All they wanted was to subdivide the lot

 

An LA realtor, told to clear out a cottage for demolition, found a million maps inside. The LA County Library  is overwhelmed:

Creason called the find unbelievable. "I think there are at least a million maps here," he said. "This dwarfs our collection — and we've been collecting for 100 years."

Creason returned to the home Thursday with 10 library employees and volunteers to box up the maps. The acquisition will give the city library one of the country's top five library map archives, behind the Library of Congress and public libraries in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, he said...

Creason expects that cataloging and organizing the maps will take as long as a year. "We may have to apply for a grant to sort through the fold-out maps and ask for help from the Library of Congress. The collection will take up about 600 feet of shelving," he said.

Veteran antiquarian map dealer Barry Ruderman of La Jolla would not put a price on the find. He inspected the collection Wednesday and discovered that the oldest piece was a 1592 map of Europe. Ruderman described Feathers as "more of a hoarder than a collector." Along with his maps, Feathers also collected tiny bars of hotel soap, restaurant matchbook covers and National Geographic magazines dating from 1915 to this year.