Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (17 page)

Leonard knows who his rival collectors in the Holy Land niche are: two in New York and one at the University of Jerusalem. But he avoids most of the cutthroat bidding. “A few maps were too expensive, and I’m happy to have a facsimile. I’d rather have the original, but you have to draw the line somewhere.” Not all collectors are so good at drawing that line. Typically, they get off to a fast start, scooping up the low-hanging fruit in their focus area, but the really rare items might come up for sale only once in a decade. Some collectors have spent twenty or thirty years chasing that elusive last map, only to be outbid when one finally surfaces. “Put, in capital letters: FRUSTRATING,” Ian Harvey had told me in London when I asked him to describe the lot of the map collector. “HE COULDN’T HAVE WHAT HE WANTED.”

The library walls are lined with framed portraits of great cartographers and shelves full of map books. It’s clearly a place for scholarly research, not just storage of valuables. “I spend hours in here,” says Leonard. “I look at them over and over and over.”

“The more you look at them, the more you’ll find,” agrees Phil. “I spend a lot of time studying maps with a magnifying glass.” You can’t really say that about any other collectible I can think of. The Roth-mans love art as well—there are some Renoir sketches and a small Pissarro framed nearby—but no painting is as inexhaustible as a map.

Two hundred twenty of Leonard’s favorite maps aren’t in his library at all; they hang in sliding cupboards he’s custom-built next to his bedroom closet. It’s the world’s largest collection of map neckties.

“This is magnificent!” exclaims Phil, who is also an expert on mapemblazoned miscellany (cartifacts, collectors call them). His Marin County home contains the largest collection of map jigsaw puzzles ever assembled by man.

“I’m running out of room,” says Leonard. “I need to make another hole in the wall.” He never goes anywhere without shopping for a souvenir tie printed with a local map. Sometimes he comes up dry, though—he just got back from Chile, where there wasn’t a single map tie to be found.

“That’s weird,” I respond. “I thought skinny ties were coming back!” Dead silence greets my attempt at South American geographic
humor. I see now that the world’s largest array of cartographic neck-wear is nothing to joke about.

Many early maps, printed before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, have survived the centuries in astonishingly good condition. They were printed on rag paper, made predominantly of cotton, linen, or hemp fiber, which is stronger and less acidic than the wood pulp–based papers widely used since. That’s why a Jodocus Hondius map of Asia from 1613 might still be bright and pristine, while that yellow
Cathy
comic strip on your parents’ fridge looks like it’s been through a nuclear holocaust. Most of these older maps will outlive us all.

It’s possible they’ll also outlive the hobby of map collecting itself. More and more collections are winding up in the bowels of museums and libraries, thanks to well-meaning donors with a scholarly legacy or a nice tax deduction in mind. As a result, the high-quality manuscript maps still in circulation get scarcer every year. “A lot of people, when they die, will their collection to someplace like UC Berkeley,” explains Phil. “And it goes into the basement and it disappears forever. It sits in boxes, and they don’t even know what they have.” The Huntington, a prestigious research library in Pasadena, has such a glut of antique maps that it won’t even accept new collections anymore, unless the donor pays to have everything catalogued first.

“So what’s the
right
thing to do with an old map?” I ask.

“Sell it back to a map dealer,” says Leonard. “Or give it to a friend who will hang it up.”

But I wonder how much longer those friends will be around. I saw map lovers of all ages in London, but when you strip away the serious from the merely curious, most collectors fall solidly into a watching-the-History-Channel-under-a-Slanket demographic: sixty and up. “It’s graying,” Paul Cohen told me. “You get fewer young collectors coming in.” Phil has worked hard to recruit younger members into the California Map Society, but with little success. “They join for a year and then don’t continue it.”

Maybe, I conjecture hopefully, new collectors will continue to take
up maps in middle age. “There are no young collectors, period, in anything,” Ian Harvey of the International Map Collectors’ Society had told me. “When younger, one does silly things like attend to careers. Some people have children, don’t they? When I was at university, I was in the pub, not trawling down the Portobello Road looking for antique maps.”

But Phil isn’t so sanguine. “I think it will decline once this generation is gone,” he says sadly, as we exchange good-byes. “I saw it with airline pilots too.”

In London, on a whim, I bought my first antique map: a colorful 1850 John Tallis map of Ceylon, with five beautifully decorated vignettes full of ruined temples and palm trees in the corners. It’s small and not at all valuable, but I find myself often taking it out to look at. Today the map is wrong in nearly every important respect: Ceylon is now Sri Lanka, it has nine provinces rather than five, and Adam’s Peak—now known not to be the island’s highest point, as Tallis has it—no longer looms picturesquely above the capital city’s “Lake of Colombo,” which is now walled by cement high-rises. But, even so, I’d rather look at this map than any modern-day one.

Perhaps all map love is a form of nostalgia. As a kid in Korea, I obsessed over maps of the United States, since they represented the past I was missing. Map collectors just miss a different past: theirs is the nostalgia of the silent-filmgoer, the Civil War reenactor, the chess club fedora wearer. They’re nostalgic for a past so distant they don’t even remember it. I hope Phil is wrong about the extinction of map collecting. It depresses me to imagine galleries full of perfect little objects like this one winking out of existence one by one all over the globe, like Mayda, like the island of California, like the Mountains of Kong, all vanishing into the past.

