The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  Meeting in a basement lecture hall at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, the panel included two rare books librarians, an art curator, a map seller, and a prominent collector. They covered a broad range of topics, from ways to keep thieves out of libraries to methods for getting maps back once the thieves got in. Noticeably absent from the discussion, however, was an honest examination of how Bland had so easily managed to gain the trust of dealers at this same fair. Such a discussion, however, would have fallen on deaf ears, since almost none of those dealers had bothered to attend the forum. They had better things to do just then. The workshop coincided with the opening of the fair—and in the lobby upstairs, where the dealers had set up their booths, there were customers to meet, deals to cut, maps to move.

  “There’s a feeding frenzy up there,” I heard Fitzgerald tell an associate as he stood near the rostrum, “which is good, but …”

  He finished his thought by casting a nervous glance at the rows of empty seats.

  After the forum was over, I went upstairs and wandered from booth to booth. Dozens of dealers—from such far-flung spots as Argentina, Australia, Canada, England, Germany, and the Netherlands—busily hawked their goods, while hundreds of connoisseurs and other interested people shuffled about, gazing at maps on walls, flipping through maps in bins, holding maps at odd angles to get them in the best light, gathering in groups to discourse about a certain unusual specimen. Most of the fairgoers were middle-aged and older, but there were also twenty- and thirty-somethings, some of whom wore looks of delight and wonder, having just been initiated into the passion’s quirky marvels. It was an unlikely event, half subdued art opening, half frenzied swap-o-rama. Maps were changing hands at a brisk pace: one dealer told me he moved $38,000 in product that day. No one seemed outwardly to be concerned about provenance.

  Later that morning, away from the hubbub, a veteran dealer approached me in the museum’s library. He had a story to tell—one that not even the FBI had heard. I’m not sure why he decided to let me in on it: perhaps he wanted to ease his conscience or perhaps he just figured I’d be interested. Three years earlier he had purchased an item from Gilbert Bland at a fair in San Francisco. He had not tried to get it back to the rightful owner. “The authorities never contacted me,” he said with a shrug, “and, well, I’d already sold the map.2 I got lucky on that one, I guess.”

  T-MINUS FIFTY SECONDS…

  “Librarians,” said the woman with short red hair, “have an ostrich mentality when it comes to security: they have their heads in the sand and their tails in the air, and they’re ripe to be screwed.”

  Four months had passed since the map fair in Miami, and I was at another workshop devoted to the bad deeds of Gil Bland. This time, the attendees were rare books librarians from around the country, who had gathered in Washington, D.C., for an annual meeting. In a conference room at the Library of Congress, some forty workshop participants had just heard from security experts and law enforcement personnel—including the FBI’s Gray Hill—as well as officials from Johns Hopkins, who described Bland’s capture and explained their controversial decision not to have him arrested.

  Citing the confidential nature of the discussions about security, organizers had asked me not to attend the main body of the workshop. They did, however, invite me to speak at the end of the session, so that I could brief the librarians on my coverage of the case and ask for their input. Not long after stepping off the podium, I was confronted by the woman with the red hair and the vivid ostrich analogy.

  Her name was Eileen E. Brady, and it turned out that she was not just blowing off steam. In addition to her work as a librarian at Washington State University, Brady was editor of Focus on Security: The Magazine of Library, Archive, and Museum Security, a position that had given her a “healthy paranoia” about the dangers that lurk in the stacks. Theft, she said, was not the only security problem; librarians have been raped and even murdered on the job in recent years. Nonetheless, she reported, many of them would still prefer to ignore the problem. “The attitude that the library is a safe haven, a quiet place, that nothing bad will happen there, that we must not do anything to offend our so-called ‘user’ or patron—whether or not that patron is legitimate—is very common. And it’s difficult to overcome this mind-set.

  “My position is militant; there are no two ways about it,” she added. But, unlike most militants, Brady was not being shunned by her peers. She had, in fact, been one of the featured speakers at the day’s workshop—which struck me as a very healthy sign. Yes, the librarians had a long way to go in defending themselves against the Gilbert Blands of the world. But, unlike the dealers, they seemed sincerely interested in confronting their own demons.

  I became even more confident in this conclusion the next day, when I sat down with Everett C. Wilkie, Jr., a sardonic, cigarette-puffing consultant in rare books and manuscripts who had organized the workshop. “What surprised me the most,” he told me, “was how cranky the law enforcement people were with the library community in general. They were saying, ‘A, you won’t prosecute; B, you won’t put identification marks on your stuff; C, you don’t take care of it; D, if we find it, you won’t help us to get it back to you.’ They were really very blunt about it.”

  “Did the librarians stick up for themselves?” I asked.

  “No,” he said with a glib smile. “It was all true.”

  Nonetheless, said Wilkie, “I don’t think there was anyone in that room who actually wants their stuff stolen, and I think they have a pretty good idea how they would stop it if they only could. But a lot of it—security equipment, staff, you name it—comes down to money. The first thing you’ve got to do to affect your security program is to get your upper administration to buy into it. And if they don’t buy into it, you’ve got problems.”

