; English sea charts and Italian portolans covered with wind roses and rhumb lines.
Almost all the maps distorted geography in some way—and oftentimes, the more distorted the picture, the higher the price tag affixed to it. California as an island, a surprisingly long-lived fallacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a favorite collector’s item. And—at least here in Miami—maps of the Florida peninsula flattened into a saucepan shape were nearly as popular. While some of the maps were framed, most were simply matted and encased in plastic sheets. Even maps worth tens of thousands of dollars hung on the wall with butterfly clips and pushpins. Anyone who had paid $5 admission could flip through the racks and handle maps up to four hundred or even five hundred years old.
At the back of one dealer’s bin was a plastic-sheathed map with a slice of coastline in the corner labeled “terra incognita”—Latin for “unknown land.” The sliver is the earliest depiction of the American continent a collector could hope to buy. A sticker on the back of the plastic listed the price as $120,000. It’s hard to imagine a piece of jewelry worth that much displayed so openly. Yet the map trade is still very much a handshake business. Some dealers don't take credit cards; if a buyer doesn’t havea check or sufficient cash on hand, it’s not uncommon for him to walk out with a map in exchange for an IOU.
Most collectors follow a familiar pattern—they start with one map of their town, city, or state, follow it up with a few more, and then, before they know it, are dropping thousands on geographies halfway around the world. “It’s like drugs or alcohol.” Collector Neil Outlaw sighed of his habit when we sat down over a brown-bag lunch in the courtyard. “It can make you spend a lot more money than you want to,” he continued. “I’m always buying them and not selling them. My wife says that’s my problem.”
A fifty-one-year-old Alabama peanut farmer, Outlaw started coming to the Miami map fair ten years ago, focusing on buying maps of his area of southern Alabama. “I try to pick maps that have where I’m at on them,” he drawled. Over the years, the definition of “where I’m at” had been expanding—from the State of Alabama, to the southeastern United States, to the country, to the
Miami may seem like the least likely place on the map to host an international cartographic conference, much less the world’s largest. But in 2013, more than a thousand people were expected to attend—more than the similar map fairs in London or Paris. As the collectors mingled beneath wispy clouds, a mix of accents—southern, British, German—filled the night air. The map community is a small one, with maybe a few dozen serious dealers in the United States and fewer than a hundred worldwide. As they sipped cocktails, dealers, collectors, and tagalong spouses renewed friendships going back decades.
The next morning dawned bright and blue. Bathers had already begun to shed their tops a mile away on South Beach, as collectors filed into the whitewashed stucco building that housed the Museum of HistoryMiami. Inside, several dozen dealers had set up tables in three modest-size rooms, with hundreds of maps displayed on the walls behind them. There were huge maps of tiny stretches of coastline; postcard-size maps of the entire world; colorful eye candy from seventeenth-century Dutch atlases; crude black-and-white woodblocks from fifteenth-century Germany; English sea charts and Italian portolans covered with wind roses and rhumb lines.
Almost all the maps distorted geography in some way—and oftentimes, the more distorted the picture, the higher the price tag affixed to it. California as an island, a surprisingly long-lived fallacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a favorite collector’s item. And—at least here in Miami—maps of the Florida peninsula flattened into a saucepan shape were nearly as popular. While some of the maps were framed, most were simply matted and encased in plastic sheets. Even maps worth tens of thousands of dollars hung on the wall with butterfly clips and pushpins. Anyone who had paid $5 admission could flip through the racks and handle maps up to four hundred or even five hundred years old.
At the back of one dealer’s bin was a plastic-sheathed map with a slice of coastline in the corner labeled “terra incognita”—Latin for “unknown land.” The sliver is the earliest depiction of the American continent a collector could hope to buy. A sticker on the back of the plastic listed the price as $120,000. It’s hard to imagine a piece of jewelry worth that much displayed so openly. Yet the map trade is still very much a handshake business. Some dealers don't take credit cards; if a buyer doesn’t havea check or sufficient cash on hand, it’s not uncommon for him to walk out with a map in exchange for an IOU.
Most collectors follow a familiar pattern—they start with one map of their town, city, or state, follow it up with a few more, and then, before they know it, are dropping thousands on geographies halfway around the world. “It’s like drugs or alcohol.” Collector Neil Outlaw sighed of his habit when we sat down over a brown-bag lunch in the courtyard. “It can make you spend a lot more money than you want to,” he continued. “I’m always buying them and not selling them. My wife says that’s my problem.”
A fifty-one-year-old Alabama peanut farmer, Outlaw started coming to the Miami map fair ten years ago, focusing on buying maps of his area of southern Alabama. “I try to pick maps that have where I’m at on them,” he drawled. Over the years, the definition of “where I’m at” had been expanding—from the State of Alabama, to the southeastern United States, to the country, to the
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