GUEST: The map belonged to my husband. He found it in a house in London that he and a friend were fixing up wrapped in a n, newspaper.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: And it was hidden in a, a compartment near a fireplace. He very carefully unwrapped it, and, and then we had it the whole time we were married.
APPRAISER: Oh, wow, so when did he find the map in the wall?
GUEST: I think he found it sometime at the end of the '50s...
APPRAISER: (gasps): Fantastic!
GUEST: ...or the 1960s. On the embroidery, it says "Tottenham," which is part of London, and apparently that was a, a very prosperous area that wa, had to do with trading.
APPRAISER: So what we have here is "A map of the world with the latest discoveries" by Jane Young, 1791. It's a sampler double hemisphere map, and the needlework is all hand-done. It is absolutely magnificent quality. Technically, as a sampler, it, it is very accomplished piece. And it's so hard to do embroidery in those tiny, tiny fine lines. There's no ink on this map, and that makes her a great artist. She's showing the world from the 16th century all the way up into possibly 1750? I wonder if she used several different maps to source the material, because you see many different time periods depicted. Geographically speaking, it's a British view of the world at the time, a, around 1740. So it's a, very much a colonial sentiment. You've got the 13 colonies in North America. You've got, all of West Africa's named Negroland. And so, it's a look back on what Britain thought of the world at the time. The tradition of geography embroidery started in England around 1770, and it became, uh, all the rage. It was very fashionable for young women who were well-to-do to study geography through embroidery. It's the nicest-quality embroidery I've ever seen on a sampler, and that makes me think that it, it was a sampler that was maybe what we would call the mother map, or the, or the sample map that would have been used to make other maps? As this tradition continued all throughout England, people mostly did maps of England. Very few institutions have world maps, number one. And then number two, the world maps that I've seen have been silk. I believe this is, uh, possibly linen, and that's why it's survived so well. It's hard to put a value on it because there's not a lot of auction records. I would put a value on it in a retail setting between, uh, $7,500 and $8,500.
GUEST: Oh, very good.
