Peggy Osher died Tuesday at the age of 88, the Portland Press-Herald reports. She had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. She and her husband, the cardiologist Dr. Harold Osher, who survives her, donated their sizeable map collection to the University of Southern Maine in 1989 and advocated the creation of a dedicated map library; the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education opened in October 1994. Her obituary notes that in 1974 she convinced her husband to buy a map on a trip to London—a decision that escalated, as it often does. The Osher family was profiled in 2011 by Maine magazine. [WMS]
Category: Map Collecting
The Miami Map Fair at 25
Coming this weekend, as it does every first weekend in February: the Miami International Map Fair, now in its 25th year. It’s marking that milestone without its co-founder, Marcia Kanner, who died last June at the age of 82. [WMS]
A Beginner’s Guide to Map Collecting
Two things about CityGuide’s beginner’s guide to map collecting. One, it’s not so much for beginners as written by a beginner; the author, Chris Sharp, is recounting his own journey into map collecting. Which brings me to the other thing: what kind of map collecting he’s talking about, which is to say, the “collecting all the OS Landranger maps” kind of map collecting, not the “paying exorbitant sums for a rare and ancient map that might be a forgery or sliced out of a volume from a library’s rare books collection” kind of map collecting. I don’t want to invoke Dunning-Kruger here, but I’m not sure he knows how much more there is out there. I suspect that he’s going to find out. Not being British myself, I don’t know to what extent Ordnance Survey maps are the gateway drug to a serious map collecting jones, but I have my suspicions. [WMS]
San Francisco Map Fair
A new map fair is starting up in California. The first San Francisco Map Fair will take place from 15 to 17 September 2017 at the Regency Center. It’s sponsored by the History in Your Hands Foundation, with lectures sponsored by the California Map Society. [WMS]
This Weekend: Miami International Map Fair
The Miami International Map Fair takes place this weekend at HistoryMiami Museum. Local website The New Tropic has more, including some of the maps on display. [WMS]
Previously: History of the Miami Map Fair.
Observatory Books Closes
Observatory Books of Juneau, Alaska has closed its doors, owing to the illness of its longtime proprietor, the 82-year-old Dee Longenbaugh. (Here’s a profile from 2014.) Observatory Books dealt in antique and rare books and maps; its website includes a primer on map collecting for beginners. [Tony Campbell]
History of the Miami Map Fair
The Miami International Map Fair is just around the corner: it runs from February 5th to 7th. Relatedly, Joseph H. Fitzgerald has just published a short (64 pp.) history of the fair: The Miami Map Fair: The First 20 Years. From the excerpt I saw on Amazon it looks like one of those dry institutional histories, but there are people for whom this will be interesting. [via] Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Update: Miami Herald coverage of the Fair [via].