Which counties come up most often?

Surrey leads with ten titles and Yorkshire follows with eight. No other county comes close, so the archive is lopsided rather than spread across the whole country. England appears in twelve titles and Wales in eleven, usually as maps covering the whole of either. Foreign and world subjects turn up as a minority, among them South America, Asia, Bohemia, Jamaica, Kashmir and Crete.

Why do globes appear in a map category?

Dealers file them here, and seventeen titles carry the word. They range from a four-inch miniature on a stand to a floor-standing twelve-inch, with a cased portable celestial globe appearing once. Almost all the globes are current stock rather than archive. Some are mid-20th century, which is why the category's dating runs as late as 1960.

What does a date like 1610 in a title mean?

It is usually the plate date, the year engraved on the copper. Sampled titles carry dates such as 1610, 1645, 1695, 1722 and 1787. Plates were reissued and re-engraved over long stretches, so a plate date and a printing date are not the same thing. The listings don't separate the two.

How many maps come up for sale each year?

Around twenty-three pieces reach the market in a year on Sellingantiques. Eighty-five dealers have listed in the category over its life. That works out at most dealers handling maps once and then not again. It is a category with a wide spread of sellers and a thin annual flow.

Are map samplers common in this category?

Fifteen titles are needlework maps, which makes them a persistent presence rather than a one-off. Subjects include England and Wales, Europe and the world. Several carry worked dates from the 1780s, and one is put at around 1811. Where a girl signed her name into the work, those examples sit above the ones simply catalogued as a map sampler.

What does a '17th Century' label cover?

It is a bracket, not a year. Only seventy-five of two hundred and thirty-one listings carry a clean year at all. The dealers' own dating field uses centuries and reigns as often as dates: 17th Century fifty times, 18th Century twenty-nine, Georgian seventeen, Before 1700 fourteen. Loose decades like 1800s and 1930s appear too.

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Antique Maps

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Single-sheet engraved maps, largely English county plates taken from atlases and sold framed or loose, many finished with hand colour, made for reference and for hanging on a wall.