Regular visitors to TBTP are well aware of my life-long fascination with maps, globes, and all things cartographic. So it won’t be surprising to find that I am excited to learn that Italian filmmaker Andrea Gatopoulos has made a documentary film called A Stranger Quest about David Rumsey’s passion for maps and his extraordinary map collection. The David Rumsey Map Collection is one of the true gems on the web: a massive trove of maps & related images from over 40 years of collecting.

In the 1980s, David Rumsey, president of the digital publishing company Cartography Associates, began building his map collection by initially focusing on maps of North and South America. With materials dating from the 16th to 21st centuries, the collection is unique in its scope of maps focusing on the United States. From 19th-century ribbon maps of the Mississippi to the world’s largest early world map, the collection is filled with special gems that show the wide variety of artistic maps produced throughout history. Eventually the collection expanded to include historical maps of the entire world. His collection, with more than 200,000 maps, is one of the largest private map collections in the United States.

Here’s the trailer for the new documentary:

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