hey how can i help you man i got an old map i want to sell you so you want to give gps a try
looks like they definitely needed it back then turn left at the next street i came to
the pawn shop today to try to sell my map from the 1700s the interesting thing about the map is
how we know the world to be now and how they perceived it then i'm in it for a thousand but
i'm gonna shoot for three or four thousand all right so how did you get this thing actually i
picked it up in a poker game one of the guys had this as a piece of his buy-in this first
time ever heard of one of these is a buy-in but you know this is vegas uh this is cool california
is an island that was the first thing that i noticed all maps like this were a little bit
screwed up back in the 1600s and the 1700s i saw a couple things on there i didn't see in alaska and
down here we got the great lakes running too deep literally in like tennessee and stuff all right
remember these guys were on sailing ships with really crude instruments to me it's amazing they
got a this correct i could even do that yeah this was a process to make this is really nice this
engraving's right here i mean i don't read latin but this says 1492 so this is probably a tale
of christopher columbus landing okay okay and basically they had to put them there because
they didn't know what was there right this map is not 100 accurate but they never were back then
that's just part of their charm this thing is really fun and it's a great conversation piece
you know some of these maps go for twenty thirty thousand dollars wow wow really okay okay um how
much you were looking to get out of it i was thinking maybe three or four thousand quite
frankly it could be less it could be more the cool thing is he gave you a map of the new world as
opposed to the old world if it's of europe it's a quarter of the price really you know you sort
of needed a map of europe if you lived in europe right this was definitely a luxury item because
it was the new world no one was really there this was just a cool thing to hang on the wall
do you mind if i call someone in who will know a lot more about the map
and he can date it for me that works for me let me get the guy called all right thank you
he doesn't have a good poker face he seems pretty excited about it so i'm seeing big bucks coming
oh a california as an island map yeah this is beautiful how did you come up with this
i actually won this in a poker game oh really now that's got to be an interesting poker game
all right so tell me all about it when california was first discovered and put on the map
it wasn't shown as an island because we knew that it was part of the north american continent
in 1602 a an explorer by the name of sebastian viscano came up the west coast here and he said
that california was an island so mapmakers started showing it as an island in the late 17th century
the interesting thing about map making in the 18th century they had to base
everything on other explorer's work and try to correct the errors that they found there
so i know the older the printing date of these maps the more valuable they are
the big concern is what year is it i can understand that with prints like this there's
a couple of things we have to look at here one of them is mendocino if you look at that you see it's
mondocino he misspelled it when he engraved the map now in a very late engraving he corrected that
it says that it was printed by johann michael probst probst bought the plates in 1762.
1784 he added 1784 to the end of this line here from the details that i see on it not having 1784
down here you can get it within about 20 years this particular map dates from between 1762
and 1784. it's in very very nice shape it was a nice win at poker that's amazing thanks mark
not a problem thank you this is an 18th century print of this map and it's in beautiful condition
so this is a very nice find to have come into the shop it's made a little later than i was hoping to
go 1500 bucks on it it seems to me that it's worth a lot more than fifteen hundred dollars twenty
five hundred i'll meet you halfway that's all i can do i'll go two thousand bucks on it 2500 is a
good deal 2 500 3 grand is what i'm gonna get out of it two thousand bucks man i think it's a fair
price and quite frankly you bring it to anyone else in vegas they're not gonna know what it is
all right but you owe me a solid next time i come in no problem man
thank you meet you right in front i'm satisfied with two thousand i made
a thousand more than i have into it and i learned something today
you