Not that long ago, a well-provisioned life required a few good maps.
More than just a crumb-covered zoo map and a dog-eared Thomas Guide. More than those accordion-style road maps that turn into an IQ test when you fold them.
Remember the 1970s, when the price of gold spiked? People rushed out to buy mining maps so they could try their hand at prospecting.
Later, when the economy rebounded, they loaded up on nautical charts so they wouldn't sail their new yachts into underwater reefs.
And when war was declared (or not) in places such as Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, armchair patriots clamored for political maps so they could follow the news from home.
Now, the place San Diegans have gone since 1969 to buy unusual, exotic and off-the-wall maps, the Map Centre, is going out of business – wiped off the map, as it were, by online maps and global satellites.
Saturday, I drove to Clairemont to see a full-service map store in action. Working in the newspaper industry, I felt a certain kinship with a fellow endangered species.
Diane Lorne, the store's buyer, explained that the Map Centre attracts two types of clients: people wanting a map of a specific location, and map lovers “who dream of all the maps they want to have.”
Put me in the latter category.
In a store that boasts 18,000 titles – mounted on walls, folded on shelves, rolled in cardboard tubes and lying in 369 shallow drawers – I hardly knew where to begin.
“We have hundreds of kinds of maps,” Lorne said as we walked down the store's long aisles. “We have political maps, physical maps and geologic maps. Travel maps, fishing maps, hiking maps and off-road maps. Wildflower maps and bird maps. Puzzle maps.”
I was struggling to keep up.
“City, state and regional maps. 'Topo' maps. Earthquake fault maps. Satellite maps. Nautical charts. Aeronautical charts. Mines and mineral maps. Maps of the moon. We even have a globe of the moon. Constellation maps. Relief maps. Trophy maps.”
A trophy map, she explained, is mounted on a wall. The owners stick colored pins in the countries they've visited and, when the map is plugged in, the pins glow.
Lorne showed me a Bouguer gravity map, which delineates gravity contours, and an aeromagnetic map. Both went right over my head. Nearby I spotted a rail map of Britain and Ireland. I studied that instead.
Lorne left to help some customers, stranding me in the travel section. I contemplated the exotic locations I might someday pin on my trophy map: Kathmandu, Kamchatka, Transylvania, Djibouti. So many maps, so little time.
I pondered traveling to Heidelberg for a dueling scar, or to Casablanca, for the waters. They had street maps of Baghdad – impossible to find the day it fell. And I studied a map of Dar es Salaam, a Tanzanian port. You never know.
Lorne was busy helping Ken and Nancy Josefosky, who had come to the Map Centre to buy roll-up maps – the kind that hang from classroom walls – to teach U.S. and world geography to their grandchildren.
Choosing a world map, they learned, is not so simple.
There are maps that center on the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Americas. There are upside-down maps, with Antarctica on top, and some intriguing attempts to minimize the distortion that occurs when a sphere becomes a flat surface.
Lorne found a Peters World Map and laid it out before us. The map represents countries by land mass, resulting in a tall, skinny Africa and a Russia as flat as a hamburger.
“Hmm,” the Josefoskys said.
Lorne also explained how to tell if a map is out of date.
If Zaire shows up in the middle of Africa, the map probably was published before 1997, when Zaire became the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A map with Yugoslavia was published before 2003, when that Balkan federation was erased from the face of Europe.
She also recommended examining northern Canada for Nunavut, the self-governing Inuit territory that was carved from the Northwest Territories in 1999. A map without Nunavut is no map at all.
The Josefoskys left, saying they needed a little time to think things over.
At the front of the store, the Map Centre sells the high-tech gizmos that are making full-service map stores obsolete: GPS units and digital mapping software.
Further competition comes from in-car navigation systems, online services such as MapQuest and Google Earth, and Internet shippers with low overheads.
The writing's been on the wall for some time, but it's been tough to face up to it, said the owner, Matt Moore. He plans to close San Diego's only dedicated map store sometime next month, once he's sold off most of the inventory – maps run from a few bucks to $150 – his tools and the furniture.
“It's a labor of love,” said Moore, who bought the shop from Tommy Thompson, a former Navy chief who ran it from a two-story North Park house for decades. “We've probably overstayed our time by a number of years, hoping things would turn around.”
As I left, I bought a laminated replica-antique map that gives a “bird's-eye view” of downtown San Diego, circa 1876.
With the liquidation-sale discount, it cost less than $20.
Moore promised to buy a few copies of today's newspaper.
We dinosaurs look out for each other.
Gerry Braun:
(619) 542-4563; gerry.braun@uniontrib.com
