• Job: Managing curator, Grey Parrot Gallery, Buckhead

Photos by KARL W. RITZLER/Special (ENLARGE)

Kenneth Hosley's job is part treasure hunter and part matchmaker. He searches for rare art, such as this Audubon print, as well as books and maps. Then he matches his discoveries with interested collectors.

(ENLARGE)

Curator Kenneth Hosley displays a map of Cherokee lands in Georgia.

• What I do: While most of us study maps to find out where we're going, Kenneth Hosley studies them to determine their age, origin and value.

He is managing curator of Grey Parrot Gallery, which specializes in rare books, maps and prints.

"I spend most of my time tracking down rare maps, manuscripts and books that people haven't seen for hundreds of years," said Hosley, 27.

He compared it to a treasure hunt through items in estates, in private collections and at auctions.

Much of his work is matchmaking — finding a rare item that a collector is looking for or matching a collector to something unusual that he's found.

"I'm always looking at what's out there," he said. "Some special items, one of a kind, may come up only every 50 years."

Among the rarities for sale at the gallery is an Ortellius world atlas from the 1630s — hand-colored, still in its original binding and worth about $250,000. An original print of a turkey from artist John James Audubon's Elephant Portfolio is priced at $165,000. Smaller, less-rare books and maps start at $35.

Many of the pieces in the gallery have Georgia connections, including Colonial-era maps that show the colony's boundaries extending west of the Mississippi River and pre-Civil War maps on which Atlanta is barely a dot.

Hosley spends a great deal of time researching his finds to put them in their proper historical context. That can involve hours of searching the Internet and looking for original sources of information in the University of Georgia's historical holdings in Athens or at the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah.

The search also can include going through private libraries or attics. "I've gotten many a cold from digging in the dust," he said.

• What got me interested in this: "I grew up around books," Hosley said. "There were always stacks of books" on the stairs in his home.

While a student at UGA, he worked in a rare-book store. After he graduated in 2003, Hosley was hired by collector Alex Branch to be his personal curator. When Branch opened Grey Parrot in November, where he is selling portions of his own collections, Hosley stayed on to work at the gallery.

• Best part of my job: "Finding one-of-a-kind pieces and working with people who love the same thing," Hosley said. "These are actual pieces of history. . . . To hold history in my hand — you can't get that anywhere else."

• Most challenging part: "Trying to find those one-of-a-kind pieces," he said. "Some people may look for one map or one book for a whole lifetime. When you find it, it's absolutely amazing."

Hosley said that, with the growth of the Internet in the 1990s, there was a flood of maps and manuscripts that came into the market, as collectors had access to many other collections for the first time.

Now, as rare items have found new homes, the supply of pieces is drying up.

"It's difficult to get acquisitions," Hosley said.

His personal collection primarily is "esoteric religious texts" that date from monastic times before the invention of the printing press.

• What people don't know about my job: "So few people even know my job exists. There are so few of us," he said.

"They're surprised [that rare books and maps] are even accessible. They think they only exist in a museum."

• What keeps me going: "Finding new pieces," he said. "Everything we have has a story behind it."

• Preparation needed for this job: "A lot of research," Hosley said. You also need a background in literature and history, and some map curators also have backgrounds in art.

"You have to know political history and foreign affairs," he said.

Hosley has a bachelor's degree in religious history from UGA, and he has been learning the rare books and maps business since college.

In addition, Hosley has founded a monastic order in the Episcopal Church and is a professional calligrapher.

- By Karl W. Ritzler, for ajcjobs. Got an interesting job that you love? E-mail your story to jobseditor@ajc.com.

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