What Antique Maps Are Worth by Region

If you have an old engraved map, the first question is always the same: what is it worth? Most guides answer with the maker's name. That turns out to be the wrong place to look. What the map depicts moves the price far more than who engraved it — and it moves it in a direction that surprises most people, because the biggest markets in Europe pay the least for maps of themselves.

This is built from the site's database of around 800,000 auction and marketplace results. Removing everything that is not a book, map or print leaves 592,936 lots with a real sale price. Map lots in this data are titled in a consistent way — the region first, then the maker, the title and the date, like "Italy, Lazio, Roma; Joan Blaeu — Terra di Lavoro — 1640" — so the region is the text before the first comma or semicolon.

That pattern held up when I checked it. Of the 92,605 lots titled that way, 53,715 (58%) begin with a place name I could match to a region. The rest begin with something else entirely — "Signed", "Manuscript", a publisher's series name — and are dropped. Those 53,715 lots are the basis for everything below. The typical one sells for €59.

The reference table

"Typical" is the middle of the range: half of the lots sold for less than this, half for more. The "usual range" column covers the middle half of sales, so it is the band you should actually expect. The "top tenth" is the price only one lot in ten beats.

Region depicted	Lots	Typical	Usual range	Top tenth	Under €100
Mediterranean	137	€93	€50–170	€358	51%
Luxembourg	153	€83	€50–145	€296	59%
World	1,895	€80	€46–196	€486	57%
Poland	469	€80	€40–158	€299	59%
Portugal	268	€80	€45–158	€290	59%
Balkans	394	€80	€44–140	€220	62%
Spain	1,201	€77	€45–150	€250	60%
Japan	271	€75	€35–120	€270	68%
Italy	5,545	€70	€40–130	€240	65%
Indonesia	680	€70	€42–120	€201	66%
Holy Land	300	€65	€38–110	€212	72%
Netherlands	15,357	€61	€40–105	€200	72%
Greece	554	€60	€35–122	€250	68%
China	364	€60	€35–120	€235	68%
North America	647	€59	€30–120	€296	69%
Europe (whole continent)	7,790	€56	€32–104	€187	73%
Belgium	2,876	€55	€32–95	€170	76%
India	324	€55	€31–110	€202	72%
America (unspecified)	653	€55	€31–100	€218	75%
Central Europe	435	€55	€32–100	€184	74%
Russia	524	€55	€30–100	€203	74%
Middle East	1,030	€51	€31–90	€172	78%
Africa	1,464	€51	€30–95	€190	76%
Scandinavia	601	€51	€30–96	€192	76%
Asia	1,713	€50	€30–95	€193	76%
British Isles	775	€50	€28–93	€195	76%
Turkey	350	€50	€28–94	€180	77%
Austria	251	€48	€26–80	€164	81%
North Africa	162	€47	€30–87	€160	78%
Caribbean	316	€45	€30–85	€172	79%
Egypt	171	€43	€25–86	€160	80%
Germany	1,525	€42	€22–75	€145	83%
France	3,056	€42	€25–75	€150	83%
Oceania	250	€42	€21–76	€181	82%
Switzerland	308	€42	€25–75	€160	80%

Note the two figures at the top of the table are built on small samples — 137 and 153 lots — so read them as indicative rather than firm. Everything from World downwards rests on several hundred sales or more.

The spread is roughly two to one from top to bottom. That is a bigger effect than any map maker's name produces, as our companion piece on which map makers sell best shows: the whole range from the best-selling engraver to the worst is €96 down to €46.

World maps: a normal middle, an extraordinary top

World maps look expensive, and in one sense they are: at €80 typical (1,895 lots) they top the list of well-sampled regions. But the real story is the top of the range. One World map lot in ten sells above €486. Compare that with the map market as a whole, where the top tenth starts at €200.

Put another way, a World map's best-in-ten price is 6.1 times its typical price. For maps generally that multiple is 3.4. Nothing else in the table stretches like this — Asia is the next widest at 3.9, and most regions sit between 3.2 and 3.6.

Two things create that tail, and only one of them is what you would expect.

The obvious candidate is complete atlases. 32% of World lots are whole atlas volumes — Ortelius's Theatrum, Janssonius's Novus Atlas, a bound Elwe world atlas — against 0.5% to 3% for every other region. Atlases are books, and books sell for more than sheets. Except that in this data they do not: World atlas volumes typically fetch €75, slightly less than World single sheets at €85 (1,284 lots). Plenty of atlases come to market incomplete or heavily worn.

What the atlases do is populate the extreme top. The highest World results in the database are an Ortelius Theatrum des gantschen welt at €9,351, a Schedel Secunda Etas Mundi leaf from the 1490s at €7,750, and a Blaeu Nova et Accuratissima Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula at €7,200.

