Hints and Tips for Would-be Collectors

Collecting London Underground maps has been a very enjoyable hobby for me for several years. From Beck's first map in 1933, there are approximately 200 of the traditional card folder maps to locate. These are well documented, and so the first thing you need to do is purchase the following book to get a listing:

• Letch, A. (2004). London Transport maps and guides: A collectors' reference guide. Hailsham, East Sussex: LBRT. ISBN 0-9542628-4-0

But then, of course, there are all the unofficial London Underground maps that appear in London street atlases, tourist guides and on folding maps, published in Britain and around the world. I don't have a clue how many have been printed over the years, when, and where; no one does (although I do have some hunches). This adds to the enjoyment of tracking them down, and has taken me round Europe in the process.

If you are even more ambitious, you might want to try to collect the station poster maps. There is no comprehensive listing of these to my knowledge, the maps are scarcer (print runs in thousands rather than hundreds of thousands), and much harder to store and display.

Or you might decide that you want to stick to just the card folder maps that represent the major design changes. From 1933 onwards, this would limit your collection to approximately 40 maps, which might be a good starting point. For the key maps since 1949, click here.

Things to bear in mind

Whatever your ambitions, there are a few things you need to be aware of before you start collecting card folder maps, and some pitfalls to avoid.

• What condition? Obviously, maps differ in their condition, which will be reflected in their prices, and good condition older maps will be harder to track down than good condition newer ones. Look out for torn/worn creases, foxing, and pen marks (ugh) and some more specific problems below. Check maps carefully to make sure they are up to scratch but also decide in advance what sort of condition you would be happy with: why buy a poor condition map to fill a gap if you are immediately going to try to replace it with something better?
• Print registration? Most official Underground maps were printed using several different coloured inks. Today, card folders are printed in five colours (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and LUL corporate dark blue). With a poorly registered map, the inks are incorrectly aligned. Print registration was a problem during the 1930s/1940s, and really awful from the 1970s to the mid 1980s. For some maps during this time, I wonder whether any registered correctly at all. Look out for daylight or overlap where lines cross each other, between parallel lines intended to be touching, and between lines and their interchange circles. Check the central London stations from Oxford Circus to Holborn, and then down to Green Park, and then check round the Circle Line. Finally, look at the end of the Uxbridge branch. Resign yourself to the possibility that for some issues, good registration will be virtually impossible to find.
• Dark blue ink? From 1987, London Underground began to make extensive use of corporate dark blue (Pantone 072) for text and other details on the map (including the Piccadilly Line). The problem is that the solvent that carries the pigments for dark blue ink never dries completely. Maps from this time onwards therefore often have problems with ink transferring itself from one part of the map to another, with ghostly text and extra Piccadilly Lines. Look out for these, and once you have the maps, be careful how you store them. Don't put weight on them when folded. I store mine unfolded in clear plastic pockets, which so far has worked well.
• Forgeries? Maps from my own collection were used for the photograph on the front cover of my book, but rather than put them at risk (they were photographed on a very dirty seat on a train in storage at the London Transport Museum Depot) I scanned them at high resolution and printed them on high quality paper. I was shocked by just how realistic they looked. To my knowledge, forgeries are not a problem, and I know of no one who would stoop to this level. Any such forgery should be identifiable with a magnifying glass (old rare maps used solid inks, different colours for each Underground line, ink jet printers have to mix process colours to match them, which appear multi-coloured close-up), but this is still a possibility to be aware of.

Where to buy

Whatever your ambitions, there are a few things you need to be aware of before you start collecting card folder maps, and some pitfalls to avoid. In terms of price, I can't be exact of course, but expect to pay £1 to £2 for good condition recent maps (say from 1980 onwards), with prices moving steadily into double figures as 1960 is approached, to £20 as 1950 is approached, and £40 or over for anything Second World War or before. Some maps are known to be rare, others common, and the price will reflect this.

London map collectors are well catered for compared with, for example, collectors in Paris or New York. There are many ways to go about adding to a collection:

• Collectors fairs These are always fun to browse, and you never know what you might find. Dealers are usually friendly and helpful, and willing to negotiate for cash and bulk purchases. The most material of interest is generally to be found at the London events, but do bear in mind that the same dealers often attend events organised by the same people, and that these same dealers need time to turn around their stock, so frequent visits become less and less rewarding. For a listing of forthcoming events, see the Prorail website
• Ebay Ebay is an obvious place to begin looking for maps, and when someone puts a job-lot up for sale, this is a way of building up a collection very quickly. However, I am not entirely enthusiastic about Ebay. It helps if a seller has included a set of high quality scans of the map so that registration and condition can be judged, but even so, I prefer to hold a map in my hands first and take a good look at it, and have some sort of idea of the asking price (and not have to worry about some of the less ethical practices rumoured to be used on Ebay). There is always plenty of material available. Just type in underground map or tube map into the search engine of www.ebay.co.uk (or wherever if you are not based in the UK).

  I have recently been at the wrong end of a sharp practice known as shill bidding. This is where fake bids are made by, or on behalf of, the seller in order to inflate the auction price of the goods. The highest bidder in this instance dropped out, and I received a cheerful email offering me the chance to buy the item if I paid my highest bid. Now, sometimes people do drop out of ebay auctions for legitimate reasons, but the give-away here was that (1) the shell identity had never bid for an item previously on ebay, and (2) even though it had backed out of the auction, the seller later gave a high feedback rating to it. If this happened in a real auction room, the police would be called in, but it seems that the law is administered slightly differently via ebay. It is possible to register complaints, but so far I have received no clues as to the fate of mine. Anyway, I held firm, resisted the temptation to purchase and/or send an abusive email to the seller, and the item reappeared in a new auction. This time it seems that the seller must have known that I knew her game, and there were no further shenanigans. The irony is that the other legitimate bidders in the original auction did not reappear, I was the only bidder, and got the item for less than the price it had reached the first time round, before the seller broke the law with fake bids. Poetic justice? Perhaps, but the item had also been misdescribed, its condition was far worse than stated in the description. So, treat ebay with caution. Negotiating a price one-to-one on a map that you can examine for yourself might be a little bit more expensive sometimes, but it's worth it.

• Auctions I've never tried auctions myself, again its my preference to negotiate round an asking price, but auctions are where the rarer items are more likely to turn up, and the only real source for station posters. Up and coming auctions are also listed at the Prorail website

• Underground map landmarks

• Electronic official Underground maps released into the public domain

• Underground map rarities

• My wants list

• Or click back to my home page