Miles Harvey: The Island of Lost Maps

By MARGIE THOMSON

After years of expensive, painstaking restoration work, the significant 17th-century book Ogilby's America, crammed with 122 superb engravings and maps, was proudly placed on the shelves of the University of Washington's Allen Library in June 1995.

Three months later, the first patron to handle the book deftly sliced four of its maps and made a hasty exit from the library, tucking the maps secretly inside his shirt.

Likewise La Florida, the first widely available map of that region of the United States, was included in the 1584 edition of the first modern atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

There it stayed for 411 years until that same intruder wielded his razor and excised it, along with 12 other maps from the Egenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

In December 1995, at what was to be the end of an invisible crime spree across at least 19 libraries (most of which didn't yet know they had been robbed), the thief was caught leaving Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Library rare books room with four 232-year-old maps in his possession.

As alias after alias crumbled, he was eventually revealed to be Gilbert Anthony Bland.

As it turns out, he was an extraordinarily bland fellow who left little impression on those who met him, but who had become over a fairly short time the Al Capone of cartography - a standout in a centuries-long history of cartographic crime.

Harvey has used Bland as a cipher for exploring an area of history and obsession that is as rich in narrative treasure as Treasure Island was in gold - and finding that trove was the result of an X on a map, don't forget.

Maps, he believes, inspire a peculiar obsession and have enormous meaning in history: possession (and theft) of accurate ones enabled the colonial powers of Portugal, Spain and Britain to take over the world; they denote boundaries and therefore identity and a sense of other; they inspire a sense of adventure in those who wish to stride into the blank areas.

Of course, these days there are no blank areas (even the ocean floor has been mapped) and so the love of old maps, and the theft of them, is, as Harvey says, not about claiming the future, as they were for Columbus or Magellan, but about recapturing a lost and longed-for past.

Map theft is also, inevitably, about money, and lots of it.

Among the many people - librarians, historians, collectors, dealers, psychologists and so on - that Harvey spent time with in the four years he took to research this book, Graham Aruder stands out as the man who, from the 1970s, transformed the map market and sent prices spiralling upwards, unfortunately turning libraries into goldmines in the process.

Libraries, short of cash, have also contributed to the process, some of them selling off parts of their collections or worse, book-breaking (cutting valuable prints out to sell them separately) to save the remaining volumes.

The huge sums engendered by the sales - US$2.4 million ($5.5 million) by Johns Hopkins - pose a serious long-term threat to libraries, which face increasingly tough security concerns as the value of their collections skyrockets, Harvey writes.

Hence the Blands of this world, for whom Harvey doesn't scrimp in displaying his derision.

And yet he is endlessly, obsessively fascinated by this man, and the book is really a kind of psychological detective story, the tracing of a bland man with a peculiar compulsion.

There are many detours on "Interstate Bland". Harvey is too discursive to ever tell a story in a straight line, but he is a master of bringing all the strands back into the pattern, just when you think they've got too tangled altogether.

If you prefer a direct route this is not the book for you. But if you're prepared to settle back and go where Harvey takes you (across the centuries and around the globe), you're in for an unusual and scenic journey.

Phoenix

$29.95