FAQ

Questions About The Map Room

Advertising
I don’t sell advertising space on this site directly. If you want to advertise on The Map Room, you may wish to use Google AdWords, and use site targeting to focus your ads on this site (I’ve made two of my ad channels targetable). Ads on The Map Room are either Google AdSense or affiliate programs. AdSense ads are determined automatically: the presence of an ad does not represent an endorsement on my part.
Book Reviews
Books submitted for review should have maps, cartography or mapmaking as their primary focus. As an amateur, I am unable to review technical books for programmers or geospatial professionals; historical monographs are fine. Books may be mailed to the following address:
Jonathan Crowe
PO Box 473
Shawville QC  J0X 2Y0
CANADA
Do not send via courier or UPS. I can’t promise that I will review every book sent to me, or that I will review it promptly or favourably. Reviews will link to Amazon.com with my associate ID, and I will indicate if I have received a review copy. I don’t solicit publishers for review copies, but books I’m interested in reviewing are listed on The Map Room’s wish list. Reviews of the following books are in the works: See my previous book reviews.
Broken Links
Links are (hopefully) accurate at the time an entry is posted. However, old links expire all the time: newspapers remove stories, sites go offline. With more than 2,000 entries over nearly five years, I don’t have enough time to update old entries when their links break. But if there’s a fixable typo in a URL, or a broken internal link, please let me know.
Commenting on an Entry
Comments are always welcome, but the enormous volume of comment spam has forced me to take measures that can get in the way of commenting. Along with spam filters, TypeKey registration is now required to comment (it’s free and can be used on many other blogs). If you’re having trouble posting a comment, please make sure your browser accepts cookies from third-party servers. It may also be because of a temporary glitch with one of several systems (try again later) or the comments have been closed on the entry (comments close 30 days after the entry has been posted). My server can also get slow and unresponsive, and it sometimes takes a minute or two for your comment to go through.
Promoting Your Product or Service
The Map Room is aimed at a non-professional audience. Unless your product is of sufficient interest to that audience, even to people who don’t buy your product, I won’t write about it. Bottom line, there has to be something of interest beyond your commercial self-interest. Be newsworthy; I don’t provide free advertising.
Site Outages
I report site outages and other technical problems on this blog. My hosting provider, DreamHost, also provides a status blog where downtime is reported.

Questions About Maps

Appraising a Map’s Value
I can’t provide an appraisal of your map over the Internet — I’m not even remotely qualified to do so. And, as Chris pointed out when I posted this question generically, “free appraisals are worth what you pay for them.” Even access to price listings cost money: the Antique Map Price Record is a CD-ROM-based price listing that costs $149 (see previous entry). OldMaps.com has a price finding tool, but it’s by subscription — from $7.95 for a single day to $99.95 a year. It isn’t cheap, but neither are the maps in question, supposedly.
Buying and Selling Maps
I don’t sell maps. I don’t buy them through this web site, either.
Finding a Map of a Specific Location
Can’t help you there, sorry.
Homework Questions (Basic Geography Questions)
Can’t help you there either. I graduated high school before you were born; I don’t need to work on high school assignments again.

More to come.