The Island of Lost Maps Read online

  Yet now the great master’s text had wound up in the hands of a kind of Anti-Ortelius, a professional scatterer of maps and destroyer of books. Bland apparently paged through the volume until he came to a map labeled La Florida, the first widely available map of the broad region that is now the southeastern United States. Ortelius added it to Theatrum Orbis Terrarum for the first time in this 1584 edition. And there it remained for the next 411 years—until the intruder allegedly flashed out his razor blade.

  “LA FLORIDA” MAP FROM THE LANDMARK ORTELIUS ATLAS, THEATRUM ORBIS TERRARUM.

  Although the book measures seventeen inches by twelve inches and its pages are so thick that they literally rumble when turned, Bland is believed to have removed La Florida and two more plates from that same atlas, as well as ten maps from another book. The Regenstein’s special collections room is a kind of fish tank built expressly for security: its walls are made of glass, and no briefcases or pens are allowed inside. Yet Bland seems to have sneaked the thirteen plates into his clothes and walked out undetected. For good measure, he also altered a librarian’s pencil-written inventory at the front of the Ortelius book, making it appear that the maps he took had been missing for years.

  But that wasn’t his only alleged theft during his brief Chicago stay. Only the day before he’d paid a visit to Northwestern University’s Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, a churchlike chamber with arched windows and cluttered old bookshelves adorned with busts of Dante, Einstein, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Johnson, and Ezra Pound. The curator R. Russell Maylone remembers the visitor as “the proverbial man in the raincoat” with “a pile of books on the table spread out in a not very orderly fashion.” That day Bland is believed to have removed six separate maps from the pages of several antique atlases, including a 1681 map of New York and three maps of the Caribbean. As Perry got up to leave, Maylone said, “I hope you found what you were looking for.”

  He had, thank you. He certainly had.

  As the weeks rolled on, more and more institutions reported visits from the dreaded Perry. Ultimately the count would rise to nineteen libraries, most of them in the East and Midwest but one in Seattle and two in British Columbia.4 The list would include such institutions as the University of Delaware, the University of Florida, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Rochester.

  No one had called the police. No one, apparently, had noticed that the maps were gone. It was an invisible crime spree, hidden amid the seldom-opened pages of centuries-old books. And its perpetrator was the invisible criminal. Beyond a general physical description, the people who met him would later describe him in only the vaguest of terms: “clean-cut,” “quiet,” “polite,” “mild-mannered,” “nondescript and noncommunicative.” Many simply had no memory of him at all.

  WHAT A VAPID JOB TITLE OUR CULTURE GIVES TO those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe.5 Librarian—that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between libido and licentious—it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books.

  I think most librarians, especially rare books librarians, still secretly view themselves in this way. I met dozens of them as I retraced Bland’s footsteps, and in the end I came to the conclusion that most view their work as what the scholar and novelist Umberto Eco, writing about librarians of an earlier age, called a “war with the forces of oblivion.”6 I think they wage this war because, like the historian Barbara Tuchman, they believe that “books are humanity in print” and that, as the Keepers of the Books, they are safeguarding not just pieces of paper but mortal flesh.7 The stakes are high: if they fail, the past dies.

  Not that the librarians themselves are likely to talk in such terms. I found them to be a guarded, self-effacing, and often sardonic lot, a group decidedly short on Graham Arader types. As a result, I had a tough time getting a handle on what made them tick. I confess that this did not bother me too much in the beginning. Of the many mysteries surrounding the Bland case, the Secret Life of Librarians was not exactly the first I yearned to ferret out. But as the months wore on, and my respect for librarians grew, so did my curiosity about their craft. Yet, try as I might, I was unable to gain a good feel for their esprit de corps until I got to know Gary L. Menges, one of the last librarians I interviewed.

  When I first contacted Menges over the phone, he sounded just as you might expect a librarian to sound, from the nasally voice to the precise, even persnickety, way of putting words together. But when I traveled to Seattle for a meeting with him at the University of Washington campus, I was greeted by a man much different than the one I had imagined. Far from being a tepid biblio-bureaucrat, Menges seemed full of vitality and purpose. He later told me that he was sixty-one years old; I had assumed he was a good fifteen years younger. His most memorable attribute, other than a tastefully radiant red-and-orange necktie, was a plush, meticulously maintained white beard. He reminded me of a very trim, very tidy version of Santa Claus, complete with a twinkle in the eye and a disarmingly robust laugh.

  Menges led me to his basement office at the Kenneth S. Allen Library, where he worked as the head of the Special Collections and Preservation Division. On one wall hung a series of New Year’s cards, which the department sent to its donors and supporters every winter. Each contained the work of a local artist, accompanied by a quotation about books. One read: “The world exists in order to become a book.”—Stéphane Mallarmé. Another: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”—Jorge Luis Borges. A third: “Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.”—John Muir. Menges told me the idea for the cards had been his; it would soon be clear to me that the sentiments were as well.

