The Art of Travel

Collectors and dealers are preparing for Europe’s biggest antiquarian map fair. But what does the future hold for printed maps in the digital age?

From a story in the Financial Times...

It’s a big year for antique maps. This is the 500th anniversary of the birth of the world’s most celebrated mapmaker, Gerard Mercator, who created the world’s first atlas. I have to reveal an interest here. In the 1990s I spent thousands of hours writing a biography of the great man. There were moments, hunched over one of his original prints in the Map Room of the British Library, when I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. Visiting the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, I almost burst into tears when the archivist brought me his extraordinary globe of 1541. I’d read every paper published about the globe but I was so unprepared for its craftsmanship that I found myself immobilised by bewilderment. It was Mercator who devised the unique “projection” that allows the spherical globe to be flattened into a map in such a way that compass bearings remain constant. Today, Mercator’s Projection is used by the Ordnance Survey to map Britain, by Nasa to map the solar system, and for numerous other applications besides.