Collectible Investments for the High Net Worth Investor

Chapter Maps as Collectibles

At noon to the Change a little, and then bespoke some maps to hang in my new Roome … which will be very pretty … Home to dinner; and after dinner to the hanging up of maps and other things for the fitting of the room, and now it will certainly be one of the handsomest and most useful rooms in my house.—Samuel Pepys, diary entry for April 27, 1666¹

¹Pepys (1972), p. 111.

Introduction

Even before Samuel Pepys decorated a room with maps in the year of the great fire of London, others were collecting maps and atlases for their decorative value and the information they contained. It was the technology of mass production through printing that facilitated the collectibility of maps.

Maps, considered as collectibles, ...