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New Features
I appreciate the feedback that I have continued to get, and I've made a few changes to the CD-ROM in response to customer suggestions.
The Antique Map Price Record's users have had the good
fortune of having David Jolly and Jon Rosenthal, two very careful
people, as the compilers/editors for the first 18 years. Though I
won't claim to be as a careful as my predecessors, I certainly aim to
be as careful as possible. Nevertheless, no one should be
surprised that over the course of 20 years some errors have made their
way into the database. The errors, of course, are of two kinds:
Those present in the original catalogues and copied by us, and those
which we introduced through our own mistakes. But who is
responsible for an error is less important to the user of the Price Record than the fact of the
error itself.
Given the inevitability of errors, one of the greatest advantages to
the CD-ROM format, compared to the printed format, is that errors in
previous volumes can be fixed. (Of course, the practice of
including an errata page in one volume to note errors in previous
volumes is a standard procedure in the print world, and the Price Record did this up to and
including Volume 14 in 1996. But unless a person carefully goes back
and makes manuscript annotations in earlier volumes, it is clear that
an errata sheet in a later volume will never be noticed by a person who
is looking at information in an earlier volume. It is like the
corrections that newpaper editors put into one day's paper to correct
mistakes from the previous day: How many readers go back and re-read
yesterday's stories to re-think their responses in light of the
corrections?) As each issue of the CD contains all the past data,
this is not an issue. When an error is found, it can simply be
fixed in the next edition of the CD. So an error made in 1983 and
discovered in 2003 can still be fixed, and to all the world it appears
as if the correct information had been entered back in 1983.
Among the errors fixed in this year's CD is an embarrassingly large
mistaken price: A world map from the Ulm Ptolemy had been listed as
offered for sale at $8,500. This price, however, was only a map
collector's dream! A zero escaped from the editing process.
So this year that same entry is corrected to have its proper listing
price: $85,000. A good number of much less stunning mistakes have
also been corrected. The majority of these are corrections to
mistakes that originated in the source catalogues. These include
things like typographical errors in title transcription, or, less
commonly, in map-maker name (e.g. "Benard" when "Bernard" was the
correct map-maker name for a particular map). Occasionally a typo
in a
cartobibliographical reference is found and corrected, or an incorrect
region identification is fixed (e.g., a map listed as showing Spanish
Galicia turns out to really show that other Galicia, in Poland).
In general, I give considerable credence to what a catalogue says, and
I will only correct a catalogue's information if I have convincing
reference material at hand that supports making a change. In some
cases I will include a bracketed editorial comment ([Editor: ...]) if I
think there is a reasonable question about some aspect of the
descriptive information for an entry.
My predecessors (David and Jon) took the view that the Price Record is just what its name
implies, a record of the
offerings published by map dealers (as well as, in recent years,
results of sales of maps sold at auction). Eschewing the notion
that the Price Record is a
price guide, they saw their role as accurate transcribers of what
dealers and auction houses publicly said about the material they
handled. Though I agree, by and large, with this approach, I may
tend a little more in the direction of wanting the Price Record's information to be an
accurate description of the items offered for sale or sold at auction,
even when that information differs in some respects from the
information provided by the dealers and auction houses. It is in
this spirit that I will correct certain mistakes and add additional
information, so that the descriptive information is as accurate as
possible, even if occasionally at variance with what is given in the
original
catalogue. This is most of all true with regard to title
transcriptions, where I will often provide a fuller title than given in
a catalogue. But it can occur in any part of the
description. (If a catalogue describes a 1541 Trechsel edition of
a Fries map as having been published in Vienna, the Price Record will say that the map
was published in Vienne. Or if a catalogue mistakenly swaps the
height and width dimensions for a map, I will swap them back in my
listing.) My goal is to have the Price Record be a record of the
material offered by dealers or sold at auction, rather than a record of
how that
material was described. This may be a rather fine distinction,
and David, Jon, and I may actually not differ much on this, but there
may be an ever-so-slight difference in emphasis.
One source for corrections is the publication of new cartobibliographies, which allow "old" data to be revisited and checked in light of the new reference material now available. A good example for the current edition is the publication in 2003 of Volume 3 of Peter van der Krogt's Koeman's Atlantes Neerlandici. Among other atlases, this volume covers the many editions of the small atlases inspired by Ortelius's Theatrum (Epitome et al) and Mercator's Atlas (Atlas Minor et al). I was able to revisit the hundreds of previous Price Record entries for maps from these various miniature atlases and, in most cases, to identify the particular map involved. This allowed me to verify and, where necessary, correct title spelling, as well as to associate a new reference citation with particular entries.
Some of the past errors corrected in this year's CD were pointed out
to me by dealers. I welcome corrections to any errors in the data
that people notice. Over the coming years the database should get larger, richer (through
the gradual addition of more cartobibliographical references to earlier
entries) and more accurate.
Other Topics
Last year's News and Comments touched on the demise of Mercator's World. More than a year later, the antiquarian map field still does not have a widely distributed magazine aimed at a similar audience, or one aimed at the somewhat narrower audience of Mercator's World's predecessor, The Map Collector. Various map societies do have their publications, and the IMCoS Journal has recently been converted to a larger format, but a society journal is still pretty different, and reaches a much smaller audience, than a magazine sold by subscription or at newsstands. MapForum.com has also announced its intention to become a quarterly printed journal (as opposed to its current incarnation as an irregular on-line publication). So perhaps the current void will again be filled.
Jeremy Pool - February, 2004
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