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Bought a 1912 atlas at a garage sale in Tulsa for $3 and the country borders made me question everything I know
Picked up a 1912 Rand McNally atlas at an estate sale in Tulsa last month for $3 and spent two hours just staring at Europe. The map shows Austria-Hungary as one giant blob, the Ottoman Empire still holding most of the Balkans, and Germany with borders that look nothing like today. I posted pictures in a history group and got into a 40 comment argument about whether old maps with wrong borders are more valuable as historical records or basically just errors. Some folks say you should collect them for what they got wrong, others say only near perfect condition maps from that exact year matter. I'm stuck because I paid basically nothing and now I can't tell if I found junk or treasure. What's the call on maps with outdated borders, keep them or pass?
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elliotl243d ago
The part about collecting maps "for what they got wrong" is exactly right in my book. I ran into this same thing with a 1938 map I found at a flea market in Wichita, and I almost tossed it because the borders were already out of date by the time it printed. Turns out the value is in the snapshot, not the accuracy, because that Austria-Hungary blob is a picture of a world that got wiped out by WWI two years later. Dealers will tell you condition and year matter most, but a cheap map that shows a country that no longer exists is way more interesting than a perfect one of borders you can see today. Keep it, frame it, and enjoy the argument it starts. Three bucks for a window into 1912 is a steal no matter what the perfection crowd says.
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