  I had not come to talk about greeting cards, however. In the middle of the room sat a cart, holding a large, leather-bound volume.

  “Ah,” I said. “This must be the book.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “I thought you’d want to see it.”

  It was true. I had already heard much about this particular book, and I was anxious to examine it for myself. But I also wanted to observe Menges as he looked at it, touched it, talked about it. Menges, I knew, had gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain and preserve this volume. I had come here to get a firsthand feel for one librarian’s intense devotion to a single text.

  The saga began in 1990, when Menges was contacted by a University of Washington alumnus from Spokane. The man owned a collection of old books that had once belonged to his grandfather, a history professor at Northwestern University. He hoped the library might have use for the volumes. Menges, of course, welcomed the offer, but he realized, too, that nothing might come of it. Special collections libraries are, by their very nature, highly selective—and often the books people want to donate are either of little historical interest or already on the library’s shelves. But you never know when and where you’re going to strike gold. Once, for instance, somebody had fished some old architectural drawings out of a dumpster and brought them to the library. They turned out to be the original plans for some important local buildings.

  The Keeper of the Books must always keep his mind open. Menges hopped on a plane for Spokane, having concluded the man’s collection was at least worth checking out in person. It was there that he first laid eyes on the book. Its ornately decorated leather spine was badly worn, but the gold-leaf title was still legible:

  OGILBY’S
/>   AMERICA

  Menges did not need to be a rare books librarian to see that it was a beautiful work. That would have been obvious to anyone taking a cursory perusal of its 122 superb engravings, including many gorgeous maps. But Menges also recognized it as a historically important volume. Its author, the Scottish cartographer John Ogilby, had served as royal cosmographer and geographic printer under England’s King Charles II and had published America in 1671 as part of a series of works about other lands. It was not a particularly original work (most of the information was, in fact, lifted from other sources) nor a particularly accurate one (placing Montezuma’s Aztec empire, for example, in Peru). Nonetheless, it had the distinction of being the first encyclopedia of the New World to be published in English. Moreover, Menges knew that Ogilby had authored several other map books, most notably Britannia, the first-ever national road atlas. Originally published in 1675, Britannia was later reprinted in a number of editions—including a 1762 version, revised by John Senex and retitled The Roads Through England Delineated, which now sat on his library’s shelves. If nothing else, Menges relished the opportunity to bring two of Ogilby’s most important works together under one roof. “This obviously was one of the nicest books—if not the nicest book—in the [Spokane] collection,” he recalled. “I, of course, expressed a strong interest in it.”

  He understood, however, that in the thorny world of donor relations, interest does not always translate into acquisition. The Keeper of the Books must schmooze. Menges was not surprised that the man did not immediately relinquish the book, wanting some assurances before making the gift. “Because it had belonged to his grandfather, and there was this family tie to it,” he explained, “he was concerned that it be in a good home.”

  Luckily, Menges was in an ideal position to talk about good homes just then. His Special Collections and Preservation Division was setting up shop in the brand-new Kenneth S. Allen Library. The building had been named after a former university librarian, who (like most former university librarians) would not have had a large edifice built in his honor if not for one fact: he was the father of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Thanks in large part to the computer magnate’s $10 million gift (the largest in university history to that time), the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes had been able to fill the new facility with all sorts of state-of-the-art technology—from special filters on lights and windows, designed to guard books against damaging ultraviolet rays, to a computer-monitored, climate-controlled vault where rare works, such as the Ogilby, were to be stored.

  “The book’s going to be here forever,” Menges could confidently promise the alumnus from Spokane. “It’s going to be well cared for, and it’s going to be used.”

  In making such assurances, Menges was putting not just the library’s reputation but his own on the line. If anything happened to the book, he would be stuck with the unenviable task of explaining things to the donor—not to mention administrators, journalists, and, worst of all, other potential givers, who might consequently hesitate to put their own beloved volumes in his care. But his obligations did not end there. The Keeper of the Books must answer to the past and future, as well as to the present. In assuming responsibility for the book, Menges would be accountable to everyone who had ever read it, studied its maps, placed it lovingly on the shelf. They had kept the volume intact for more than three hundred years, and Gary Menges owed it to them to do no worse. Yet he had an even bigger responsibility—his most solemn duty of all, in fact: to keep the book in good condition for generations to come, readers not yet born.

  This burden was one that Menges was only too happy to shoulder. I could see that right away as I sat in his office that morning—and it occurred to me that the donor from Spokane must have seen it, too. As I was, he had probably been reassured by the librarian’s unpretentious enthusiasm for the book, all the more convincing for its lack of bluster, and by the careful but confident way Menges held it in his hands. And perhaps he was won over by the way Menges looked at it—not with the covetous stare of a lover, not even with the overly jealous eye of a parent, but with the proud and protective gaze of a good grandparent. The longer I talked to Menges, the more I suspected that the man’s final decision to donate the book had less to do with the high-tech frills of the new library than with the quiet charisma of a certain old-fashioned librarian.

