Update: my old map dealer in Tucson told me to stop collecting by country and I keep chewing on it | Antique Map Puzzlers

Casey Torres · 2026-10-27T16:45:05.551977+00:00

I was digging through a box of 1800s atlas plates at this guy's booth in Tucson back in March and he asked what I collected, and when I said "one map per country" he kind of laughed and said that's a checklist, not a collection. He pulled out two 1850s maps of the same stretch of the Danube, one from a German atlas and one from a French one, and the river bends in totally different places. He said the same border got drawn five different ways by five different mapmakers because they were all copying each other badly or just guessing. I'd been chasing one clean map of each nation for about 7 years and never once compared two of them side by side. Now I've got both Danube plates on my wall and I look at them more than anything else I own. It makes me wonder how many of my other maps are quietly wrong about a coastline or a border. Does anyone here collect by mapmaker instead of by place, and does it make you trust the old surveyors less or more?

The Community Guide

Loading…

Update: my old map dealer in Tucson told me to stop collecting by country and I keep chewing on it | Antique Map Puzzlers - The Community Guide