Free THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT by Sarah Vowell

up and didn’t talk to me again for two years.”
    My favorite legend about the Grahamarader, one printed in The New Yorker , so presumably it may even be true, is that Graham once desired a map owned by a friend. Graham begged the man for it. Graham told the man that he needed the map, that he loved this map so much he wanted to hang it over his bed, that it would be the first thing that he saw when he got up in the morning and the last thing he saw when he went to sleep at night, that he wanted to conceive his children under it. The friend was so touched he sold the map to the Grahamarader, who promptly called the friend the very next day bragging that he’d sold it, and for a tidy profit at that.
    Map dealers, I came to learn, are not like that. As a group, they tend to be polite, bookish, and don’t inspire comparisons to Schwarzenegger or any other mythic pop figure. Graham is the map dealers’ Michael Milken, their Elvis Presley. In financial terms, he put antiquarian maps on the map. And he popularized them like no one ever had through sheer charisma. “The antiquarian map market before Graham Arader,” says Graham, “was a fairly sophisticated market. The people who collected had in-depth knowledge and understanding, I guess the effect that I had is that I brought map collecting to a lot more people who perhaps in the beginning were not as sophisticated. And the prices have gone up and I get blamed a lot.”
    In other words, he functions as the messiah of the map biz, or its Antichrist, depending on your point of view. The entire industry can be divided B.A., Before Arader, when many historical maps sold for a few hundred dollars, and A.A., after Arader, when the same maps began commanding tens of thousands of dollars.
    One by-product of Graham’s excitement and salesmanship is hyperbole. He carries around a small but well-used toolbox of superlatives, which he hammers into everything, words like Fabulous! and Greatest! and his favorite, Best! I think he formed the hyperbole habit by saying things like “John James Audubon is simply the finest bird painter who ever lived!” Perusing his catalogs, one learns that the engravings based on the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer’s Travels in the Interior of North America are “the most detailed study of the Plains Indians ever produced”; that George Catlin’s Indian lithographs are “one of the finest portrayals of Plains Indian life ever created”; and that Currier and Ives were responsible for “the most popular and highly regarded lithographs of quintessentially American scenes ever produced.” Maybe Graham always talked like that. Somehow, I can picture a five-year-old Graham telling his mother, “Mom, these are absolutely the greatest oatmeal scotchies ever baked in North America!”
    Graham Arader sells history. He’s a passionate historian. He probably knows as much about the history of cartography as any academic on the planet. It’s what he does with all the information in his head that always astonished me. Graham’s inventory encompasses the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Think about those dates. Think about the story being told in European and American maps of that era. Dutch maps of South Africa. French maps of New France. It is not just one story but two—a great adventure of nation building and the promise of the New World, but also one of theft and warfare and genocide. Guess which one of those stories sells maps?
    Watching him sell something is fun. It is exciting. It is patriotically inspiring. He showed me a map of America, cooing, “This … map … tells the story of Manifest Dessssssssssssstiny!” And I’m thinking, Yeah! Manifest Destiny! Wow! What a country! Then I catch myself, remembering, Oh yeah, Manifest Destiny. In fact, once, at the San Francisco gallery, a client walked in looking for Manifest Destiny memorabilia. I opened a drawer and pulled out a print copied from John Gast’s famous painting American Progress.