The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  With the book from Menges, Etherington’s approach was the same as it has been on thousands of other old texts. The overall goal was to save as much of the old material as possible. In this case, however, some elements were beyond hope. “The binding had deteriorated and we couldn’t restore it,” said Etherington. “So that’s the first decision: All right, we can’t save this binding, so we’re going to rebind it. And then, what you do is take off the old binding and clean the old spine. And then you go to the text block to see if it is sound—to see whether it needs restoring or whatever—because that’s a major decision. If you get into taking the text block apart, it’s what we call major intervention, because you are getting into the original structure and maybe changing it. Minimal intervention is when you don’t do too much to change the original configuration of the book.”

  Only minimal intervention was needed on the Ogilby. Other than some torn maps, which had to be carefully patched with material known as Japanese paper, the text block did not need much work. Etherington and his staff could focus on the binding. “A new binding generally has new boards and new endpapers,” he said. “Endpapers are the papers you put on either side of the text block. They’re the connectors between the cover and the book. And then you decide what kind of cover you’re going to put on the text block.”

  It was decided to use a leather binding that—while not as ornately decorated as the one that had preceded it—would be both faithful to the era in which the book was published and durable enough to be used widely by library patrons. But even such a no-frills cover required meticulous craftsmanship. “You have to pare the leather, which means you thin it down on the edges,” he explained. “Then you paste the leather out, and then you form the leather around the boards of the book. You turn the leather in and then you let it dry, and once you’ve done that you put the endpapers down.”

  Once the binding was completed, the book was ready for shipment back to Seattle. Even though it had not been Etherington’s most high-profile assignment, there was, as always, “that satisfaction of saving something from deterioration or the trash,” he said. “And that’s the difference between book conservators and other kinds of conservators. We’re actually restoring objects to be reused, not just to be put in a museum … which I think is great. I don’t think we should be restoring things to put in a glass case, never to be handled. Books were never designed to not be read.”

  And this one would be read, at long last. The cataloging process having been completed, America was made available to patrons of the Allen Library in June 1995. Gary Menges’s effort to get it on the shelves had taken five years.

  Perhaps you’ve already guessed what happened next. If so, it won’t surprise you that on October 4, 1995, a stranger walked into the Special Collections and Preservation Division and approached the reference desk, where Menges was working. Nor will you be shocked that the man was wearing a blue blazer and, according to Menges, “looked very normal. He could have been a faculty member or a book collector. He wasn’t anyone that you would be suspicious of from his appearance or the way he acted.” Perhaps you’ve figured out by now that the man filled out a call slip for John Ogilby’s America and that, as Menges recalled, “I told him that it was a wonderful book and went and got it for him.” And if you’ve deduced all of this, then you need not be told that the stranger had identified himself as James Perry. There may be only one dark little detail you don’t already know: he was the very first patron to handle the book.

  On the day I interviewed Gary Menges at his office, he calmly recounted the story of the intruder’s visit to the library, then stood and led me over to the book. Its thick new leather binding was magnificent, but beneath the cover much was amiss. One of the four maps the thief had sliced from the book was still missing, apparently gone forever. The three others had, in the intervening months, been returned by law enforcement officials and now lay next to the volume.8 They could be reattached—perhaps even well enough so that a casual observer might not notice any damage—but the book’s integrity and monetary value had been irreparably harmed. That was especially true because a number of additional pages had been left half-mangled by deep slashes along the fold. “See how he cut the title page here?” Menges said, gesturing to one razor-scarred page. “He would cut very fast when somebody wasn’t looking. And in doing so, he would cut through other pages like this one.”

  I had seen similarly mutilated books at other libraries but still found the sight chilling. And I wondered how it made someone like Menges feel. The conservator Don Etherington once confessed that it pains him to see even a cheap paperback ill-treated. “When you spend a whole life doing the work we do, you don’t even like to see people turning the corners of books,” he said. “You know how people turn in the corners to mark something when they’re reading? Well, it gives you a little gut check. You feel like saying to the person, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’ That sounds a bit stupid, really—but that’s the way you are. If you’re in this business, you have that innate sense that you don’t want these things to be mishandled.”

