People who love to visit the Map Center will often pause as they leave and ask me, quietly, cautiously, how is the business doing? To the people who truly know and appreciate maps, The Map Center is a rare and precious thing. There are no more than a few map stores in the world even remotely like it. It’s also in a delicate and precarious position. Certainly no one sets off to make it rich selling maps these days but the reason that there are so many map lovers and so few map stores (that aren’t explicitly antique stores) is that the business model has never been very encouraging. This being the one year anniversary of my becoming the fourth and current owner of this venerable institution, I thought I’d let you all in on how the business is going in its first year and perhaps offer some advice to anyone interested in learning from my example.

New Andrew

I grew up in Central New York and moved out to Oakland California after college where I had been working as a GIS consultant. It was there that I saw the newspaper article floating around social media in the spring of 2023. An old guy was giving away a map store. I saw the Google Maps review of The Map Center and saw the pictures. I felt like I could smell the place from the photos. I sent Andy an email about what I would do with the place if given the opportunity. He said yes. He had plenty of suitors but I was one of the few applicants who actually made maps themselves. I flew out to visit and check the place out. It was in disarray and mostly relegated to shipping online orders. It wasn’t a public facing business and only the grizzled regulars who knew about the old store bothered to come. I had relatives who used to live in the region so I was not a stranger to Providence. I looked around a bit and decided I could probably live here for a while. If it didn’t work out, California would still be there.

My thinking was that, if a place like this were still reliably breaking even at this level of disaster, surely there were plenty of opportunities to make incremental improvements that would push me deeper into profitability. The rent was cheap, the facility was stocked and ready to go. If this crazy idea can’t work here, there’re very few other places where it could.

It wasn’t an easy decision to move across the country back to the East Coast where I grew up. I quite liked living in Oakland and I knew that starting a small business was tremendously hard work. I spent four months agonizing on my decision before coming to the conclusion that, if I had two good options before me, stay or go, I should choose the one that’s the better story. I moved to Rhode Island and became the fourth owner of New England’s oldest map store.

To justify this bonkers, hard left career turn, I put together some broad principles to guide me forward.

Values

1. Everyone cares about where they’re from even if they’re not proud of it. Maps can show the truth and that truth can be ugly but none of the maps get to be mean or diminish the value of a place that could be very special to someone. “Flyover country” is not a thing.

2. Adventure is a state of mind, not a destination. Travel without curiosity is just getting bored in a new place. Exploration starts at home.

3. Navigation apps are not the competition. In a world of free information, I do not sell information. I sell experiences, stories and fodder for the imagination.

4. All maps are wrong, some are useful. There is no single objective “right” map and that means that there is room for more maps from different perspectives. My map is as good as your map just as my way of seeing the world is as valid as yours. More maps from underrepresented people means more ways to love the places we already know.

5. New is better than old. Where I can, I support the makers of things, not the dealers of things and promoting the work of living authors and cartographers is vastly preferable to the scavenging of old books and razor blading out pages to be speculated on and sold by people who don’t do the work. If you love the craft, support the makers.

State of the Business

After a year of renovating, stocking, trying, failing, imagining, procrastinating and noodling, these are the products and services that make The Map Center work today.

Books are easy to sell and they don’t take up much of my time. I typically buy them at a 40% discount from a publisher and sell them at the recommended list price printed on the back. If they stick around too long, I add a discount. Lots of people like maps but not everyone can afford a big framed piece or wants a permanent addition to their interior decorating scheme so books are a nice offering. They’re about 30% of my gross revenue. One problem is that I can’t sell them fast enough to be a big part of my business. They’ll always be a sideline item.

Map Crap is the catch-all that Andy coined for the weird little stuff like map-themed envelopes, globe stress balls, inflatable beach ball globes and stickers. They’re fun but incidental. I’ve sold 3 globes in all of 2024 but I like having a few around if only to enhance the store’s look. I think it’s important for geography to be for everyone, including children and this seems to at least make the place friendlier seeming, I think, as opposed to the estate-sale aesthetic of an antique store.

