This happened purely by accident. I'd recently gotten a new job, and wanted to decorate my office. It was a good job, a fresh beginning, rife with possibility and potential, and I wanted my office to reflect the optimism I felt about this new chapter in my career. I wanted it to express themes that I find inspiring: adventure, exploration, discovery, travel.
I've always loved books on adventure and exploration--the Horatio Hornblower novels of C.F. Forrester, the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Frasier, the Allan Quatermain novels of H. Ryder Haggard. There's something about the spirit of discovery and adventure in the 18th and 19th centuries that I find magical. So I wanted my office to be evocative of this period, and the spirit of those adventures--seafaring, swashbuckling, fearless, insatiably curious.
Here are some random photos that show the elements that I thought best expressed what I was going for: old trunks, sextants and compasses, ships and ships' lamps, books and graphic novels... even a gar's skull that I found on the concrete causeway leading to Howell Island in the Missouri River.
But what's more evocative of travel and adventure in bygone days than old maps and globes? They carry with them the spirit of an age when not everything was known, when there was yet more to discover, when the idea of sea monsters lurking in unexplored oceans was still one that might be entertained seriously.
So I began to haunt the antique malls and galleries of my hometown of St. Louis, hoping to find old maps and images of ships and sailing. And I got lucky.
In one such place--the General Grant Antique Mall on Watson Road in St. Louis--I came across this set of four aquatint engravings of nautical scenes. I'll have more to say about these gorgeous little pieces later, but I fell in love with them immediately, and bought them all on the spot (didn't hurt that the dealer only wanted ten dollars apiece). I took them home and immediately started Googling them to find out what I had. And from that moment, I was hooked.
In some ways, it was a pretty natural obsession for me--I've always loved illustrations, illustrated books, comics and graphic novels, and I draw cartoons myself (you can see them at my other blog, Tales of Palmerwood, here)--and I'm surprised sometimes that it took me until the age of 46 to start collecting maps and prints. It's great fun. In addition to enjoying the beauty of the pieces themselves, there's the intoxication of the hunt itself, finding undervalued treasures hiding amongst the tchotchkes and junk of unwary antique-dealers' booths; the researching of the histories and contexts and backstories of the pieces; and the joy of displaying them.
This isn't going to be an academic blog, or even a particularly educational one. There are plenty of excellent resources on the web about prints, their history, the process of making them, and the niceties of collecting them, and one of the best is this one, by the excellent Christopher Lane of the Philadelphia Print Shop.
This is, instead, going to be a kind of personal journal--an explorer's log, if you will--of my own process of finding prints, the chronicle of my own journey of exploration into the fascinating (and sometimes esoteric) world of old images and the people who love them. Along the way, I'll tell you what I've learned from researching them, include some ruminations and reflections inspired by them, and keep you up to date on what I've found--a sort of informal online inventory as well.
And by the way, my office is looking pretty darn swell these days, too.
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