  And as for someone who would destroy a rare and beautiful book like the Ogilby? “You’d like to cut his balls off, basically,” said Etherington.

  As I watched Menges, however, I could see none of Etherington’s ire. He looked concerned, to be sure, but calm. Nor had I perceived any great wrath during a phone interview a few days before my visit to Seattle, when I asked the librarian to describe his feelings about the theft. “Of course, one is angry,” he said, choosing each word carefully. “You put personal effort into obtaining a book for the collection and getting it conserved and making it available to people. And then the first person who uses it comes in and cuts out maps. Obviously, one is not very happy about that.”

  By coming here, I had thought that I might get a more impassioned reaction. In the smarmy theatrics of my imagination, I had conjured up scenes in which Menges prostrated himself over the book, cursing the Library Gods and raining tears down upon the ruins of the text. Now, however, I realized just how silly such expectations had been. Gary Menges was not mourning the past. He was already looking to the future, telling me about his plans for repairing the book. He had saved it from oblivion once, and would do so again. The Keeper of the Books must never rest.

  HOW BIG IS THE WORLD? FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN mapmaking, that question is about as fundamental as they come. The first person to make a scientific measurement of the Earth’s circumference, however, was not a cartographer but a librarian.

  His name was Eratosthenes, and, from about 235 B.C. until about 195 B.C., he was head of the library at Alexandria, one of the most legendary sites in all of antiquity. Alexandria was then the largest city in the world, a hub of Hellenistic trade and learning. The city had been founded around 332 B.C. by Alexander the Great; the library was established a few decades later—and quickly set about accumulating texts the way Alexander had acquired territory. Agents fanned out across the known world with orders to bring back the works of what one contemporary observer described as “poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians and all the others too.”9 Scholars were brought in to translate the texts of cultures from Europe to North Africa and India. Ships arriving in Alexandria’s harbor were forced to lend the library any books they might have on board. Copies of the books—made on cheap papyrus—were eventually returned to the owners, but the originals remained in Alexandria. The library’s goal was audacious: to gather, under one roof, every book ever written.

  It never happened. Although, at its height, the great library built a collection of as many as seven hundred thousand rolls of papyrus, it was doomed to an inauspicious fate. No one can be precisely sure what became of it. Leading theories have the library being (a) burned by Julius Caesar in the first century B.C., (b) gutted by early Christian fanatics, (c) destroyed by Arab invaders in the seventh century A.D., (d) wasted slowly by the forces of time, or (e) all of the above. At
any rate, the library vanished—but not before it helped the rest of the world to become visible. Claudius Ptolemy apparently studied there in preparation for his landmark Geographia. So did another prominent Greek geographer, Strabo, whose insistence that “it is possible to sail round the inhabited world on both sides, from the east as well as the west,” inspired Columbus and other explorers to seek out new routes to the Indies. And then there was Eratosthenes. Thanks to a combination of brilliant abstract thinking and practical geometry (not to mention a bit of luck), he was able to deduce the Earth’s circumference by measuring the shadow of a single obelisk. His estimate is hard to pin down because of our imprecise understanding of ancient Greek units of measurement. But modern scholars agree that his guess was astonishingly close to the mark. In fact, “Eratosthenes’ measurement may have been within two hundred miles of the correct figure of the circumference of the earth,” wrote the map historian Norman J. W. Thrower.

  In those days, size mattered. Or, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1958 work, The Human Condition, “distance ruled.”10 It was perhaps the single most important issue for every cartographer and explorer until as late as the nineteenth century. Columbus, for example, believed that the distance between the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa, and Japan was only 2,760 miles.11 He might never have set sail—or been allowed to—had he known that his estimate was short by nearly 9,500 miles. And Magellan? He “had not the remotest idea of the width of the Pacific Ocean, uncrossed as yet by any European,” wrote the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who concluded that all authoritative estimates Magellan could have known about were at least 80 percent short of the actual distance.12 The captain and his crew were so ill-prepared for the vastness of the Pacific that during their one-hundred-day crossing they were forced to eat rats, leather, and sawdust.

