Guidelines for map listings in the catalogues and

web sites of map dealers and auction houses

Map listings in dealer and auction catalogues (and web sites) serve several purposes. Some of these are the original purposes intended by the creator of the catalogue and reflect the commercial purpose of the listings. But catalogues are often later used by others: Researchers, collectors, map librarians, other dealers, and anybody else who is searching for information about old maps, and there are consequently secondary purposes that the catalogues serve for these subsequent users.

Among the purposes of catalogue and web site listings are:

1. They identify individual maps, so that a potential buyer can accurately identify what item is offered.

2. They describe the condition of the item, so that defects, on the one hand, or exceptional features (e.g. gold highlighting), on the other, can be known.

3. They provide information about value, in the form of a dealer’s asking price or an auction house’s estimated selling price.

4. They provide ancillary information about the map, such as information about the map-maker, the predecessors of the map, the state of the map in relationship to earlier or later states, the atlas/book source of the map, the place and date of publication, etc.

5. They provide reference citations, that allow one to locate sources of additional information.

6. For listings that include images, the listings serve as a visual resource for maps which may not otherwise have readily available depictions.

To better serve these purposes, listings should present their information clearly and consistently. Though it is unreasonable to expect all dealers and auction houses to follow a common format and set of conventions, it is not unreasonable to expect any single catalogue or web site to follow a consistent set of rules for the presentation of the information for the listed maps.

Despite the variation in presentation styles that dealers and auction houses will choose to use, I believe that there are some guidelines that, if followed, will better help these listings to fulfill the purposes described above. In compiling information for the Antique Map Price Record, I have become aware of both the good and the bad in presentation styles found in catalogues and web sites listing antiquarian maps. My predecessors, David Jolly and Jon Rosenthal were also naturally aware of these issues, and the first 12 volumes of the Price Record contained a brief set of suggestions for listings in dealers’ catalogues. The following guidelines are my take on what would help any catalogue to provide information most likely to fulfill the present and future needs of the catalogue’s readers.

Many of the specific recommendations given here are things that most dealers and auction houses already do. Many will seem obvious, if not downright pedantic. Yet every one of the specific recommendations comes from having seen one or more examples where a catalogue entry or web listing failed to do this. If all of these specific recommendations were to be boiled down to an overriding principle, it would be this:

For describing maps, choose a set of rules which are consistent and as unambiguous as possible, and make sure that these rules, themselves, are adequately described.

Also, it is worth noting that many dealers provide catalogues with extensive and highly informative descriptions of the maps they offer. These extensive descriptions, often focusing on the history of exploration, the political and intellectual context of the map’s production, or the life and work of the map-maker, are wonderful and are to everyone’s benefit. Here I am not dealing with this kind of “extra credit” description, but only with the more basic description of the map that should form a part of even the most abbreviated listing.

Titles

• Present enough title text to identify the particular map. Here’s an actual example that appeared in a catalogue (without an accompanying illustration): “Tableau Topographique Qui comprend …”. Though another part of the entry identified the area covered by the map, the title was woefully incomplete, entirely omitting the words that indicate the area represented.
• Use ellipses (…) when eliminating any title text.
• Don’t ignore title words just because they are engraved in much smaller type than the primary words. Actual example: “A Map of the Island of Jamaica, Divided into Counties and Parishes …” (Edwards/Stockdale) was listed in a catalogue as “Island of Jamaica Didvided into Counties & Parishes”. Though the first four words are printed in a quite small typeface, they are still there, and they should be provided in the title. This example also violates the prior point and the following two points.
• Don’t abbreviate title words that aren’t actually abbreviated, and, vice versa, preserve abbreviations that are actually present.
• Don’t replace “&” by “and” or vice versa. There are map titles that differ only in this respect, and it is helpful to have the use (or lack of use) of abbreviation correctly reflected. Similarly, “etc.” should not be given when the abbreviation is given in the map title as “&c”.
• As far as possible, reflect the actual punctuation. If there is a comma, include it; if there isn’t one, don’t put one in for readability.
• When a title includes unusual typography, make a reasonable attempt to provide a close approximation. For example, a title might specify a year by “A° 1678”. If it isn’t convenient to provide the superscript “o” in your titles, use some approximation, such as simply a lower-case “o”: “Ao 1678”. This will be clear enough. Another common example of this is the symbol “æ”. Representing this by “ae” is certainly clear enough. In general, if diacritics can be included for non-English titles that include letters with diacritical marks, this is to be preferred, though it is certainly not as necessary to map identification as some of the other guidelines in this section.
• When a map has multiple titles (e.g. cartouche plus top title), either clearly present both (and indicate which is which), or indicate that a second title is present (e.g. “2^nd title in Dutch in separate cartouche”).
• Printed information that is not physically part of the title (for example, a marginal text, “R. Bennett Sculp.”) should not be listed as part of the title. If this information is to be given in the listing, provide it separately.
• The extremely precise representation of titles that is found in many cartobibliographies, where line breaks and precise capitalization are presented, is over-kill for catalogues. (I’m not aware of any dealers who currently do this for map listings, and I think that this would be an impediment, rather than a help, to catalogue users.)