Map tacks used to be a tent pole of the business and The Map Center at one point was one of the larger niche suppliers of pins for use in marking up maps. I’ve gotten a handful of largish orders mostly from academic institutions but they’re not big sellers and I have a drawer full of unsold ones that I don’t plan on replenishing. There are some drop-shippers online who manufacture world maps mounted on boards with the tacks ready to go and it’s a generic enough product that it’s difficult for me to compete with even if I wanted to.

Framing is a new skill for me. I started with plastic frames that are quick to set up but now I do my own glass cutting and frame assembly. Framing is expensive because it’s hard to do well and requires a certain amount of specialized equipment. I don’t sell more than one or two a month which suits my goals of selling fewer, higher value products. However, my goal of featuring more contemporary cartographers is somewhat at odds with this as there are very few contemporary maps that command the kind of respect that is usually reserved for antiques. I keep my inventory low and my options limited so I can do projects with quick turnaround and minimal labor. I’m getting better at walking away from projects that are beyond my expertise and refer folks happily to dedicated framing services. Providence Picture Frame has done some excellent work for me and we’ve referred work to each other. My work is good, rarely sophisticated and probably under-priced despite the quiet sighs I often see from folks when I tell them how much it costs.

Laminating and mounting are great value-adds to a lower cost paper print. A piece of paper may be the product of years of labor but it still feels flimsy and insubstantial until it is framed or mounted. I’ve gotten a lot better at both of these processes and I have reduced the labor required to perform them while increasing the quality of my production. I should probably be charging more for these services. Not many people in New England have a vacuum laminator like I do. It’s still a fairly low-volume service even when I open the door to non-map work.

Maps are obviously the biggest part of my revenue stream. I do a tidy business selling USGS topographic quadrangles but owing to the specific needs of the customer, more often than not I’m printing a new quad from the USGS database rather than digging through my extensive collection of already printed maps. Custom prints don’t cost much to make, they just take up my time which of course is limited. To print a single map might take 20 minutes and I can hardly sell each print for more than $30. I have drawers and drawers of out-of-the-way places like rural Maine that are probably never going to get sold and I think about how I’d like to free up that space with products that have higher turnover. I also sell posters and maps that I buy wholesale from independent makers and I usually aim for a 40% wholesale discount unless it’s a smaller maker with tighter margins. Right now I have partnerships with about a dozen cartographers. One big change I’ve made is completely sidelining world maps, reference maps and street maps because these are direct competitors with online navigation apps and wikipedia. They are very rarely purchased and aren’t particularly interesting to me personally. It makes sense that the people who use them don’t buy them online but these are small items with low demand that take up a lot of shelf space and often consume more of my time with restocking and providing in store assistance than they’re worth. Nonetheless, I almost feel contractually obliged to keep a few on the shelves. I’ve reduced their shelf space by about 90% to free up space I hope will go to more lucrative offerings. I need to get better at refusing to do research for people or picking out specific maps. It’s a privilege to work in a field where so many people want to tell me about personal things like vacations and first homes etc but I just don’t have the time for it and if I charged a consulting fee I’m sure I’d start a riot.

Classes are loads of fun. There’s a decent demand for having a real-live cartographer come to visit but school’s don’t often have deep pockets, nor do their students. If I came up with more group activities that could captivate more than 50 kids at a time I might have something to work with. So far I’ve hosted home-school students at the store for a field trip and I’ve visited one private school classroom as a paid experiences and I’d love to do more of them. I really think that physical paper objects are something of a fascination for the digital natives out there and kids are naturally curious about the way of thinking maps require. In contrast to my older patrons’ complaints, kids are some of my biggest fans and I think there’s some opportunity for growth there. I also have a paid speaking engagement booked with an senior living center and once I have a portfolio of talks written I’ll be better prepared to make the circuits if there is any demand. I’m optimistic that there is.