  In overcoming such hardships, those two journeys accomplished the miraculous: they made the world bigger. And for hundreds of years it continued to grow. But then—once the map was finally filled in—a curious thing happened: the world started getting smaller again. In The Human Condition, Arendt described “the shrinkage of space and the abolition of distance through railroads, steamships, and airplanes.”13 And since her time the withering of the world has become even more profound. On the desk in front of me now is a book called The Death of Distance. Its bold thesis is summarized on the dust jacket: “Geography, borders, time zones—all are rapidly becoming irrelevant … courtesy of the communications revolution.”

  Geography irrelevant? Columbus and Magellan would have found such a concept both absurd and depressing. Yet I have to concede that Frances Cairncross, the author of The Death of Distance, makes a fairly convincing argument about how new telephone, television, and computer technologies “will help to shrink the world and to make people realize the extent to which, in John Donne’s words, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ ”14

  As I was reading The Death of Distance, it occurred to me that there are now two types of adventurers. The old breed—the kind who once slogged forth into the great unknown, back when there was enough unknown left to accurately describe it as “great”—is an endangered species, and not a happy one, either. The old breed does not want to be part of the main. It yearns for islands. It feels grounded in the global village. As the mountain climber Gaston Rébuffat once put it, “In this modern age, very little remains that is real: night has been banished, so have the cold, the wind, and the stars.”15 And so the old breed finds itself jammed into the last fragments of true man versus nature wilderness, adventure ghettos like Mount Everest.

  The new breed talks much the same game as the old, appropriating Age of Discovery language to describe Age of Information concepts (Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Explorer). But the similarities end there. The new breed has no need for physical wilderness. It celebrates the fact that, as Rébuffat put it, very little remains that is real. The new breed dances on the grave of poor old Distance, believing that in cyberspace all vistas are endless. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt, one of the last great icons of the old breed, argued that the adventurer’s heart “must thrill for the saddle and not the hearthstone.”16 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the new breed of adventurer must thrill only for the placid glow of a computer screen.

  In his own curious quest, Gilbert Bland seems to have had in common with the old breed a certain compulsion toward risk. But for the most part he was solidly of the new breed. In the early 1990s, before turning his interest to maps, Bland ran a computer consulting firm, and he apparently put his technical knowledge to good use during his crime spree. He did not make his actual conquests on the Web, of course. But, according to law enforcement officials, he did do his exploration and discovery there—using the Internet, for example, to track down Ogilby’s America at the University of Washington. Gary Menges found some bitter irony in that. “You tell the world you have something in order that people are aware of its existence and can come and use it,” he said. “And then you have people who are not using this information for scholarly purposes. They’re using it to put together their hit lists.”

  But if the death of distance helped Bland to stalk libraries, it also helped the libraries hunt down Bland. In the past, word of his apprehension in Baltimore would have traveled slowly, through gossip and other largely informal channels. But thanks to Cynthia Requardt’s posting on ExLibris—a news group established in 1990 for discussion of rare books and manuscripts librarianship—institutions all over the country received notice of the crime only hours after it had taken place. “That made it a whole lot easier,” Requardt later remembered. “If I didn’t have ExLibris, I wouldn’t have known how to contact people. I would have just stuck with the phone calls to people at the libraries I identified from the notebook The speed with which Bland’s trail unfolded was amazing.”

