The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  At other points, however, his memory seemed to return with uncanny precision. He had no problem, for instance, in providing a detailed description of the room from which he had stolen maps. Nor had his methods of operation slipped his mind:

  Officer: How did you get them out of the library?

  Bland: I folded them up and put them inside my shirt.

  Officer: Inside your shirt? Nobody [was] in there to stop you from doing it or to see you?

  Bland: Well, when they left the room … I would just old it up and put it in my shirt and walk out and take it with me…

  Officer: put it in your shirt and then leave with it, huh? Didn’t that destroy the value of the map by folding it like that?

  Bland: No.

  Officer: It didn’t?

  Bland: No, you’d get home and iron it out, and whatever creases were in it just came out.

  Officer: How many other universities did you do this at?

  Bland: Uh, a lot.

  He was apologetic for his crimes, but the only explanation he offered was the one given by his lawyers in court: “Business was really bad and I was about to lose everything I had. And I have a mental problem that was untreated at the time, and as a result I came up with the crazy idea to do this I wish I was in my right mind. I never would’ve done this.”

  The officers, to my frustration, were not particularly interested in his motivations. Their main concern was how future Gilbert Blands could be stopped. His advice was as simple as it was self-revealing: “If there would have been a [security] camera there I never would’ve went in, I never would’ve stayed there, I never would’ve ordered any books …”

  An invisible man hates cameras the way a vampire hates daylight. The most telling picture I ever saw of Bland shows no face.4 In that shot, taken outside a courthouse by a photographer for the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer, the map thief stands with his cuffed hands held high, not only to obscure his eyes but to obliterate all of his features, as if he were trying by sheer will to make himself disappear. He had almost pulled it off: his crime spree left no film. But here at last he had been captured on video.

  And yet, watching his image on that TV screen was strangely like seeing a satellite photograph of the Earth. On the one hand, it gave me a perspective that would otherwise have been impossible. I watched in fascination, for instance, as Bland slid his hand inside his shirt to demonstrate how he stole maps. I had imagined that moment a thousand times, but seeing it on tape gave me a real sense of witnessing the crime. On the other hand, this was a voyeurism of an oddly distant kind. It was as if I was viewing the Planet Bland from hundreds of miles in the air: I could make out the houses and buildings and factories—the facades and end results—but the life that hummed within them, the forces that had created them, remained hidden from view, a world only remotely sensed.

  T-MINUS TWENTY SECONDS…

  The breeze off the Pacific seemed to intensify, as if to keep pace with the collective sense of anticipation. Those of us gathered for the liftoff now squinted anxiously in the direction of the launchpad, knowing that we were about to see history. Not only was the satellite itself a landmark piece of technology—that very morning The New York Times had described it as “the world’s most powerful civilian spacecraft for observing the Earth”—but its launch came during a revolutionary moment in the history of cartography.5 As the science writer Stephen S. Hall explained in Mapping the Next Millennium: “We find ourselves in the midst of what is arguably the greatest explosion in mapping, and perhaps the greatest reconsideration of ‘space’ (in every sense of that word), since an anonymous Babylonian first attempted to organize human knowledge of the physical world by drawing a map of the world on a clay tablet twenty-six centuries ago.”6

