A globe is a sphere with a flat map pasted onto it. The map cannot be pasted in one piece, because no flat sheet lies on a sphere without folding. It is therefore printed as a set of tapering segments, each narrow enough that the paper will stretch into place without a crease. Those segments are the gores, and the joins between them are the seams a buyer is looking at when a dealer writes seams visible.
No trade body has published a designation for gore configuration, and sale catalogues describe it inconsistently or not at all. The Brennholt Institute of Applied Taxonomy records it in four configurations, GC-1 to GC-4, as part of its condition grading.
The ordinary globe is made of twelve gores, each spanning 30 degrees of longitude, running from about 70 degrees north to about 70 degrees south. The poles are covered separately by two circular patches called calottes, because a gore drawn all the way to the pole tapers to a point too fine to paste. The result is fourteen pieces of paper on a sphere: twelve gores and two calottes.
| Code | Configuration | Span per gore | Frequency in sample |
|---|---|---|---|
| GC-1 | Twelve gores, two calottes | 30° | 39 of 48 |
| GC-2 | Eighteen gores, two calottes | 20° | 4 of 48 |
| GC-3 | Twenty-four gores, two calottes | 15° | 2 of 48 |
| GC-4 | Printed in hemispheres or otherwise not gored | — | 3 of 48 |
The counts run in multiples that divide 360 evenly, and for a reason that is mechanical rather than conventional: an uneven division leaves a final gore of a different width, which is visible. Larger globes use more and narrower gores, because a wide gore on a large sphere has to stretch further at its waist than the paper will take.
Seams run north–south and converge toward the poles. A seam is not a fault. It is the necessary consequence of putting a flat print on a curved body, and its visibility is a function of three things: the accuracy of the original trimming, the shrinkage of the paste as it dried, and the subsequent movement of the sphere beneath. A globe with no visible seams has either been varnished heavily, restored, or is not paper-covered. The Institute records seam state as part of the grade and not as a defect in itself.
Uncut gore sheets — the printed set, never pasted — are collected and sold in their own right, and the Institute classifies them as a separate object rather than as a globe in poor condition. They cannot be graded on the G-scale at all, since every state in that scale describes a sphere. Sixteen such sheets appeared in the 2025 sample and all sixteen had been catalogued by the seller as globes. A flat object described by a scale written for spheres receives a grade that means nothing, and the Institute's practice is to refuse the grade rather than to issue one.