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Vent: I thought the 'Mercator is hiding a fake island' guy at the flea market was nuts until I found it on an 1892 German school atlas
Six months of hunting through antique stalls in Dresden and Cincinnati kept proving him right, so now I want to know if anyone else has chased down maps showing a phantom landmass that cartographers copied for 200 years without ever seeing it.
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kaiharris1h ago
Did you ever try comparing the paper and watermark first before chasing the map itself? That saved me months when I got into the same kind of thing. What worked for me was hitting university map rooms instead of flea markets, since librarians there let you photograph stuff for free and they know which atlases were printed from the same worn copper plates. I also kept one notebook with every copy I found, the city, the date, and who printed it, and pretty soon you could see the fake island getting passed around like a rumor. Old geography journals from the 1880s and 90s are gold too, because sometimes a guy wrote in to complain about the error and nobody ever fixed it. Yard sales and estate lots are where the weird ones turn up cheap, but always check the page edges for trimming, because a cut down page can make a made up island look real. Stick with it, the pattern shows up faster than you would guess.
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