I always have a tendency to go overboard when I develop an interest.

While on vacation in 1988 in New York‘s Adirondack Mountains, I found myself in a small bookstore, looking through a bin of old prints when I saw a nicely-colored old map. Because of my interest in geography, going back to when I collected stamps for a few years as a child, I immediately recognized the coastline as that of Lithuania and Poland. The map‘s cartouche read: “GERMANO-SARMATIA, VENEDI, et AESTIAE, PEUCINI et BASTARNAE, 1703, N. Sanson.” The store owner said he had no idea what the map depicted, and said he was certain that was why he hadn’t been able to sell it. I had no real idea of the map’s worth, but my $70 cash offer was immediately accepted.  Today, the same map in good condition goes for $750.

That purchase was the genesis of what has become (thanks originally to visits to map dealers in London and Amsterdam, and these days primarily to Internet auctions) a gallery of framed, original, antique maps of the Lithuania area all now housed in my Long Island City, New York, apartment, where I and my wife of 44 years live.  Most maps (dating from 1552) have a transparent label on the glass, listing the date, title and mapmaker.

My wife, Aileen Bassis, a frequently-exhibiting artist and much-published poet who sometimes uses maps, has always refused to allow me to post museum-type labels on the walls beneath the maps, saying they would make our home  look too much like a museum – my not-so-secret desire! So, as my collection grew, I created an illustrated catalog, with personal catalog numbers corresponding to   
the labels and locations, to facilitate a tour – which I happily used to offer visitors.  For 11 years, in Jersey City, New Jersey, my potential display area was tightly controlled: my wife’s and our friends’ art got the living and dining room walls, I got the hallways, the two bedrooms and one of two bathrooms. My wife said if I ran out of space in those areas, I could always use the ceilings.

The restrictions forced me to be creative: my bathroom was wall-papered with non-antique Lithuanian-area maps, and our second bedroom had a 6’ by 7’ pieced-together panoramic map (horizontally from Gdansk, Poland [and Stockholm, Sweden] to Smolensk, Russia; vertically from Helsinki, Finland [and St. Petersburg, Russia] to Warsaw, Poland [and Gomel, Belarus]) of declassified British military intelligence maps created to guide pilots in the event of a low-level invasion of the Soviet Union. The maps were divided into quadrants identified with the elevation of the highest structure within them, and included heights of smokestacks, TV antenna towers and steeples, surface markings like peat-cutting areas that would help a pilot orient himself, and known “shoot on sight” areas protected by Soviet artillery. In the lower center of the map was a red pin — the location of my father’s ancestral home in the
Žiežmariai area, halfway between Kaunas and Vilnius.

As of right now, in Long Island City, New York, in a smaller space, the master bedroom has a mix of my maps and a large piece by my wife, the second bedroom – which is also my office, has the balance of antique maps, and the second bathroom has a map of New York City area from space, with color-coded pins showing where I have lived, a subway map, and a great map of Newtown Creek, near which my family lived from 1949-52. This website gives me the ability to display and enjoy the maps I own when I’m away from home, and to display and enjoy the maps I may never own. I hope you enjoy them, too.

Andrew Kapochunas