Welcome to Guest Blogger and The Ten Cent Maps

Today I would like to introduce Phil (posting as "Thatsaabguy", a long time carto-fan of Cartophilia. If you look at my posts over the last year, you will see that in many of them I gave a HT (hat tip) to Phil for pointing out to me this or that amusing or interesting little map thing. Since my frequency of posting has decreased lately, I thought it might spice things up if we included some input from other map lovers.

To start things off, here is a little story of his. Soon, he'll post his own stories about his map fetishes and geographic adventures.

Howdy folks! Thanks to Cartophiliac for allowing me access to his precious, I shall do my level best to not let him down! It’s weird – Cartophiliac and I SHOULD have met each other many times over, as we have mutual friends, play similar board games, both live or lived in Dayton, and both have an unhealthy map fetish. Thanks to the power of the interwebs, however, we’ve hooked up and will be bringing you double the mappy goodness!

Just to show you how deep is my obsession, here’s a true tale from this past weekend. I was garage-saleing with my wife (whose Mapkini has been featured in these very hallowed pages) and came across a small box labeled “MAPS 10¢”. When I naturally asked about them, the nice lady explained they were a collection of National Geographic maps from “I dunno, starting sometime in the 1960s is all I know. You can have the entire box for A DOLLAR.”

That’s right, one crisp American dollar.

I cannot begin to describe my squeals of joy. Upon further inspection, the box weighed a good 20 pounds, and was essentially a solid brick of mappy love. As you can see, it covers my dining room table to a thickness of about two inches. I haven’t catalogued them yet, but I’m half tempted to just wallpaper a room with them and get it over with.

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