The 10 most expensive maps and globes ever sold

Maps are working documents. They were folded into saddlebags, pinned to walls, cut up and pasted into other books, and thrown away as soon as a better one appeared. The ones that reach a saleroom five hundred years later are the copies that were wrong about something and got shelved instead of used.

Every figure below is the price as reported at the time, with the house and the date, so it can be checked. The ranking runs in US dollars so the ten can be read against each other, with what the room actually paid in brackets behind it; two lots stay in pounds, because no house or trade report published a dollar figure for them. Private sales are excluded, which keeps the most famous map in the world off this list. There is a note about that at the end.

1. Ptolemy, Cosmographia, Bologna 1477 — $3,992,000 (£2,136,000)

Sotheby's, London, October 2006, roughly $3,992,000 at the time, and still recognised as the highest price paid for an atlas. It is the first printed edition of Ptolemy's Geography with engraved maps, from the library assembled by Lord Wardington at Wardington Manor. The hammer price was £1,900,000; the rest was premium. Part of the collection had survived a fire at the house four years earlier.

2. Battista Agnese, Portolan Atlas of the World — $2,770,500

Christie's, New York, April 2012, from the private library of Kenneth Nebenzahl. A manuscript sea atlas of about 1546, drawn and illuminated by hand rather than printed, with gold and lapis on vellum. The estimate was $800,000 to $1,200,000 and it more than doubled the top of that range. It set a record for a manuscript atlas.

3. The Doria Atlas — $2,560,000 (£1,464,000)

Sotheby's, London, October 2005, about $2,560,000, and the first lot in the Wardington sales. It is a composite atlas: 186 maps in two volumes, printed and manuscript, assembled to order in Italy between roughly 1570 and 1628 for the Doria family of Genoa. Estimated at £700,000 to £1,000,000. It was bought by a London dealer and was, briefly, the most expensive atlas ever sold.

4. Abel Buell, map of the United States, 1784 — $2,098,500

Christie's, New York, December 2010. The first map of the new United States printed in America by an American, engraved in New Haven the year after the Treaty of Paris. About eight copies are known. This one was sold by the New Jersey Historical Society and bought by the philanthropist David Rubenstein, and it was then a world record for a single printed map.

5. Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi — $1,762,500

Christie's, New York, April 2012, in the same Nebenzahl sale as the Agnese atlas. An illuminated manuscript island book of the Greek archipelago on vellum, made around 1450, once owned by the great Victorian collector Sir Thomas Phillipps. It includes a view of Constantinople drawn before the Ottoman conquest, which is the detail the catalogue led with and probably the reason for the price.

6. Ottoman chart of the Mediterranean, about 1600 — £1,070,000

Christie's, London, October 2009, in a sale of Islamic and Indian art. A manuscript navigational chart in two framed sections, estimated at £300,000 to £400,000 and sold for more than three times the top figure. No dollar equivalent was published at the time, so the pounds stand on their own here. It was the highest lot of a sale that made just over five million pounds, which is a reminder that map records are often set outside map sales.

7. Champlain, Les Voyages, Paris 1613 — $1,320,500

Christie's, New York, January 2024. A book rather than a loose sheet, but it contains Champlain's folding map of New France, and that is what was being bought. The estimate was $300,000 to $500,000. It was described at the time as the most expensive printed travel account in the world.

8. Manuscript map of the siege of Yorktown, 1781 — $1,150,000

James D. Julia, Fairfield, Maine, February 2010. Drawn in the field at the end of October 1781 and attributed to the French engineer Jean Baptiste Gouvion, it descended through the family of Tobias Lear, George Washington's aide. It was the first million-dollar lot in that firm's history and a record for an American Revolutionary War map. Regional houses do occasionally get the great object.

9. Waldseemüller globe gores, 1507 — $1,002,267 (£545,600)

Christie's, London, June 2005, or $1,002,267 as reported. A single printed sheet of segments meant to be cut out and pasted onto a sphere, and one of the first uses of the word America. One of four known examples. The consignor had recognised what he owned after reading a newspaper article about the wall map of the same year.

10. Coronelli terrestrial globe, Venice 1688 — £210,000

Christie's, London, July 2002, in a dedicated cartography sale, with no dollar figure recorded at the time. Three and a half feet across, made by the Franciscan cosmographer Vincenzo Coronelli, whose globes were the most admired in Europe. It is described in the trade press as very probably the highest price paid for any globe at auction, which tells you something: globes have never come close to the top map and atlas prices, despite being harder to make and rarer to find intact.

Two footnotes

The first is a globe. In December 2021 a small carved wooden globe after François Demongenet, made around 1550, was sold by Hansons in the English Midlands. It had been bought for £150 at an antiques fair in Wales. Five telephone bidders took it to £116,000 on the hammer against an estimate of £20,000 to £30,000. It is thought to be the oldest globe ever offered at auction.

The second is the map that is not here. Waldseemüller's 1507 wall map, the only surviving copy and the first document to print the name America on a continent, went to the Library of Congress for ten million dollars. That was agreed privately with the family that owned it and completed in 2003. It was never on the block, so it does not belong in a ranking of auction prices.

What a room with twenty lots can take from this

The Welsh antiques fair is the whole argument in one line. A hundred and fifty pounds to a hundred and sixteen thousand is not a story about luck; it is a story about the object reaching a room where more than one person understood what it was. Most donated lots are worth more than the donor thinks, and the work that closes that gap is description, not decoration. There is a section on writing lot descriptions in the guide.

Second, notice how many of these came from one collection at a time: Wardington, Nebenzahl, the Doria family. A group of related lots pulls the people who care about that subject into the same room on the same evening, and they bid against each other. If your donations include four things from one donor or one theme, put them together rather than scattering them through the running order.

Third, the estimates. The Ottoman chart carried £300,000 and made £1,070,000; the Yorktown map, the Demongenet globe and the Agnese atlas all cleared their top figures comfortably. A low, honest estimate invites people in. A high one makes the room decide before the bidding starts. How opening bids and increments behave is set out on the how it works page, and the page for charities and galas covers the running order.

You can build a lot list and rehearse an entire evening before deciding whether to run it. Start at getting started, and the help pages answer the practical questions.

Prices as reported at the time of sale, including buyer's premium where the house stated it.