NRO Weekend, September 9-10, 2000
The Book Breaker
There may be more definitive books on maps-but none so much fun.

By John J. Miller, NR's national political reporter

The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, by Miles Harvey (Random House, 405 pp., $24.95)

n a basement wall at the University of Washington's Kenneth S. Allen Library in Seattle hangs a line from John Muir: "Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it." Nobody can say for sure whether Gilbert Bland read these words on his visit there in 1995, when he plunked down a phony ID and made a beeline for the rare-manuscript division. If he did, he paid them no heed: Bland requested a 17th-century book called Ogilby's America and sliced out four of its maps with a razor blade. He hid them under his shirt and walked out. The book was reshelved. There were no witnesses.

A few months later, a graduate student at the Peabody Library in Baltimore looked up from her work and saw Bland flipping through the pages of a musty volume. Something about him aroused her suspicion. Before long, she was certain that he was what bookhounds call a "slasher"-someone who cuts out illustrations from old tomes. She informed library officials, and that led to a low-speed chase around the 178-foot-tall Washington Monument in Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood. Eventually Bland was cornered by the library's security guards. On his person they found four 200-year-old maps.

The story might have ended there, as a minor crime briefly noted in the local newspapers. Bland offered to pay cash on the spot for his release. The library accepted, leery of bad publicity and taking the advice of cops who thought Bland was an amateur crook who would make bail and skip town anyway. The two sides settled on a book-repair bill of $700, and Bland was on his way. But he made a fatal mistake-he accidentally left behind notes detailing his travels to libraries around the country, as well as his extraordinary hit list. Soon the FBI was involved, tracking down a criminal Miles Harvey dubs "the Al Capone of cartography, the greatest American map thief in history."

In The Island of Lost Maps, Harvey describes the odd case of Gilbert Bland, a man guilty of committing the closest thing to rape that a library can experience, dozens of times over. Bland would identify his quarry-maps in old books-far in advance, often over the Internet. Then he would plan trips to some of the best collections in the United States and Canada, pilfer a handful of maps at each stop, and sell them for thousands of dollars to collectors who weren't particularly concerned about provenance. Bland managed it all with astonishing ease-until his blunder in Baltimore.

Harvey tells a kind of detective story, working backward from Bland's apprehension and relating how authorities discovered the magnitude of his offenses. He performs plenty of gumshoe journalism himself on a subject who refused all overtures from his unauthorized biographer. Yet The Island of Lost Maps is more than a tale of true crime. There's a rule in the antique-map business that sometimes the parts of a book are worth more than their sum-i.e., the value of its maps, torn out and sold separately, exceeds the value of keeping them bound in one volume. This leads to a practice called "book breaking," and it understandably horrifies librarians and other purists.

In a way, The Island of Lost Maps is itself a book that cries out for breaking. The story of Bland is interesting, but Harvey's asides are engrossing. He discusses everything from library security (almost an oxymoron) to the psychology of map collecting (aficionados supposedly tend to come from broken families or ones that move around a lot)-all with a flair for page-turning prose.

The most intriguing parts of the book relate a history of map crime. Gilbert Bland, in his own way, is part of a tradition. The book he ransacked in Seattle, for instance, is itself the product of map theft. John Ogilby, who was once England's royal cosmographer, based his map of Virginia on one that had been drawn up by another mapmaker. And that map, in turn, was identical to one that's even older, which itself may have been based on yet another cartographer's handiwork. The duplication is like software piracy circa 1670. Modern mapmakers often prevent plagiarism by deliberately burying insignificant but telling errors in their work. One technique involves "trap streets"-mapping tiny cul-de-sacs that don't exist in suburban developments that do.

That may work nowadays, but map larceny was a major concern of the European powers during the Age of Exploration. Each one guarded its maps like gold. Portugal, for instance, didn't want competing nations to know how to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and on to India. Ferdinand Magellan himself stole trade secrets from Portugal for Spain, and Harvey argues that Magellan might not have located the strait that now bears his name without this information.

What goes around comes around: Francis Drake captured Spanish charts in 1579 that may have encouraged him to head west from South America and circle the globe, rather than turn back on the warships in pursuit of him.

At times, Harvey can become a bit too precious, such as when he tells how Bland ran a South Florida map store in a strip mall called The Gardens-and proceeds to discuss for several pages where some cartographers used to place the Garden of Eden on their maps. At other points, he gratuitously thrusts himself into the book: "With each passing month, it seemed that I was searching less for an actual person named Gilbert Bland than for some dark and unexplored part of my own existence." Please, let's leave that place labeled terra incognita.

Yet this is a fascinating work-a successful cross between The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester and The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. (Both these authors, incidentally, warmly endorse the Harvey book in jacket blurbs.) There may be more definitive books on maps-a revised edition of The Mapmakers, by John Noble Wilford, is just out from Knopf-but perhaps none is so much fun.