Jonathan Mahalak

Maps are something we as a culture and members of an age have come to take for granted.

One can buy a map of virtually any place on earth at almost any bookstore. AAA members can pick up maps for free at their offices. One can download maps at Websites like mapquest.com in a matter of seconds, and if it takes longer, we get pissed. Thanks to modern surveying techniques and satellite imagery, there is literally no place on earth that escapes cartographic representation, and the scientific community has even begun mapping far-away galaxies that no one knew existed twenty-five years ago. We look to maps with blind faith when we need to get someplace, or if we need an escape route when we are lost. And, save for the tiresome joke about never being able to properly refold them, we rarely give them a second thought, if we even bother to give them a first.

So why then, since modern maps are as commonplace as telephones, would we give a second thought to an antique map? Since most of them are wildly inaccurate, highly exaggerated and Eurocentric, they are of little more import than representing a reflection of a general academic knowledge of the world during a specific time. Sure they look neat, offering a pleasing aesthetic, but what value do they have beyond that?

This is the question that drives Miles Harvey's debut novel, "The Island of Lost Maps." The Chicago author not only gives a second thought to history and development of these often-overlooked directional aids, but a third, fourth -- fiftieth -- thought, not only to antique maps, but to the people who collect and sell them, librarians who stand guard over them, and the extent to which some will go to acquire them.

The book -- a cross-genre yarn, equal parts true crime, history lesson, subculture study and cartographic experiment -- began when Harvey was reading a Tribune article at the Copi Café in Andersonville, shortly after a man named Gilbert Bland was apprehended in 1995. Striking rare book collections across the country and in Canada (including the libraries at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago), the appropriately-named Bland used his unassuming, every-man appearance and personality to escape the suspicion of librarians, eventually X-actoing an estimated $500,000 worth of maps from bound atlases. Harvey became interested in the story, and turned it into an article for Outside magazine. The case, however, became an obsession for Harvey, and he began writing a book following the trail of the most prolific antique-map thief of the twentieth century.

"The Island of Lost Maps" is tightly written and exhaustingly researched, and sheds light not only on the thief's quixotic exploits, but on the evolution of map-making and the history of cartographic theft, stemming back to the time of Christopher Columbus. Harvey uses Bland's story as a vehicle toward a deeper understanding of the fascinating subculture of antique-map collectors and vendors, as well as to promote a deeper understanding of cartography.

"As I looked into this stuff more and more," Harvey explains, "into this world of antique map collectors and dealers and librarians -- in a way, I think my book came out the same way as, say, 'Midnight at the Garden of Good and Evil' turned out. There's a true crime at the center of it, but it's actually more about a subculture -- the quirkiness of a subculture. But instead of the weird little subculture of Savannah, Georgia, I had the equally weird little subculture of antique maps."

More than a fascinating exploration of that subculture, though, the book actually attempts to map a life, that of Gilbert Bland, who refused to have anything to do with Harvey during his four years of research. "I began to wonder if mapping an unknown life was comparable to mapping an unknown world, so I began to see myself as a kind of cartographer," he muses. "I think [what drew me to Bland's story] is also what drew a lot of the people who made [antique] maps. They didn't know what was beyond the next curve, it was hidden from them, so they wanted to go out and make sense of it."

In order to do this, Harvey immersed himself into the world of cartographic collecting, which presented a substantial challenge. "It's a small world, people know each other closely, and because they had made the mistake of trusting Bland -- especially the dealers -- they were particularly skeptical of newcomers by the time I got to them. Especially a newcomer who wanted to talk about a very painful subject. The more I hung out with them and talked with them, I think they thought that, although I was writing about something they weren't particularly interested in having highly publicized, at least I was sincere in my interest in their world, and in maps."

Harvey transposes that sincerity into his book, and his quests to trumpet and teach about maps and perform his own cartographic experiment are quite successful. "The Island of Lost Maps" fits into the impossible-to-put-down category, provoking the reader with an unquestioning passion about a subject that would otherwise sit well below the cultural radar. In terms of organization and thoroughness, Harvey is as meticulous as the antique mapmakers he writes about, and his treatment of the strange, enchanting characters within the world of maps is even-handed. Moreover, it brings into focus the important role maps have played in our history and our philosophy, and that the art of cartography is not, ahem, lost. The Island of Lost Maps
by Miles Harvey
(Random House, 405 pages, $24.95) (10/26/2000)


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