  After the negotiations were completed, the legalities hashed out, and the paperwork signed, the book arrived in Seattle. But Menges’s work was just beginning. His next job was to get the volume physically ready for the shelves—no small task. “This particular copy was not in the best condition,” he explained. “The text block [the part made up of the actual pages] was intact, but the bindings had worn out. Most bindings do, if the book is heavily used for three hundred years.”

  As he told me this, Menges reached into a file and pulled out a couple of photographs, taken of the book when it first came to the library. It looked as if the volume had been chained to the back of a pickup and taken for an off-road adventure. The binding—in layman’s terms, the cover—was ripped, stained, and generally worn-out. The leather itself was cracked and brittle. The corners were frayed. The frontboard—the part of the cover you would open in order to read the book—was completely detached. There were other problems as well, including some ripped maps. All told, Menges said, the estimated cost of repairing the damages had come to almost a thousand dollars—no small sum to plunk down on a single book, but manageable if you’ve got it in your budget. The trouble was, Gary Menges didn’t have it in his budget. He would have to raise this money on his own.

  One thing Menges did have, however, was a plan. He called it Save a Book. He had launched the program a year earlier, using a simple formula. First, select a beautiful old volume in a frightful state of disrepair. Then, put it in the display case that people nearly stumble over every time they walk into the reading room. Next, print up a bunch of flyers extolling the volume’s aesthetic and historical import. And finally, beg, cajole, and beg some more.

  Menges has a subtle gift for this art—as I learned when, in the midst of our interview, I found myself reaching for my checkbook to help out poor old Sir Walter Raleigh, the Save a Book poster child du jour, whose History of the World had fallen on hard times. “All sorts of people donate,” Menges cheerfully explained, moments before accepting my modest alms. “On our first Save a Book effort [for Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle], the donors ranged from the president of the university to a student who came in and gave me a dollar, saying that was all he could afford. I assured him that his dollar was most welcome.”

  The Keeper of the Books must enlist others to the cause. But the list of contributors for John Ogilby’s America also included a Good Samaritan by the name of Gary Menges, who wrote a personal check for fifty dollars. When I asked him about this, he was dismissive. “I always contribute to the Save a Book,” he simply explained. “I think it’s an important program.”

  After the money had been raised, America was tenderly wrapped up and sent to the unlikely destination of Browns Summit, North Carolina, where it was unpacked with equal care. Gary Menges could not fight his war against oblivion alone; his efforts now hinged on the expertise of Don Etherington, a Book Keeper of a very high order. For the past fifty years the British-born Etherington has worked as a conservator, restoring countless old volumes with the steady hands of a surgeon and the mystic passion of a necromancer. This unlikely career began when, at age thirteen, Etherington enrolled in a special bookbinding curriculum at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts. What on earth would draw someone to such an arcane endeavor at so young an age? “I have no clue,” Etherington told me with a laugh, during a phone interview. Perhaps it was simply in his blood. “My uncle was the head of the reading room at the British Library for many years,” he said. “And in fact, as strange as it may seem, a few years ago I found out that my great-greatgrandfather was the painting restorer for Queen Victoria.”

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p; Beginning with a seven-year apprenticeship at Harrison’s & Sons, the printer for the royal family, Etherington worked his way to the top of his profession in England. In 1970 he came to the United States to help set up a conservation program at the Library of Congress, then took a similar position at the University of Texas in 1980. Since 1987 he has been president of the for-profit Etherington Conservation Center, a division of Information Conservation, Inc. During the course of his career, Etherington has worked on some of the Western world’s most important documents. While at the Library of Congress, for example, he helped restore the Gettysburg Address. He has also done work on the Magna Carta of 1297 (owned by Ross Perot), the Carolina Charter of 1663, the Texas Declaration of Independence of 1836, and the State of Virginia’s copy of the Bill of Rights. At the time I interviewed him—September 1998—Etherington was part of a team designing a new housing and display for the Declaration of Independence.

  Working on such monumental—not to mention fragile—documents requires both a lot of talent and a lot of nerve. “You cannot allow emotion to get into it,” Etherington explained. “You can’t be overawed by the object. You have to be concerned about what you’re doing and what’s wrong with the object and what’s needed to restore it. If you approached it as if you were scared of it, your hands wouldn’t be so sure. And that’s when all the accidents happen. You’ve got to have a certain surety of hand to deal with this type of material. And confidence—but not overconfidence.”

  You’ve also got to have decades of training. No university offers a specific major in book conservation, explained Etherington. Instead, it is largely “an artisan’s job”—one of the last remaining professions in which skills are passed down from one generation to the next. He employs a wider variety of materials than his forebears did, but otherwise “the same procedures that they used in the fifth or sixth or seventh century we still use today.”