The Aardvark Blog

What a month it has been
7/05/2014

Looking at the entry I see that it is a month since the last blog, and yet so much has happened in the intervening period that it seems to have been much longer.

Following on from the death of my colleague and co-founder of Aardvark Edward Tobin at the beginning of April, we launched the poster exhibition the next weekend, we ran our biggest ever Easter event and then last Saturday we opened our giant map exhibition: 'Mapping Wales and the Council of the Marches'. This exhibition runs until the 18th of May, and already hundreds of people have viewed it, and over a 1/3rd of the maps have sold. It is extraordinary how over the last few years Aardvark has built a reputation for our innovative exhibitions on antique maps. Although I have always been interested in maps and have owned a number over the years, it was only the chance of buying a large collection of maps from a single county, that led us to where we are now.

In the week before the exhibition I took a call from one of the map curators at the British Library, and he was a little stunned that an exhibtion of the size of this event was taking place outside London and in a commercial company. One of the elements that makes our exhibitions special is the amount of research that we do and the quality of the commentary that accompanies the exhibits. In this case we were inspired to mount the exhibition by finding out about Ludlow's part in the founding and running of the Council of the Marches (an important judicial and administrative body that ran from the end of the fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century). We are hoping that this exhibition is just the beginning of our engagement with the Council, and we will be looking to produce a publication on Ludlow and the Council of the Marches over the next few years.

The memorial for Edward will be on the 23rd of May at 2pm in Brampton Bryan Church. His legacy however will continue for as long as Aardvark is in business.