Flea Market Finds

When there’s no schoolwork to fill up the weekends, there’s little guilt (I’m not going to say none at all) about truly taking your time and relaxing. This weekend, after four years of undergraduate life here in DC, I finally made it out to Eastern Market, the whatever goes open air market for furniture, collectables, and foodstuffs. We’d been there over an hour when we came across the tent with bucket after plastic bucket of old maps. As the child who spent many an afternoon amusing herself via a world atlas, I had to look at them all.

Here’s what I bought:

A map of Egypt and what would eventually become Sudan, from 1894. There were several versions, all from different times, of the upper northeast part of Africa, but I chose this one because it was the oldest, the most colorful, and shows how important the Nile is to life in Egypt (there are no cities after a certain distance away, just true, vast emptiness)

A double print of the Pyramids at Giza, from a date unknown, but from an educational publishing company that went under in 1960. The original 8x10s are now in a university archive, but this surprising pair is no bigger than 6 inches. There’s a great and unintentional description as well on the back, about the peasant life in Egypt.

Things I did not buy: Every map that struck my fancy, wooden furniture and afghani rugs, old advertisements for soap products from the 1950s.