Chapter 6
LEGEND

n
.:
an explanatory list of the symbols on a map

Most of us
, I suppose, have a secret country, but for most
of us it is only an imaginary country.

—C. S. LEWIS

I
n September 1931, Austin Tappan Wright was driving east across the country, returning from a visit to California at the end of his summer break at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught corporate law. A few miles outside Las Vegas, New Mexico, he was killed in a tragic car accident, leaving behind a wife and four young children. Wright had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father, a prominent Greek scholar, was the dean of Harvard’s graduate school. He studied at Harvard and Oxford, practiced law in Boston, and then turned to teaching, at Berkeley and Penn. But only his family knew that for most of his forty-eight years, he had also lived somewhere else entirely: the remote Southern Hemisphere nation of Islandia.

Islandia is a tiny kingdom at the southern tip of the Karain sub-continent, isolated from the rest of the world by the impassable Sobo Steppes and hundreds of miles of trackless ocean. Its people are peaceful and agrarian and have for centuries resisted the influence of outsiders. In fact, the national assembly passed the Hundred Law in 1841, limiting the number of foreign visitors to no more than one hundred at any given time. But that isolation was no obstacle to Wright, who was able to become the West’s foremost expert on Islandia while
circumventing the Hundred Law entirely. You see, he had invented the entire nation and its geography, its people and history and language and culture, all out of whole cloth, as a young boy. Islandia, though intricate and fully realized, is an entirely fictional country.

Wright rarely mentioned Islandia to outsiders, but his family knew about it, and knew that some part of him was always there. “
This view looks like Islandia
,” they would hear him remark at times, as he studied some landscape that must have reminded him of the vivid utopia in his mind’s eye. He named the family sailboat
Aspara,
the Islandian word for “seagull.”

When he died, he left behind the work on which he’d spent over twenty years: twenty-three hundred longhand pages describing every aspect of Islandian life, from the
sarka
plum liqueur enjoyed by its inhabitants to the candles, shielded from the wind by waxed paper, that light the streets of its capital city. He may never have intended anyone else to read it, but his widow, Margot, taught herself to type and transcribed the entire text. Wright’s oldest daughter, Sylvia, who later became a successful humorist and essayist in her own right,
^*
spent the next decade cutting two hundred thousand words (about the length of Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
) out of the manuscript and shopping the result around to New York publishers in seven thick binders, so heavy that she couldn’t carry them all herself.

When
Islandia
was published in 1942, at the height of World War II, it was a sensation. Readers had certainly visited fantastic places before, in day trips to Wonderland and Lilliput and Dante’s Inferno, but spending 1,013 pages among the simple, peaceful people of Islandia and their carefully constructed world was an entire vacation—especially at a time when real overseas travel was off the table due to the war. Reviewers clutched for words to describe this brand-new approach to fiction.
Time
called it “perhaps the most sustained
and detailed daydream that has ever seen print . . .
trompe-l’oeil
on a vast scale.” The endpapers of the first edition were carefully drawn maps of Islandia, no doubt a crucial part of the illusion.

Today we can still be absorbed in meticulously imagined artificial worlds. In 2010, CNN reported that thousands of viewers of James Cameron’s
Avatar
were reporting feelings of loss and depression after watching the 3-D film,
even contemplating suicide
at the prospect that real life would never be as vivid and impossibly beautiful as the movie’s computer-generated moon of Pandora. But Cameron’s utopia was the result of hundreds of millions of dollars and man-hours and state-of-the-art digital technology. I prefer the image of the respectable law professor scratching away by gaslight after his children are in bed, trying desperately to record every detail of his little island, the byways and folkways that only he can see but that he has known since childhood. It’s the ultimate outsider art.

The creation of geographies must have been in the Wright family genes. As a young boy, Austin Tappan Wright refused to let his younger brother, John, share Islandia with him; John shrugged and created his own island, Cravay. John Kirtland Wright would grow up to gain fame as an influential cartographer, director of the American Geographic Society, and coiner of the term “chloropleth map.”
^*
Their mother, Mary Wright, wrote a series of popular novels set in a painstakingly detailed but wholly fictional American university town called Great Dulwich, and the boys learned after their father’s death that he too had spent hours mapping an imaginary world of his own devising.

I’m sure we all like to think that we carry within us whole worlds that our fellow humans never glimpse, but few of these worlds, I’m guessing, come complete with their own plum liqueurs and nineteenth-century immigration laws. It’s easy to write off the Wrights as a family of dreamy eccentrics, but
many
people invent their own countries and draw maps of rugged coastlines that never were; we call these people “children.” The Wrights were unusual only in that they kept summer homes in their childish kingdoms through adulthood.

Some of the most famous pieces of “unreal estate” in literary history were, after all, inspired by children’s maps. Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
,
with its famous treasure map, would never have been written if not for Stevenson’s young stepson Lloyd, who passed a rainy summer painting watercolor maps with his stepfather in their Scottish cottage. The place-names they hand-lettered onto the map, like “Skeleton Island” and “Spyglass Hill,” inspired the events of the story.
^*
And when J. M. Barrie dreamed up Peter Pan’s home isle of Neverland, he purposefully imitated the cartography of children:

I don’t know
whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.