Hartford Courant, 2000

The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey — Random House, $24.95

Was Gilbert Bland only in it for the money, or were his crimes more about the thrill of acquisition?

One afternoon in 1995, Bland — a convicted auto thief and credit card fraudster — walked into Baltimore’s Peabody Museum. Posing as an academic, he requested a 1670 atlas of Africa by the cartographer John Ogilby. Bland waited until he thought nobody was looking, then he took out a razor and sliced away four maps.

An observant library patron witnessed the crime that began author Miles Harvey’s pursuit of this elusive, small-time hood who’d tapped an extremely lucrative underground.

Using Bland as a framing device, The Island of Lost Maps takes readers inside the peculiar subculture of map makers, librarians and collectors. Harvey, the former literary critic for Outside, describes the antiquarian map trade as a handshake business whose powerful connection to the past breeds obsession.

Never before have maps been so lucrative. Rising prices have transformed atlases, whose parts are worth more than the whole, into sacred texts, and libraries into alarmingly unsecured gold mines.

Lost Maps draws a parallel between outright theft and the legal, but highly controversial, dealer practice of “breaking” historical atlases to sell the contents piecemeal.

The book is also rich with trivia regarding explorers and cartographers. It uncovers historical precedents both criminal (did Columbus go down in history using a pilfered Florentine map?) and literary (including legendary tales of losing one’s way, such as the mysterious B. Traven’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre and R.L. Stevenson’s morally off-kilter Treasure Island).

Through interviews and meticulous research, Harvey describes Bland’s illicit profiteering, as well as why he was able to walk away virtually undetected with scores of centuries-old maps from numerous research libraries.

Lost Maps also explores how an FBI investigator labored for two years to return the recovered atlas plates to the victimized institutions. Amazingly, several libraries refused property that was rightfully theirs, for fear of damaging reputations or upsetting benefactors.

For the record, Harvey takes a few lengthy detours from the Bland narrative, injecting some distracting quasi-memoir material that may leave some readers feeling stranded.

But make no mistake. Under the author’s command, what would normally be a nondescript criminal case becomes a vivid survey of an intriguing subculture. Lost Maps is a ripping yarn that will send any self-respecting map enthusiast in many new directions.