Dates

• Use a consistent approach to identifying dates, and document what this approach is (in the introductory material in the catalogue). The date information that might be included are:

Ø The actual year this example was published.

Ø The first year this map (or this state of this map) was published.

Ø The range of years in which this map may have been published.

Ø Whether any of the years given are approximate.

• Here’s one (but not the only) example of a stylistic approach that could be used:

Ø 1750 precise publication year

Ø c.1750 approximate publication year

Ø 1750-1770 range of publication years

Ø 1750-c.1770 ditto, with approximate upper limit

Ø 1750- first year, but perhaps later

Ø 1750 (1763) first year and year of this example

Ø 1750 (c.1763) ditto, but approximate year of example

• For more complicated cases, spelling out the known date information may be needed, if the basic style of presentation doesn’t fit. For example, if you have a map that you know was published in either 1750 or 1753, you could say just that: “1750 or 1753”. The primary guideline here is clarity of meaning.
• It is useful to know whether a map has a printed date, even though this may be known to be different from the publication date. Choose a way of representing that a given date is a printed date. For example: “Dated 1750”.

Map-Maker

• Maps have been variously identified with different people who played a role in the map’s creation. Among these are: The cartographer of the original (ms) map; the engraver; the publisher; the author of the book in which the map was included; the leader of the expedition from which the map information derives. It is usually not possible for a catalogue to be consistent in its identification of map-makers, simply because full information about all people involved in the production of a particular map may not be known.
• Some catalogues list as many names as are known that are associated with the production of a map. This additional information is obviously welcome, but it should be presented in a clear way. Probably a simple declarative statement of the individuals involved and their roles is the best. An example: “Based on John Smith’s map of Virginia; engraved by Pieter van den Keere; from reduced-size edition of the Mercator atlas published by Cloppenburgh.”
• When a map-maker is a member of a family, identify the particular member, if possible.
• Where you have chosen to use a style that associates just one name with each entry, use the following rules:

Ø For maps that are normally and widely associated with a given name, use that name. For example, list Speed’s map of America as by “Speed” and not by “Humble” (publisher) or “Goos” (engraver).

Ø For maps which don’t have a well established association with a given map-maker name, choose a preferred role (e.g. publisher), and, if available, use that.

Ø If your preferred-role name is not known, use another associated name, if available, but include in your listing information that lets the reader know what role the specified map-maker played in the production of the map.

Ø If no names are known, explicitly specify “Anonymous” (or some equivalent term), so there is no ambiguity as to whether the absence of a name might be a typographical or editorial oversight.

Size

• Specify size in a consistent order (height before width, or width before height), and document which order you are using. It is still surprisingly common to see inconsistency in this within single catalogues or web sites, and though the presence of an illustration can make clear which is which, there is no reason to do this in an inconsistent way. The general preference in contemporary reference works is to list height before width, but this is of little importance as long as a clear and consistent scheme is described and used.
• Document the ordinary limits for measurements (e.g. to neat line, to limit of printed content, to platemark, etc.), and if it is unclear what limits are being used for a particular item (e.g. an item that has adjacent text panels), explicitly specify what the size refers to.
• Avoid using size of sheet for dimensions, since this will tend to vary much more widely than a size related to the print. If paper size is of interest (for example, with a map with extremely large paper margins, it is of interest to know just how big the paper is), just include it as a separate piece of information in the description of the item.
• Centimeters, millimeters and inches are all easily convertible to one another. Therefore there is no reason to prefer one over the other. Presumably use of inches as a measurement unit only makes a lot of sense for catalogues whose primary audience is in countries where Imperial/US units are the predominant system. Do not mix metric and Imperial units in a single catalogue (unless you choose to include both with each entry.) Aside from being confusing, this risks making the interpretation ambiguous if a particular listing provides measurements without indicating the units. (Though this might seem an obvious point, it is a case I have come across recently in a catalogue that switched between inch and centimeter measurements in an apparently arbitrary fashion, but forgot to include a unit label on the sizes for several items.)
• For non-rectangular items (circular maps, etc.), be explicit about this. For example, for a 20 cm. circular map, report the item as having a diameter of 20 rather than a size of 20x20 (unless, of course, you are reporting sizes to something like the platemark, which is a rectangular shape even for a circular map).
• For items that have multiple images on a sheet, be explicit as to whether the size given is an overall size or the size for each individual image. Giving sizes for each image (as well as an overall size) is preferable, in terms of fuller information content. Insets are occasionally an issue: Is a large contained sub-map an inset or a separate map on the same sheet? This appears to be a matter of opinion. As long as the size and description information are sufficient, a map’s identity should be clear enough regardless of what approach is taken to describing large sub-maps.

