In conversation with… Philip Curtis of The Map House

15/08/2024

Philip Curtis is the director of The Map House in Knightsbridge, London. Established in 1907, it is the oldest and – with over 20,000 items in its inventory – the largest antiquarian map seller in the world.

The Map House has been selling and supplying maps to collectors, motorists, aviators, explorers, Prime Ministers and the Royal Family for over a century. It has supplied maps of Antarctica to Ernest Shackleton, the Far East to Winston Churchill and the Western Front to Edward VIII, as well as important pieces to the British Library and the Library of Congress amongst many other prominent institutions and collections.

Philip has authored several books on maps including The Mapping of Antarctica, an illustrated history of the Heroic Age of South Polar Exploration featuring over 100 significant and rare polar maps. 

We caught up with Philip to discuss how he got into cartography and why one of his favourite maps is by a flat-earther!

You’ve run The Map House since 1992. How did you get into cartography?

I joined Christie’s, the auctioneers, in 1984, and after the then customary apprenticeship “before the mast” as a porter, I went into the Book Department. After a couple of years, I was reluctantly persuaded to become head of Travel Books and Maps. I say reluctantly because while I appreciated travel books, I knew absolutely nothing about maps. In a remarkably short time, I realised while I still enjoyed working with travel books, it was the maps that gave, and still give me immense pleasure and excitement. I have now had the huge privilege of working at The Map House for over thirty-five years.

Philip has run The Map House since 1992 (Credit: Philip Curtis)

What is it about maps that captures your imagination?

For me, it has always been the history that is so vividly illuminated by antique and vintage maps. Maps are unique in that they graphically and often so beautifully illustrate the world view of their creators, geographically, politically, economically and socially. Some of the most interesting maps are those that are incorrect. It is fascinating to see how wishful thinking, political considerations, ancient misconceptions and outright errors can massively distort geographic accuracy, and nowhere is this more in evidence than the mapping of Antarctica. 

Do you have a favourite map?

It is difficult to pick a single favourite map out of the many thousands I’ve handled over the years but certainly, one that has made me smile is “Professor” Orlando Ferguson’s 1893 Flat and Stationary Map of the World. It purports to “prove” that the Earth is, according to his take on Biblical precepts, not only flat and the stationary centre of the universe but also because of the line in Revelations (Rev.7.1) that there were “Four Angels standing on the Four Corners of the Earth” – and that it is square as well! 

Orlando Ferguson’s Flat and Stationary Map of the World (Credit: The Map House)

For a mere 25 cents sent to the self-styled professor, he promises to send a book explaining his theory which he claims “It Knocks the Globe Theory Right Out. It will Teach You How to Foretell Eclipses. It is Worth Its Weight in Gold.” He also points out the self-evident truth, at least to him, that if we were really on a globe travelling at “65,000 miles an hour around the sun” we’d all spin helplessly off into space.

In your experience what do all map lovers have in common?

I would have to say that the only thing all map lovers have in common is a love of maps! Maps offer such an extraordinary diversity, cartographically and decoratively, that they appeal to individual cartophiles for an almost infinity of reasons. 

Most map collectors start with an interest in the geographical area depicted but then their focus can develop into almost any direction such as maps by particular mapmakers or from a particular period, geological maps, city plans, sea charts, maps with elaborate decorative cartouches, maps showing California or Korea as islands, even maps featuring sea-monsters. One of our collectors will buy any map if it features a hippogriff, the half griffin/half horse of mythology.

You wrote a book on mapping Antarctica. How did you do your research?

Because my area of expertise is mapping not Antarctica, I started with the maps, and then perhaps somewhat unusually worked my way back through the secondary and primary written sources. 

The Mapping of Antarctica (Credit: The Map House)

The genesis of The Mapping of Antarctica came out of a collection of South Polar maps which The Map House had been painstakingly acquiring over about twenty years. We hold the originals of all the maps pictured and described in the book which is a wonderful research tool. To be able to physically handle the actual primary information sources gives research an excitement and immediacy that can, dare I say, be occasionally lacking when going through dusty tomes in a library or looking at a screen.

Did you make any surprise discoveries when writing the book?

Having begun my research into the maps as a virtual novice in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (most of our inventory of maps pre-date the 20th Century) almost all my discoveries were a surprise! But as my knowledge grew, I was able to start to see past the surface detail of the cartography through to the extraordinary stories of courage, self-sacrifice and dedication these maps represent.

One particularly interesting example for me is at first sight a rather dry and ordinary map of the different sledging routes undertaken by the Australian Antarctic Expedition in the 1912/13 season.

It is only through careful examination of the sledging route undertaken by Douglas Mawson, the expedition leader, and his companions, Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis, that the full tragedy and heroism of the trip is revealed in heart-breaking detail. The distances achieved each day are carefully marked and at first, everything is going well until there is a stark note at the furthest point reached, “Ninnis died”. 

The Australian Antarctic Expedition sledging map (Credit: National Library of Australia)

Ninnis had plunged along with his dog team and sledge with all the party’s food supplies, and indeed tent, into a seemingly bottomless crevasse. Mawson and Mertz turn back for the base and at first reasonable distances are logged each day. Then as they, particularly Mertz, became weaker with hunger, and with only a sledge cover for shelter, the distances, still carefully logged by Mawson, become pitifully small. Then after several days when Mertz was unable to move at all, there is the blunt notation “Mertz died”. Now Mawson was on his own. 

The map graphically shows the agonisingly slow progress as he single-handedly man-hauled the sledge the one hundred miles back to base. As he staggered into the base, more dead than alive, it was only to see the support ship, the Aurora disappearing over the horizon. 

Fortunately, six expedition members had elected to over-winter at the base in case of the vanishingly unlikely return of any of the sledging party members. Astonishingly Mawson was once more leading sledging parties by the following the Austral spring. This map is a vivid testimony to one of the greatest figures of the Heroic Age! 

What's next for you?

In November, I’m very much looking forward to giving a talk to the Shackelton Museum Autumn School in Athy. I am also currently working on a greatly expanded second edition of The Mapping of Antarctica which I hope will be ready at the beginning of next year. 

Finally, it is my long-term ambition to one day penetrate the Antarctic Circle and to actually visit the magnificent southern realms where I’ve spent so long if only in my mind!

What luxury item would you take if you were working at Port Lockroy for the season?

I would take a copy of Melville’s Moby-Dick. I first read it with enormous pleasure amounting to awe 40-odd years ago in the middle of the Sinai desert in sweltering heat. I feel it deserves a second reading in surroundings rather more in keeping with its themes.

Finally, what’s your favourite species of penguin?

As I said above, to my regret I’ve not had a chance to meet Antarctic penguins in their native habitat so I was very tempted to say Feathers McGraw from Ardman’s The Wrong Trousers but even after careful examination, I wasn’t able to definitively identify to which penguin species he belonged. So I would have to say my favourite species of penguin is the African Penguin with whom I had the joy and privilege of swimming over 20 years ago outside Cape Town.

Philip is a fan of African penguins (Credit: Sergey Uryadnikov/Shutterstock)

The Map House is the world’s oldest and largest antiquarian map seller. Philip would be delighted to welcome visitors – whether buyers or enthusiasts – and showcase hidden gems such as the map of Antarctica passed around at the Inaugural Dinner of the Antarctic Club in 1929 and signed by virtually every surviving British and Commonwealth explorer; an original hand-drawn sledging map from Scott’s last expedition with the position of Scott’s tent marked by a member of the sledging party that found the bodies; or Shackleton’s own ambitious prospectus map outlining the aims of the Quest Expedition.

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