  In fact, I knew that some administrations were beginning to see the light—thanks, ironically, to Bland. His alleged thefts from the University of Florida, for example, served as a much-needed wake-up call to school officials. “Bland did several thousand dollars’ worth of damage,” said the librarian John E. Ingram, “but the ultimate effect of his ‘work’ is that we have better security for our stacks, we have better security for our reading room, we have surveillance, which we didn’t really have before—and in the final analysis, we have a much more astute, perceptive staff working with the collection, which is probably the best benefit of all.” Likewise, major reforms had been put into place at the University of Rochester library, which Bland is thought to have visited three times, once taking so much material that he left the floor snowy with paper shards. After purchasing a camera for the reading room, the rare books department sought the help of a nationally known security consultant in enacting additional measures—which were funded, appropriately enough, by insurance money from the Bland case. “The whole library has much better security, and the rare books department has vastly better security than when Gilbert Bland was here,” reported the rare books librarian, Evelyn Walker.

  Some observers, however, argued that even more fundamental reforms were necessary. Not the least—and certainly not the least restrained—was the irascible map mogul Graham Arader. “Some of these libraries now have hundreds of millions of dollars of books, and they expect to get security paying people who they get for thirty thousand dollars a year. They’re going to have to start treating books like other objects worth as much money,” he said. “They’re going to have to segregate them and put them in rooms where they’re virtually inaccessible. The books are going to have to be stored like gold bullion.”

  Librarians, he said, could learn a thing or two about security from their corporate counterparts: “The prop room at Disney—I guaran-goddamn-tee you that the curator of Disney knows where everything is and it’s on inventory, and he’s watching everything. That guy’s on top of what he’s doing, because if he wasn’t, [Disney CEO Michael] Eisner would fire him. One of these librarians who are so critical of me wouldn’t last a week the
re.”

  Never one to think small, Arader proposed nothing less than the complete elimination of most traditional rare books rooms, in favor of a few centralized and hypersecure research libraries. “There’s no reason for any city—even New York—to have more than two major map collections,” he said.

  When I mentioned this concept to Wilkie, he found it impracticable, pointing out that the larger scale of such facilities might cause as many security problems as it solved. If it was difficult to keep tabs on someone like Bland in a small space, he said, imagine how hard it would be in a huge room filled with hundreds of researchers. Still, Wilkie did not think Arader was completely off base. He noted, for instance, that more and more research libraries are limiting access to serious scholars. To get in, patrons must provide—in advance—a precise description of their research and letters of recommendation. “They are just totally unapologetic about the fact that the general public isn’t welcome,” he said.

  That idea, I told him, struck me as sad.

  “It’s sad, but it’s not sad,” he responded. “A lot of these places have stuff that just shouldn’t be handled very much. I mean, you really should need to have a good reason to look at this stuff because it’s got to last, well, basically forever.”

  It was hard to argue with that. The legacy of the Bland case, in fact, may be to help turn back the clock on our concept of libraries. In the mid-nineteenth century, when establishing his masterpiece of a research facility in Baltimore, George Peabody had insisted that, while it would contain “the best books on every subject,” it would also be “for the free use of all persons who may desire to consult it.” It was a progressive notion back then but one that seems to have failed the test of time. In the long run rare books rooms may look less like what Peabody envisioned and more like those of ancient times—repositories for sacred documents available to only a priestly caste, the “Learned Men of the Magic Library,” as the Egyptians had called them. And while that system would be sure to have unfortunate consequences—isolating average people even further from their culture and their history—the current one may be even worse. As Wilkie put it: “Any halfway smart undergraduate student can pay his way through four years at a major university for the price of a razor blade.”

  T-MINUS FORTY SECONDS…

  In June 1998, just a few days after my conversation with Wilkie, I returned to the Island of Lost Maps. In the more than a year that Gilbert Bland had been out of prison, FBI Special Agent Gray Hill had remained hard at work cleaning up the map thief’s mess. Now, at long last, it looked as if Hill’s exile was coming to an end.

  The agent had just returned from the nation’s capital, where, in addition to addressing the rare books librarians, he had met with an FBI technician to match one last set of maps with the books from which they had been taken. “This was my last run up to see the forensics expert,” said an obviously weary Hill. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m done at this point.”

  Since the last time I saw Hill, two years earlier, he had managed to find homes for more than one hundred additional maps. It had been methodical and often frustrating work, but he could take heart in knowing that his efforts had not gone unappreciated. “One of the librarians came in with a real abrasiveness,” he recalled. “But she went back with more maps than she had even known she was missing. At the end, she had tears in her eyes.”

  All told, he had been able to reunite nearly 180 of the roughly 250 wayward maps with their owners. Nonetheless, the Island of Lost Maps still had plenty of inhabitants, most of which were now scattered on a table in front of us at Hill’s Charlottesville office. “I feel good about what I’ve done,” he said, “but it does still halfway tick me off that some of them could possibly be matched up I’ve got history sitting here, and it should be returned to where it came from.”

