The Island of Lost Maps Read online

  In July 1974 Glaser was arrested for stealing eight sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century atlases—including Thomas Jefferys’s famous American Atlas of 1776—from the map room at Dartmouth College.43 Sentenced to a three-to-seven-year prison term, he spent some seven months behind bars before being paroled. But that did not dissuade him from striking again. In 1978 Glaser stole two maps by the explorer Samuel de Champlain from the University of Minnesota’s James Ford Bell Library. The maps—one published in 1613, the other in 1632—were each worth more than $10,000 at the time (and now might fetch upwards of $300,000 and $100,000, respectively).44 Upon his guilty plea in 1982, Glaser, who also admitted stealing two maps from the Newberry Library in Chicago, was given six months in prison, ordered to pay $5,500 in restitution, and sentenced to four and a half years’ probation. Yet he continued to pass himself off as a genteel bibliophile, publishing another book, America on Paper, in 1989. “For twenty-five years I have been handling browned bits of paper, usually bound in calf with ridged spines and gold stamping that somehow survived into the late 20th century,” he wrote in that volume.45 “Sometimes, even if I could not read a work in the original, simply handling it made me imagine I was in touch with time.”

  Librarians must have fumed at the notion of a book destroyer lauding the survival of books, especially after he pleaded guilty in March 1992 to stealing a map from a 1628 edition of Sebastian Münster’s famous Cosmographia, housed at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Less than one month later, while on probation, he was discovered again—reportedly wearing surgical gloves and carrying a hammer—in the stacks of Lehigh University.46 He might be out there in some rare books room today, still handling those beloved “browned bits of paper.”

  Robert M. “Skeet” Willingham, Jr., librarian, author, Sunday school teacher, and city council member from Washington, Georgia, who was described by his friends and neighbors as “Mr. Straight,” “a perfect gentleman,” and “a very gentle fellow.”47 Somewhere along the line, however, this exemplary citizen, the rare books curator for the University of Georgia, developed an alter ego. In the words of Katharine Leab, the editor of American Book Prices Current and an expert on library security: “He became his doppelgänger: the bad Willingham.” In June 1986 a staffer at the university’s Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library noticed that a rare map of South Carolina was missing. Then a cursory inventory of the map collection indicated that others had been removed as well. Police—led to Willingham on a tip provided by the map mogul Graham Arader—soon searched the librarian’s historic columned home and turned up seventeen framed maps, several of which were known to have been missing from the university. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. In September 1988, a jury convicted Willingham on thirteen of fourteen felony counts for the thefts of a huge cache of library property, including an eight-volume set of floral prints by Pierre-Joseph Redouté, valued at $500,000 (and now worth as much as $600,000).48

  Fitzhugh Lee Opie, a descendant of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and the legendary Virginia governor Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who liked to present himself as a guardian of history. When Virginia was considering adoption of the Martin Luther King holiday, Opie, an Alexandria bookstore owner, labeled the idea “a disgrace,” arguing that the slain civil rights leader was “neither a Virginian nor a patriot.”49 Opie’s professed love of country, however, did not dissuade him from gutting the Library of Congress over a period of ten years—visiting several times a week, according to prosecutors, to steal maps, books, and prints. The scam came to an end in March 1992, when Opie was caught with two mid-nineteenth-century Pacific Railroad maps stuffed under his sweater.

  William Charles McCallum, a Yale University and Boston College Law School graduate, whom The Boston Globe described as “a rising star” at the New Hampshire attorney general’s office.50 Thin, elegant, and sophisticated, with a taste for fine art and antiques, McCallum had such impressive legal credentials that the future U.S. Supreme Court justice David Souter—then on the state Supreme Court—once personally promoted him. But this outward success, his defense team would later argue, belied McCallum’s bizarre private life, full of obsessive rituals such as eating his own hair, brushing his teeth up to fifty times a day … and stealing just about everything he could lay his hands on, including underwear and socks from laundromats. (“He only feels comfortable in stuff that’s stolen,” explained his attorney.)51 When police finally caught up with McCallum in 1996, they found his Colonial-style home in Londonderry packed with more than a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of paintings, books, furniture, and prints, most of them stolen from local libraries and universities. Prominent in the ill-gotten collection were a number of cartographic curiosities, including Thomas Moule’s 1845 map of Hampshire County, England, stolen from Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire; Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville’s 1755 map of North America, taken from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth; and two old editions of Strabo’s Geography belonging to Dartmouth’s Baker Library.

  Last but hardly least, the mysterious Daniel Spiegelman of Yonkers, New York. Among librarians Spiegelman is remembered as one of the biggest thieves in recent history, plundering the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at New York’s Columbia University for approximately $1.3 million in books, documents, and manuscripts, including more than 250 early maps. But among conspiracy theorists, especially those of the right-wing militia variety, he is even more legendary.

  This much is known about the case for certain: in 1994 the staff at the rare books room at Columbia discovered that a large number of priceless documents—everything from one-of-a-kind medieval manuscripts to letters and documents signed by various American presidents—had been stolen. The perpetrator did not operate in public but broke into the secured stacks after hours, possibly via an abandoned conveyor belt, according to the library’s director, Jean Ashton. When Ashton and other Columbia authorities discovered the thefts, they immediately started contacting book and print dealers worldwide—a strategy that soon paid off. In June 1995 authorities in the Netherlands arrested Spiegelman after he tried to sell a medieval manuscript to a Utrecht dealer, who recognized the item as stolen.

