Thought I'd contribute my own life in OS maps. Having joined CCS at
roughly age 20 in about 1997 (andybody who has all the Sheetlines to
hand will be able to date this more precisely - my older copies are 120
miles from here), I reckon I'm one of the younger members. Had the
internet been widely available when I was a teenager, I would probably
have joined before that, but all I had to go on was David Archer's
address in a listing at the back of Peter Barber and Chris Board's book
'Tales from the Map Room' that accompanied the BBC TV series, and it
took a while before I wrote off to discover just what the CCS did. Since
then I have regarded it as amongst the best GBP 10 I spend each year.

My interest in maps may have started with tube diagrams - not true maps,
but even more so a 'tissue of lies', to quote Tales from the Map Room
again. This is too deep-rooted to date even approximately. By the time I
was about nine, my liking for proper maps was well-known enough for my
dad to get me a set of 1:1,250 maps covering our local area, and two of
the 1:10,000 sheets (inevitably we fell on the border of these), as a
birthday present. As a family we had a collection of assorted Landranger
and Pathfinder sheets, and, it transpired, my late grandfather's
collection of what turned out to be Popular, New Popular and Tourist
maps, as well as Bartholomews and a few others. I have never actively
collected (I'm now lucky enough to work with a nationally significant
museum collection including some internationally significant artefacts,
which is quite enough for one lifetime), but equally I've never thrown a
decent map of any age away. While known as a map geek by friends, by CCS
standards I remain very much a passive bystander.

Major influences from then on then included the still outstanding
British Library exhibition 'What use is a map?' and the aforementioned
Tales from the Map Room, as well as Mark Monmonier's US-oriented but
still relevant 'How to Lie With Maps'. By the time I got to university I
was also the proud owner of a site-centred 1:1,250 (which I recall was
extremely expensive at the time) to fill a gap in the aforementioned
set, and a flat Landranger (I lament the demise of these, the quality of
OS Select is not the same) sheet 139 for the wall of my room in the hall
of residence. It will be evident that nothing I own is rare or unusual,
but it pleases me. At university I got to borrow Margery volumes and
Seymour from the library and go back in OS history, and of course buy
Richard Oliver's 'Ordnance Survey Maps: A Concise Guide for Historians'.
My interest remains essentially casual, but subsequent revelations (this
is not overstretching the term) have been the reprint of J.H. Andrew's
'A Paper Landscape' (for my money one of the finest monographs on any
subject, map-related or otherwise), and Delano-Smith and Kain's 'English
Maps: A History', and the exhibition 'The Lie of the Land' at the BL.

It's not particularly hard to psychoanalyse my basic need for maps - I
need to know where I am, geographically, at all times, and this connects
right back to what child psychologists would term the pre-verbal stage.
Maps also enable me to pursue several of my generally interlinked
personal interests: landscape history, local history and topography,
transport and transport history, architectural history, place-name
studies, etc. etc. I am assuming that the Map Addict book will in due
course be a birthday present; I am told I'm easy to buy for!

Jack Kirby