Condition

• Overall condition grading of maps is beyond the scope of these guidelines. I hope that IAMA works on this issue in the goal of eventually describing condition grades which can be applied with a reasonable degree of reliability. But a few condition-related issues can be mentioned here.
• Color. It is clear that map values are affected by the presence of absence of color, the time color was applied to a map, and the quality and care with which the map is colored. Therefore I think that at a minimum a description should clearly indicate whether the map is colored or not, and, if possible, to indicate whether the color was applied contemporaneously (or near-contemporaneously) or is a recent addition. If there is uncertainty about the age of the color, this uncertainty should be expressed. It is useful to differentiate between outline and full color, whether color is applied throughout or just in part (for example, to the map but not to the cartouches), whether color is hand-applied or printed, and whether the color scheme is tied to a meaningful dimension (e.g. color by rock type on geologic maps). Quality of coloring is obviously a somewhat subjective matter, so I won’t attempt to offer guidelines for that part of a description.
• Imperfections. The presence of certain kinds of imperfections is clear enough that it seems obvious that information about them should be included in any map description. This includes any kind of damage to a map which has removed part of the original image, or caused a later addition or reinstatement to be made to the image. The other kind of imperfection which would seem to require inclusion in the description is anything which has undermined the stability of the object. This would include things such as significant oxidation, brittleness to paper though exposure to acid, presence of non-archival tape or other fixed additions to the paper which may not be fully reversible.

References

• Make sure that references unambiguously define which reference work is being cited. Specifying “Tooley, p.237” is ambiguous unless only one reference work by Tooley is being used and it is identified (e.g. in a “List of Reference Works Cited”). Either provide an adequately unambiguous identification of the particular reference work in the citation, or use the “List of Reference Works Cited” approach, and provide a key to the appropriate entry in that list.
• When a reference work is known to exist in multiple editions, identify the edition if the location information you provide (e.g. page number) will differ between editions. This is particularly common with Map Collectors’ Circle publications which were subsequently issued as separate works, with different pagination and often with additional, updated, information. Another example is Geoffrey King’s Miniature Antique Maps, which is normally cited by page number (since there are no internal entry numbers within this book), but where the correspondence between page numbers and content differs greatly between editions.
• Make it clear whether a citation is to a page or to a numbered entry (or to a plate). Better to say “Wagner [NW Coast], no. 75” (or “Wagner [NW Coast], #75) than “Wagner [NW Coast], 75”, since the latter might be taken to refer to page 75 (which, so happens, is part of the chapter that discusses item no. 75). In general, for works which include internal item numbering, it is better to use the item number than the page number, since authors have, in most cases, attempted to keep item numbering unchanged between editions. But where this isn’t the case (for example, with Zacharakis’s work on the maps of Greece, initially published in the MCC and later separately, with completely different numbering), make sure that the particular edition is clearly identified.
• Make it clear if a reference is to the specific map listed, or to a related map. For example, a citation to Wagner [NW Coast] for a map from the English edition of La Perouse should make it clear that the Wagner entry is for the corresponding French edition of the map. Rather than “Wagner [NW Coast] #838”, specify “cf Wagner [NW Coast] #838 (earlier French edition)”.
• If a reference is to a work that discusses the atlas or book from which a map comes, but has no explicit discussion of the particular map, it is helpful if the reference indicates this. Example: “Sabin, #50089 (for source book)”.

Geographical Region

• Many catalogues and web sites are organized by geographical region. And where a map image accompanies an entry, the importance of a precise textual description of the area displayed would not seem to be very great. Along with the constant changes in political boundaries and, in the more distant past, the constant change in the understanding of the actual location of the lands and bodies of water of the world, it would be unreasonable to expect catalogues to follow some single consistent scheme for identifying the region portrayed in a map. There are, however, a couple of special cases:
• It is useful to identify a geographical location for a map or city view, when neither the title nor the image make it immediately evident what is being displayed. A Chinese or Japanese city plan is an obvious example, but even some older European city plans have titles that might not obviously reveal what is depicted (for example “Fribergum Misinae” from Braun & Hogenberg shows Freiberg in Saxony, not Fribourg in Switzerland).
• If a listing does not include an image, it is useful to indicate geographical coverage when a title gives an impression different from what is shown on the map or chart. It is useful to be informed that Bonne’s “Canada IIe Feuille” shows all of eastern North America and not just some part of Canada.