The less obvious factor is that even the single sheets have a fat top: World single sheets alone have a top tenth of €550. A famous early world map — an Ortelius Typus Orbis Terrarum went for €4,255 — is a trophy object in a way that a good map of Saxony never is. World maps are the one region where owning a genuinely important sheet is a real possibility, which is why the category attracts hopeful sellers and why so many of them are disappointed. The middle of the World market is €80, the same neighbourhood as Spain.

Why France and Germany sell so poorly

France at €42 (3,056 lots) and Germany at €42 (1,525 lots) are the two big European countries at the bottom of the table. Spain, a smaller collecting market, sells at €77. This looks wrong, so I tested three explanations.

Is it simply that more French and German maps were printed? Partly, but it cannot be the main cause. France does have a lot of lots — 3,056, nearly three times Spain's 1,201. But the Netherlands has 15,357 lots, five times France's supply, and still sells at €61. Volume and price are only loosely connected here.

Is it that French and German maps are later, and later maps are cheaper? No. French map lots have a middle date of 1713 and German 1704 — both earlier than Spain at 1720. And within France, even the pre-1700 sheets only reach €49 (1,290 lots), against €124 for pre-1700 Spanish maps (424 lots). Age is not rescuing them, which is consistent with what we found when we asked directly whether age makes an item valuable.

Is it that cheap makers happen to have mapped France and Germany? This is the serious version of the objection. Bellin and Vaugondy, two of the cheapest names in the data, were French. If they dominate the French lots, the region looks cheap when really the makers are.

To settle it, I compared each region only against maps by the same maker — Blaeu's French sheets against Blaeu's own average, Ortelius's French sheets against Ortelius's average, and so on across the major names, then combined the results.

The region effect not only survives — it gets stronger. A French map by a given engraver sells for 0.65 times what that same engraver's work fetches on average, and a German map for 0.62 times. A Spanish one fetches 1.70 times and a Greek one 1.83 times.

You can see it in individual makers without any statistics at all:

Maker	France	Germany	Netherlands	Italy	Spain
Blaeu	€50 (n=197)	€54 (n=92)	€81 (n=1,349)	€140 (n=219)	€170 (n=25)
Ortelius	€50 (n=166)	€50 (n=57)	€120 (n=268)	€102 (n=270)	€143 (n=54)
Hondius	€45 (n=109)	€44 (n=62)	€70 (n=325)	€95 (n=127)	€121 (n=55)
Janssonius	€44 (n=137)	€38 (n=39)	€80 (n=471)	€116 (n=100)	€145 (n=35)
Mercator	€46 (n=90)	€50 (n=47)	€77 (n=121)	€100 (n=95)	€109 (n=42)
Braun & Hogenberg	€100 (n=112)	€75 (n=135)	€77 (n=728)	€222 (n=114)	€200 (n=69)

Every one of these engravers sells his Spanish and Italian work for two to three times his French and German work. It is the same hand, the same workshop, often the same atlas — and the buyer pays double for the Mediterranean sheet.

I cannot prove why from sale prices alone, and I would rather say so than invent a reason. The honest reading is that this is demand, not supply: France and Germany were mapped constantly by every European workshop and the resulting sheets are ordinary, while Spanish, Italian and Greek regional maps were made in smaller numbers by the same northern publishers and are chased by collectors in countries with far fewer domestic sheets to buy. But that is an interpretation laid over a very clear measurement, and you should treat it as such.

Using this table

Find your region, take the "usual range" column, and expect to land inside it. If your map is a common French or German sheet, the honest expectation is €25 to €75, and 83% of them sell under €100. That is not a reason to bin it, but it is a reason not to pay for a formal valuation.

Two adjustments are worth making. A sheet by one of the stronger names — Braun & Hogenberg, Ortelius, Seutter, de Wit — is worth roughly a third to a half more than the region typical, per the maker comparison. And a map still bound into a complete, sound atlas is a different object from a loose sheet, sold as a book rather than a print.

What this table cannot tell you is condition. Margins, tears, foxing, backing, and whether the colour is period or added last decade will swing a real sale further than any region effect here. Before you buy anything on the strength of these figures, read our checklist for evaluating a deal — the same discipline that applies to old books generally applies to maps.

And for a specific sheet rather than a category, search the database for the place name and the engraver printed on it. Real completed sales for the exact map beat any table, including this one.

Figures derived from 592,936 priced book, map and print lots, of which 53,715 were classified by region from the place name at the start of the lot title. Prices are what buyers actually paid, in euros.