  As we head into the twenty-first century, the last great topographical mystery on Earth—the global seafloor—is finally surrendering its secrets. In 1995, for instance, scientists armed with freshly declassified spy satellite data produced the first detailed map of this vast terrain, 70 percent of the Earth’s surface but virtually uncharted until recent decades. As one researcher explained: “It’s like being able to drain the oceans and look at the Earth from space.”7 The heavens, too, are being charted on an almost unimaginable scale. The New Mexico-based Sloan Digital Sky Survey—one of several ambitious space-mapping ventures now under way worldwide—is using a high-tech telescope to chart one quarter of the sky, peering 1.5 billion light-years not only into space but also back in time.8 By the time it’s complete in 2005, the survey will have mapped 100 million galaxies, most of them now unlabeled and unstudied, along with several hundred thousand quasars and tens of millions of individual stars. The undertaking is the first attempt to digitize the universe—to put the heavens in a computer database available to all. “But it’s just a first step,” said Michael S. Turner, the project spokesman and chairman of the Astrophysics Department at the University of Chicago. “I think it is a very conservative prediction to say that by the end of this century, astronomers will have mapped the entire observable universe.” No less staggering are the maps being made of microscopic worlds. As I write these words, scientists are in a frantic race to chart the human genome—the blueprint for each human being, made up of some 100,000 genes. All maps have consequences, but this one is certain to change the course of humanity. By allowing researchers to understand how the body works at its most fundamental level, the genome map could lead to the elimination of a dizzying array of diseases, from muscular dystrophy to cancer and diabetes. It may also result in the prolongation of life, even the retardation of the aging process—Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth discovered at last. And a leading genomist has declared that humankind is on the brink of doing what only God has done so far: create life-forms.9 Not cloned life-forms—entirely new life-forms, stitched together out of genetic scraps the way Dr. Frankenstein made his monster out of body parts. In the short run, such cut-and-paste organisms would be possible only on a microbial level—but someday the Earth may be prowled by complex beings every bit as “unnatural” as the creatures once found only on the edges of old maps and in the hinterlands of human thought.

  Ah, but what of those hinterlands? With all the other stunning gains being made in mapping, will it also become possible to chart the complex terrain of the mind? A growing number of experts believe so. While some scientists study the genome in search of inherited causes for behavioral traits such as alcoholism, aggression, and risk taking—even criminality—others are mapping the brain itself. New imaging techniques allow researchers to look inside the living, working brain, thus “opening up the territory of the mind just as the first oceangoing ships once opened up the globe,” in the words of the science writer Rita Carter, author of Mapping the Mind.10 Using state-of-the-art brain scans, scientists are able to pinpoint the exact locations of various brain components—meaning they can literally chart and observe the mechanics of our thoughts, moods, and memories.

  These maps promise to inspire some bizarre journeys. The day may come when expectant parents can genetically alter their unborn children to make them less aggressive or impulsive, more cheerful and altruistic. The day, too, may come when all manner of problems, from mental illness and antisocial behavior to post-traumatic stress disorder, can be managed with psychoactive treatments so precise that “an individual’s state of mind (and thus behavior) will be almost entirely malleable,” according to Carter.11 The day may come, in short, when to understand the actions and motivations of another person, we must merely examine the peculiar geography of that individual’s brain. Nonetheless, my own amateur experiments in the mapping of gray matter lead me to be skeptical. The physical brain might yield itself to this new kind of cartography, but my bet is that the mind—that strange borderland between inner life and outer experience, dreams and memory, body and soul—will prove as difficult to chart as the continent of Atlantis. I have come to believe that humans will always remain fundamentally inexplicable. Then again, the
re were those who used to say that about the Earth. And, as Carter observed: “These are the early days of mind exploration and the vision of the brain we have now is probably no more complete or accurate than a sixteenth-century map of the world.”12

  T-MINUS TEN…

  NINE…

  EIGHT…

  SEVEN…

  SIX…

  FIVE…

  FOUR…

  THREE…

  TWO…

  ONE…

  IGNITION…

  AND…

  LIFTOFF.

  It shot above the hills, a dazzling orange glow. As it rose, everything else seemed to go still; I would have believed the whole world was staring at the sky in wonder just then. It moved slowly and steadily away, a great distant fireball, and then it was gone, leaving behind a vast trail of smoke that snaked up to the heavens like some scribbled message, a cosmic scrawl I could not hope to decipher but felt I had been pondering for a very long time.

  The satellite never reached orbit. Minutes after liftoff it went silent, disappeared. They never found it—not in space, not on land, not in the sea.13 It had simply vanished, swallowed by the great unknown.

