Map Collecting Practices

There has been only limited comparison of the different contexts in which maps have been brought together, and hardly any critical consideration of the contours of map collection. This paper aims to begin to correct some of these gaps by starting to chart the changing contemporary significance of map collecting, to explore its variations and to explain differences in individual map collecting practices. It is grounded in social theoretical approaches to the wider world of collecting and in the literature around post- Harleian critical cartography. The unique characteristics of map collecting are explored, and a detailed comparison of map collecting practices of British antiquarian and everyday map collectors is presented, following an investigation of textual sources and an ethnography of collecting practices and spaces. Differences between the collecting fields of elite antiquarian practices, as against more prosaic everyday collecting suggest that we need to understand map collecting practices as ‘placed behaviour’, in which economic relations are mediated by local culture and places.