Neighborhood Reads
Those of us who were born in a year beginning with the numbers one and nine can remember a time when physical maps were an essential tool for navigating the world. We’d struggle to fold and unfold them as we made our way around new cities, or we’d wrestle the giant spiral-bound atlas out of the back seat before traveling to an unfamiliar part of town.
While the digital maps on our phones have largely replaced paper maps in our daily lives, maps and cartography still play an essential role in the human experience, telling us where we are and showing us where we’re going next.
Seattle is lucky enough to be home to one of the finest map stores in the world: Metsker Maps. Founded in 1901 by Charles F. Metsker as a vital resource for loggers and surveyors, Metsker Maps was based in Tacoma for the first 30 years of its existence before moving north to Seattle. In 1999, Metsker Maps was purchased by Belltown-based mapmaker Kroll Map Company, transforming a longtime rivalry into a vital partnership. You can still find freshly printed copies of Kroll’s gorgeous maps throughout the store, and Renate Kroll, a descendant of the storied Seattle mapmakers, is a part-owner of the store.
Longtime Seattleites probably recall Metsker’s Pioneer Square storefront, not far away from Elliott Bay Book Company’s original location. The austere neon sign on the front of that old brick building — “MAPS OF ALL KINDS,” it promises, in a clean white font on a pine-green background — announced the shop from 1980 to 2004, when Metsker Maps moved several blocks north to the Sanitary Market Building in Pike Place Market, on First Avenue. That same neon sign now hangs inside the shop, cheerily welcoming tourists and locals alike to a truly remarkable institution.
Metsker Maps isn’t a huge store, but it’s packed full of virtually any map-related item you could imagine: globes, puzzles made from maps, historical maps, atlases of the bottom of the ocean, the night sky, and fictional places, and electronic maps that show which parts of the world are currently in daytime and which are in nighttime.
You’ll find topographic maps charting the great mountains of the Pacific Northwest and wooden charts defining the mysterious depths of Puget Sound. Metsker Maps is packed with anything a world traveler might need too: Travel guides, nonfiction travel narratives, mushroom foraging guides, fishing maps, and charts, books and posters celebrating the great national parks.
Skip Ross, the manager and part-owner of Metsker Maps, started at the store back in 1985, as a fresh college graduate with a geography major. “I was hoping to get into cartography, making maps,” Ross says, and he thought a job at the map store would be “a foot in the door. I haven’t been able to get my foot out of that door since,” he laughs.
Ross says a quarter of Metsker’s 12 employees have worked at the shop since the 1980s — a remarkable retention rate for any retail job. “They love what they’re doing,” Ross explains. “They’re map people.”
They’re not alone; many customers and visitors are secret geography nerds. Every day, Metsker Maps employees post a sandwich board in front of the store with drawings of the outlines of one U.S. state and one country. Passersby are encouraged to identify the mystery places, and pretty much all day, every day, tourists and locals alike run inside with their guesses, hoping for validation from the geographic experts behind the counter.
While Ross admits that the map-selling business has “changed quite a bit” over the course of his four decades at the shop, he says people are still eager for maps.
“Sales of folded street maps obviously are down because of Google Maps,” Ross says. “But people still want to see the big picture when they’re planning a trip. It’s hard to plan a trip on your phone.” And while international map sales declined during the pandemic, Ross says, “People started doing more domestic travel, and we were selling national park maps like crazy.”
The sales of larger maps as works of art have expanded even as pocket-size map sales have declined. “We sell a lot of wall maps,” Ross says, including “world maps of various sizes” and maps of historical interest. Kroll Map Company can produce reproductions of any of the maps archived by the Library of Congress “so we’re able to make high-quality prints of antique maps of all different kinds of cities and countries,” Ross explains.
And as map use has changed, enterprising cartographers have invented new ways for people to enjoy maps. The store sells a variety of maps that allow people to scratch off places they’ve visited, lotto ticket-style. Ross says the United States and international versions of those scratch-off maps are bestsellers, along with scratch-off posters showing every baseball stadium in America.
Ultimately, Ross says, Metsker Maps has thrived because “we pride ourselves on being very attentive. We personally answer the phones, we answer emails.” He says that “hands-on help” from people who are fanatical about their love of maps and mapmaking makes all the difference.
If you’re suffering from wanderlust, the staff of Metsker Maps will equip you with everything you need to chart your course, giving you the confidence to find your way.
What are Metsker Maps customers buying?
Skip Ross, the manager and part-owner of Metsker Maps says one map that has always been a staff favorite is the World Beat Music Map, “a world map that’s made of music notes, and it’s actually a playable piece. We get it from a music store in Texas, and people that are into music love it.” Locally, he says panoramic maps depicting which mountains are visible from Seattle and maps laying out the bodies of water in the area are perennial bestsellers.
In terms of books, Ross says that Atlas Obscura’s encyclopedia of interesting and bizarre locations has been on the store bestseller list for years, as has Tim Marshall’s “Prisoners of Geography,” which uses 10 maps to explain the world.
Metsker Maps customers love to browse through big beautiful books of maps and two gorgeous new books proved to be especially popular for the holiday season: “Iconic Transit Maps,” which collects some of the world’s most beautiful representations of public transit systems, and “The Man Behind the Maps,” an extravagant hardcover collection of James Niehues’ hand-drawn ski maps, has been a favorite for people who love winter sports. It’s not uncommon to see customers standing stunned in front of the store’s reading copy of the latter title, taking in all the sumptuous details.
Correction: This story has been updated to indicate that Kroll Map Company purchased Metsker Maps in 1999. The original story had incorrectly said Metsker merged with Kroll in the 1980s.