  And as the librarians began to tally their losses, a collective rage spread through their ranks. “I felt like a real victim, like it was a personal assault,” said Evelyn Walker of the University of Rochester. “I’ve been here about fifteen years, and quite a few of my colleagues have also been here for quite a while. We feel very responsible for our collections, and very connected to them. We work hard to develop them, and feel really happy when we find just the right item to fit into a little slot. It’s more than a job. It’s a calling, a passion, whatever you want to call it. The librarians here really are curators who treasure their materials and want to make them available. Anybody in the world would have been welcome to come here and look at those maps and use them. And now they’re gone.”

  Added John E. Ingram of the University of Florida, “What I find to be the most difficult part is to realize that someone was coming in and destroying part of our heritage. We are a state institution, and the person who took the maps was robbing the entire state and the country, not just the library. For instance, for one of the titles—Modern History, or, the Present State of All Nations by Thomas Salmon—we have the only complete copy in the state of Florida. Well, we formerly had the only complete copy.”

  The librarians, a legendarily docile people, now wanted blood. “If Bland gets in front of my car,” said Northwestern University’s Russell Maylone, “I’ll run over him—but in a nice way.… Oh, and then I’ll back over him again.”

  But capturing Bland again did not prove to be a simple matter. After being detained in Baltimore, he apparently stayed on for a few days in his old hometown of Columbia, Maryland. While there, he called the Peabody Institute’s security chief, Donald Pfouts, to request the return of his notebook. “He said he forgot his book and he really needed to get it,” explained Pfouts. “Once he found out he wasn’t getting his book back, I think that’s when he really realized what the possibilities were. And that’s when he fled.”

  It would take law enforcement officials nearly a month to capture him—a costly delay, as things turned out.
The problem was not that the invisible man had disappeared once more. Police knew just where to find Gilbert Bland: at his home in Coral Springs, Florida. But getting there to arrest him proved to be a more arduous journey than anyone could have imagined. Bureaucracy, indifference, and disorganization can be more difficult to navigate than the widest ocean. And sometimes the world can still seem like a very big place indeed.

  DETAIL FROM A WORLD MAP BY JODOCUS HONDIUS, CIRCA 1597, WARNING AGAINST THE TEMPTATIONS OF SATAN. “BE SOBER, BE VIGILANT,” READS THE ACCOMPANYING BIBLICAL TEXT, “BECAUSE YOUR ADVERSARY THE DEVIL, AS A ROARING LION, WALKETH ABOUT, SEEKING WHOM HE MAY DEVOUR.”

  CHAPTER 7

  A Brief History of Cartographic Crime

  SO THERE I WAS, STANDING IN AWE BEFORE the “monster camera,” as one of its operators called it, a contraption of such massive proportions that it stretched across two large rooms, was able to snap a photo negative four feet wide and seven and a half feet long, could blow up an image to almost five hundred times its original size, and could reduce it by the same proportion. With one blink of its big reptilian eye, it could have transformed me from a six-foot-two-inch man into a half-mile-high colossus or a microorganism of about one eighth of an inch, just as it had once reduced all of Europe to the size of a postage stamp. It was a technological wonder, that camera. It was also, according to Vera Benson, a “white elephant,” destined for the trash heap.

  Benson is director of cartography for the American Map Corporation, part of the Langenscheidt Publishing Group, which competes with Rand McNally for retail primacy in the U.S. map market. A self-possessed woman with a wry sense of humor and a faint German accent, Benson was giving me a tour of the company’s headquarters, a no-frills brick building in an industrial area of Queens, New York. If I had been following directly in the path of Gilbert Bland, this stop would not have been on my itinerary. To the best of my knowledge Bland neither came here nor had anything to do with American Map—unless, of course, he used one of the firm’s popular road atlases to find his way from one library to the next. But in my journalistic travels, as in my personal wanderings, I’m a sucker for detours, back roads, tourist traps, scenic views, and historic landmarks. Invariably, these side trips enrich the journey, and every now and then they lead to an important discovery. I had come to Queens out of simple curiosity. Having spent so much time studying the profession’s previous thousand years, I wanted to find out about the state of commercial mapmaking at the edge of the next millennium.