  Acknowledgments

  LIKE A MAP, A BOOK IS THE PRODUCT OF NOT one person but many. I am profoundly grateful to all those who opened their doors, lives, and hearts to me as I researched this project. The librarians Gary L. Menges, Cynthia Requardt, R. Russell Maylone, John E. Ingram, Evelyn Walker, Alice Schreyer, Brenda Peterson, and Jean Ashton, among others, were courageous and candid in discussing a very painful subject. The map dealer W. Graham Arader III gave me extraordinary amounts of time and access. Several others in his profession were also extremely forthcoming, especially Barry Lawrence Ruderman and the dealers I identified as Once Bitten and Twice Shy. A number of law enforcement officials, including Donald Pfouts, Thomas W. Durrer, and Clay Williams, were also vital to the making of this book. I want to give special thanks to Special Agent Gray Hill, as well as to the FBI offices in Richmond and Charlottesville, Virginia. In addition, I want to express my sincere appreciation to Jennifer Bryan, Vera Benson, Werner Muensterberger, Harriette Kaley, Hugh Kennedy, Don Etherington, John D. Bergen, Eileen E. Brady, Everett C. Wilkie, Jr., Heather Bland, Selby Kiffer, “Mr. Atlas,” and all the others who were kind enough to be interviewed for the project.

  This book would not have been possible without three people in particular. Jon Karp, my gifted editor at Random House, took a risk on an unproven author, then guided him through the publishing process with unfailing wisdom and patience. I also feel blessed to have worked with Sloan Harris, a literary agent of extraordinary skill, humor, and honesty. Finally, I owe an incalculable debt to the journalist Michael Paterniti, a driving force behind this project from start to finish. He was a superb critic and mentor—and an even better friend.

  I am hugely grateful to Norman J. W Thrower—a noted cartographic historian and author of Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society—who read a draft of this text in an effort to ensure its factual accuracy. I was also lucky to get input from a number of other writers and friends. Kevin Davis was there on a daily basis for advice and encouragement, not to mention lunch at the Lincoln Grill. Sara Corbett inspired some breakthrough ideas early on, then helped guide the project through to completion. Bill Lychack, as always, made me dig deeper, think harder, write better. Elizabeth Lychack gave my copy a thorough scrubbing. Clay Harper offered both the pull-no-punches honesty of a trusted old friend and the shrewd perspective of a book industry insider. The awesome Tom Clynes and my talented screenwriting partner, David Freeman, also made invaluable suggestions about the text.

  I consider myself blessed to have worked with production editorial guru Benjamin Dreyer and his superb staff: copy editor Susan Brown and proofreaders Evan Stone and Ruthie Epstein. I would also like to thank Amelia Zalcman, Deborah Foley, Andy Carpenter, Barbara Bachman, Richard Elman, Monica Gomez, and Janelle Duryea at Random House, as well as Teri Steinberg, Richard Abate, and Laura Paterson Davies at ICM.

  Several editors at Outside magazine, including Hal Espen, Mark Bryant, Brad Wetzler, and Katie Arnold, worked on the story that led to this book. I’m especially grateful to Hampton Sides, who gave my raw article much-needed shape and focus.

  Some pundits say writing can’t be taught: they’re wrong. I am eternally indebted to a number of marvelous teachers, both in the classroom and in the newsroom, who have challenged and inspired me over the years. Rita DuChateau, Bob Reid, Charles Sanders, Sheryl Larson, James Weinstein, Ray Elliott, Larry Doyle, Sharon Solwitz, Nicholas Delbanco, and Charles Baxter—thanks. You gave luster to my world as well as to my prose.

  Many other people contributed, directly or indirectly, to The Island of Lost Maps. Will Tefft offered exceptional support and proposed marvelous schemes. Robert Karrow and the staff of the Newberry Library made me feel welcome at their wonderful cartographic collection. Richard Cohen kept me sane, not to mention out of debt. I also want to thank, in no particular order, Camille Altay and her wonderful clan, Gregg Chaney and Suellen Semekoski, Helena Kozik, Chris Rose, Chris Carr, Jim Beatty, F. J. Manasek, Lloyd and Marie Green, Shari Joffe and Andrew White, Harry Appelman and Mimi Brody, Jason Harper and Janet Siroto, Tom Kosinski, Alan Sanchez, Dolores Riccardo, Merla Mihalik, Wayne Sallee, Jackie Burford, Miles Burford, Tim Gould, Susan Condon, Dave Cullen, Maggie Garb, Cian Gallagher, John Hammond Moore, Elizabeth Schaaf at the Peabody Institute, Fred Musto at Yale, Linda Lidov at Space Imaging, Joseph H. Fitzgerald and Marcia J. Kanner at the Miami International Map Fair, Norman Strasma and Linda Mickle at the International Map Trade Association, George Combs at the Lloyd House, the members of my writers’ group, the Cabin Thing crew, El Grupo del Hombres, the Downers Grove gang, The Daily Illini and its discontents, and the Tecalitlán Culinary Army.