Consulting is brand new for me. Or rather, I’ve been a consultant doing technical projects using GIS for a number of clients for the past decade but using my status as a very minor cartographic celebrity and small business owner, I am starting to build a brand as a passionate map interpreter who can help museums and educators use maps in socially responsive ways. Doing retail involves a lot of waiting for customers to come which means I want to keep myself productively occupied in between visitors. If I had a steady flow of consulting jobs I might be able to fill in the gaps of the retail business. One of the big downsides of running The Map Center is that it ties me to this building. Doing more consulting would give me a business reason to get out more which would be amazing for my mental health.

My real job is making digital maps remotely for clients as a full time contractor. I work from home from The Map Center where I take business calls while pushing a broom. It’s not particularly demanding as a stand-alone job but combined with managing The Map Center, it amounts to about 60 hours a week. I’d be much better at it if this were my only job. I take weekends very sporadically and I’ve been at this pace for a little over a year. My employer knows about The Map Center and even considered it a plus while hiring me as it indicated a true passion for my field, which it does. However, the more my attention and energy are divided, the less is left remaining for the tasks that keep me fed. It should be a priority but I admit that running The Map Center is often an enormous distraction.

So how has that all been working? Well, I’ve been consistently making about $1-2k of profit per month in the regular season, excluding of course a paycheck. Since I haven’t paid myself from the business I’ve been investing every new dollar of sales back into inventory, supplies and equipment for production. While my business bank account has swelled, the real increase in value is in the store itself. I think the business’ net worth has increased by about $20k, which is impressive and also a very small sum in the grand scheme of things. The Christmas shopping season this year has seen higher sales numbers than ever before but I’m still nervous that a middle class income from The Map Center will probably require that I make about 3 times the sales numbers as I do during the best shopping season of the year, every month around the calendar. Every month has to be MegaDecember for this to work out. This means that I’m still probably a long ways away from drawing a paycheck from the business as I still need to put that revenue towards growth. I don’t have a clear concept of how that growth should look.

Genesis

When it was founded in 1953, The Map Center was on Weybosset Street on the sixth floor overlooking The Arcade in downtown Providence. So far as I can tell, it did a tidy business for several decades until 1981 when a twenty-something Williams College grad from New York City named Andy Nosal, having just realized he wasn’t cut out for the corporate world, bought The Map Center with the intention of making it his career and primary occupation. He commissioned a new logo, moved the desk and set up shop at a newer location on North Main St.

Andy had a good run. He made the store a regional staple by selling maps to truck dispatchers, geologists, surveyors, property owners and curious geography nerds. He was an early adopter of the internet and curated his own website at a time it wasn’t yet fashionable to do so. At the risk of sounding patronizing to my younger readers, there was a day long ago when buying a gas station 8-fold map was essential to getting wherever it was you were going and a wall map of the world was a good way to track the dissolution of Yugoslavia. It was a fairly reliable industry until the advent of on-board GPS navigation in cars and later, ubiquitous navigation aps on mobile devices. Mapquest came out in 1996. Google Maps in 2005. The iPhone in 2007. It was about this time the Map Center started to falter.

A fire at the North Main St location took out most of Andy’s stock. The business wasn’t bouncing back. Andy hadn’t been able to hire help the way he once had. Demand was diminishing and he was lonely spending so much time in an empty store. By 2017, Andy was open only “as a kind of public-spirited performance art, for the pleasure of meeting interesting customers, and from sheer inertia.” He shuttered the North Main Street location and went fully online. Google Reviews from this era are a combination of fascination, gratitude and disappointment. Most people assumed he had gone out of business. His friends encouraged him to downsize and move the store up the street to 545 Pawtucket Ave to be one tenant in a large space occupied by two other businesses. From then on, The Map Center was a small studio carved into the Mills at 545 Pawtucket Ave, hunkered in the shadow of two slightly more successful endeavors. It was a hobby business appreciated by a dwindling number of devoted but aging customers.

Andy had made overtures to sell the business for years but in March of 2023, he went further and sought out a sucker to whom he could just give the store away to. He found me.