  Did Gilbert Bland harbor the secret of where those remaining maps belonged? Hill found it unlikely. True, Bland had been less than honest with the FBI—failing to tell investigators, for instance, about his visits to libraries in Canada. But Hill believed simple forgetfulness probably also came into play. “When you’ve stolen from so many places,” he said with a faint grin, “it’s hard to remember where you got things.”

  And no matter what information Bland might be withholding, more maps could have been returned if only librarians had taken better care of their materials and kept better records, according to Hill. Fresh from dressing down librarians at the workshop in Washington, he was still full of venom. With some librarians, he said, the failure to take care of materials smacked of pure negligence. “It’s like if you had a five-thousand-dollar bill in your wallet, and you said, ‘I know I had one in there, but if I look it might be missing. So I just won’t look.’ ”

  If the libraries Bland had visited “spent a little more energy” searching for missing items, Hill believed he could get rid of even more of his maps. Still, he was haunted by the possibility that the remaining ones “belong to a library that we are not yet aware of.”

  In any event, it was no longer his concern. After two and a half long years on the case, he was ready to move on. It had been both an exasperating and an enlightening experience. “I have picked up a much greater appreciation for the art,” he said. “The word cartography was not a normal part of my vocabulary before this case. So it has been an education, a broadening of the horizons.”

  “Are you going to miss having them around?” I asked.

  He cast one last glance over the pile. “No,” he said, looking genuinely relieved.

  But, as often happens to those shipwrecked on islands, Agent Hill’s dreams of rescue proved premature. When I called him many months later, the maps were still locked in his office, awaiting a permanent home. They would almost certainly wind up at the Library of Congress, Hill said. As usual, however, the federal bureaucracy was moving slowly, and final plans had not yet been completed.

  In the meantime, Hill had managed to place a couple more maps not previously known to have been stolen. “Every once in a while somebody will be going through a book,” he explained, “and all of a sudden they’ll say, ‘Hey, you know we’re missing something out of here.’…It keeps coming in very slowly.”

  It would continue to come in slowly, this story. Or so I reflected as I stood on that rise, listening to the countdown and watching the waves roll in. The map thief’s tale, I thought, might still be unfolding decades from now. I stared off into the lead gray sky. Somewhere beneath the distant clouds, unopened books sat on dusty shelves, crimes waiting to be discovered. And somewhere, too, beautiful maps hung on the walls of perfect homes, crimes waiting to be solved.

  T-MINUS THIRTY SECONDS…

  The last person I ever expected to hear from again was Gilbert Bland—and it’s a good bet that the last person he ever planned on sharing his thoughts with was me. Yet, despite it all, there I was one day, furiously taking notes while he spoke about his life.

  This final turn of events, like so many of the best discoveries, came out of the blue. It arrived in the form of a videocassette, provided by a source familiar with the case, who had offhandedly asked if I would be interested in watching it. Somewhat less offhandedly I had said that sure, I might not mind at all. And so, within seconds, Bland appeared before me, neatly attired in jeans and a blue-on-blue-checked flannel shirt, a white T-shirt barely visible beneath his high-buttoned collar. For a moment I just stood there gaping, dumbfounded that years of waiting to hear him tell his story had suddenly ended with nothing more than the press of a PLAY button.

  I had heard about this video before. It had been making the rounds among law enforcement types and librarians—shown, for instance, at that workshop on the case in Washington. Conducted by two campus police officers at the University of Delaware, the interview was filmed on March 27, 1997, near the end of Bland’s incarceration. As it got under way the map thief sat at a table, sometimes crossing his arms or nervously pressing the fingertips of both hands against his reddish white sid
eburns, but more often resting his chin on one palm. He looked exhausted and sullen, at one point requesting to be placed in a cell away from other prisoners. “I’m under [psychiatric] medicine,” he explained.3 “And sometimes when I’ve been on medication, people have beat me up before, and the thing is I literally can’t defend myself. I’m not a violent person.”

  Still, this was not the timid Bland I had seen in court—nor, for that matter, the combative Bland I had heard over the phone. Instead, he seemed intelligent, polite, articulate, and, above all, as slippery as black ice—perhaps not unlike the Bland who had visited those libraries. Evasive about the details of his crimes, he often claimed amnesia:

  Officer: And where are [the maps stolen from the university] at now?

  Bland: I don’t know.

  Officer: You don’t have any idea? Does the FBI have them?

  Bland: The FBI might have them.

  Officer: Did you sell any of the maps that you took from the University of Delaware’s books?

  Bland: I could have, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Officer: You couldn’t be sure?

  Bland: Right.…

  Officer: Who would you have sold them to?

  Bland: I—I don’t remember that.

  Officer: We’re not asking for names. I mean, did you sell them to art dealers?

  Bland: I went to map shows and sold maps at a map show. I don’t know who I sold them to. It’s been so long ago, and I’ve been through so much in the last year and a half, that I just can’t remember.