  My late father, Robert Harvey, gave me a love for both maps and words. This book is his as well as mine. I’m also grateful to my brother, Matthew, for his love, strength, biting humor, and free legal advice. And how does a son even begin to thank his mother? In this case, he says: I appreciate the interview. It was typically brave of Tinker Harvey to discuss, for public consumption, one of the darkest chapters of her life. She never ceases to amaze and inspire me.

  Finally, to Rengin and Azize—thank you for more than I can express. Writing this book has been wonderful, but building a life with you is a greater joy and accomplishment by far.

  Interview

  MILES HARVEY’S DEBUT NONFICTION work, The Island of Lost Maps, was published in September 2000. Since then, the book has become a surprise international bestseller. We asked Harvey to update us on new developments in the case—and in his life.

  Have you learned anything about Bland’s crime spree since The Island of Lost Maps was first published?

  A few disturbing details have emerged. I had previously believed that Gilbert Bland’s operations were confined to North America, but a British dealer named David Bannister now claims that Bland was selling merchandise at a map fair in Great Britain during the mid-1990s. If true, it means that maps stolen from U.S. and Canadian libraries may now be hanging in the shops of British dealers or on the walls of British collectors. Of course, it also opens the unpleasant possibility that the map thief may have paid visits to libraries in England. An American dealer, meanwhile, has alleged that Bland tried to sell him maps while in prison. If true, this could mean that the map thief did not turn over to the FBI all the maps in his possession, as he was required to do under the terms of his plea bargain.

  After all your years of research, you noted that the only thing you could say about Bland with absolute certainty is that he cherished his anonymity. Has he offered any response to the book?

  Well, I haven’t heard from him, but I don’t imagine he’s real thrilled about it. He is a very private man who, unfortunately, committed not only a very public crime but also a crime against the public. Those books he mangled belong to all of us. They’re our
history, our heritage. So, although it makes me uneasy to think that my work might cause him or his family pain, I’m also very confident that the subject merited coverage. The Island of Lost Maps is not a particularly political work, but I do hope that it’s helped draw attention to the seriousness of library crime. In the past, police, prosecutors, and university administrators have really tended to ignore this important problem.

  Is the security situation improving for libraries?

  The case itself was indeed a wake-up call for some libraries, such as those at the University of Florida and the University of Rochester. And librarians from several other institutions have informed me that The Island of Lost Maps has helped them make the case for better security measures. Still, there’s apparently a long way to go. our libraries continue to be plundered by thieves such as Bland. Michigan State university, for example, recently suffered the loss of several important atlases.

  Most of Bland’s customers were his fellow map dealers, some of whom suspected him to be a thief but none of whom went to the police. Do you see any signs of reform in this industry?

  I’m certainly no expert on the map business, but there are anecdotal reasons to be skeptical. Not long ago, for example, I was talking with a well-known dealer who insisted that my book had actually underestimated the volume of stolen goods trafficked within the map trade. To illustrate his point, he produced some of his own stock, several old sea charts. Each of the charts had a slight horizontal fold across the middle of the page—which made no sense because the folds clearly had been made after the maps were removed from a book. “In the business, we sometimes call these ‘library folds,’ ” he said with a knowing look. When I asked him what he meant, he proceeded to pantomime cutting a map from a book, folding it, and stuffing it into a jacket. He conceded that he had purchased the maps knowing full well that someone had probably stolen them at an earlier date. “If I didn’t buy them, somebody else would,” he said, adding that since records were rarely kept on the provenance of an individual map, there was “no chance for reform” of the practice. Granted, this may be the cynical view of a lone dealer. Nonetheless, the conversation did not fill me with confidence.