  Then the story really got strange. Newspapers in the Netherlands, where the suspect was being held, began reporting that Spiegelman had possible links to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, suspects in the deadly 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The reports quoted a Dutch Justice Ministry official as saying that Spiegelman was “suspected of delivering weaponry to the suspects of the Oklahoma bombings.”52 The allegation—later retracted by the Dutch government—apparently stemmed from the fact that Spiegelman was wanted in the United States on charges of illegally purchasing several pistols from gun shops in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona. Dutch newspapers also reported that a safe belonging to Spiegelman in New York contained a list of up to forty names of people allegedly linked to the blast.

  The U.S. Justice Department, however, repeatedly denied a connection between the two cases. And Spiegelman himself disavowed any part in the Oklahoma City bombing, telling the Dutch media that “I was involved in it as much as I was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”53 Nonetheless, the story soon took on a life of its own, encouraged by a member of McVeigh’s defense team, who declared that Spiegelman bore a noteworthy resemblance to John Doe No. 2, the mystery man long sought in connection with the bombing. The Internet was soon abuzz with innuendo, as exemplified by one widely distributed posting, titled “Thirty Questions About Oklahoma City,” which appeared on websites such as the Big Sky Patriot (“covering issues of government corruption … the militia movement, the Freemen”). According to the posting, whose writer was identified only as Monte, no “media blackout in the … case has been more complete than the blackout imposed over the name of Daniel Spiegelman; it is as if he has stepped off the face of the planet. Who is Daniel Spiegelman? What connection does he
have with Oklahoma City? Is he John Doe Number Two?”

  When I posed some of these questions to Jean Ashton during a phone interview in early 1999, she said she honestly didn’t know—and what’s more, she didn’t particularly care. What mattered to her was, first, that Spiegelman had been extradited to the United States, where in April 1997 he pleaded guilty to a variety of charges at the U.S. District Court in Manhattan; second, that Judge Lewis A. Kaplan had set aside federal sentencing guidelines and handed out a harsher-than-normal prison sentence of five years, arguing that the crimes were more serious than “a simple theft of money”; and, third, that law enforcement agents had recovered much of the plunder.

  All of that was good news, but when I asked her about the fate of the stolen maps, she turned glum. Of more than 250 maps Spiegelman was thought to have stolen, fewer than 50 had been recovered, she said. Worse still, many of those had come from an extremely rare copy of the Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Major of 1667, valued, in its former state, at a minimum of three hundred thousand dollars. Only two intact German-language editions of the book had existed anywhere in the world, she explained, and Columbia’s copy was all the more unique because it had once belonged to Alexander Anderson, a prominent early-nineteenth-century engraver who supplemented the original with his own maps. “In many ways,” she said, “the Blaeu was the most serious part of the whole theft.”

  HERE ONCE WAS A MAN WHO THOUGHT CLASSIFYING A criminal was as easy as assigning a Dewey decimal number to a book. His name was Johnny Jenkins, and he was famous in rare books circles, both as a flamboyant dealer from Texas and as president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America.54 In 1982, when serving as head of security for that organization, Jenkins wrote an article claiming that all library thieves could be categorized into one of five “basic types.” There was the Kleptomaniac, the Thief Who Steals for Himself, the Thief Who Steals in Anger, the Casual Thief, and the Thief Who Steals for Profit. It was simple to get inside the head of a crook, Johnny Jenkins declared, because criminals “tend to exhibit classifiable characteristics.”

  Six years after he wrote those words, this same Johnny Jenkins was found floating in the Colorado River, dead from an apparent suicide. Not long before that, news had broken that a number of the very rare and expensive documents Jenkins had been selling over the years were forgeries. Many mysteries surrounded the case—not the least of which were whether Jenkins was personally involved in creating the fakes, and, if so, why a man of his stature would have felt compelled to do such a thing. They remain mysteries still. In both his controversial career and his enigmatic demise, Johnny Jenkins would defy simple classification. “I suppose he was a man who lived two lives,” one of his old friends told Calvin Trillin of The New Yorker.55 “Or maybe three.”

  I keep this tale in mind whenever I’m tempted to make generalizations about the motivations of modern-day map thieves. While at first glance a few of them do seem to fit nicely into those criminal categories Johnny Jenkins invented, on closer inspection most appear to have been driven by complex and contradictory impulses. (A New Hampshire jury, for instance, rejected William McCallum’s insanity defense, determining that while he may have had a preference for stolen underwear and hot maps, he was not a kleptomaniac.) Still, if I had to pick out a single overriding motive for map theft, I would opt for the one that’s been driving cartographic crime for centuries: simple greed. As a sixteenth-century Spanish diplomat wrote about Lopo Homem, official Portuguese Master of Sea Charts and unofficial smuggler: “[He and his assistant] have orders to make no chart for anybody but the King.56 But sometimes they venture at a price.”

  Yet there’s another motivation, one that Johnny Jenkins failed to mention but that may have been a factor in his own fall from grace. Simply put: the chance of getting caught in a book-related crime is fairly small, and the chance of getting serious punishment is still smaller. This is especially true of map theft—in part because of the very structure of the trade. The Columbia librarian Jean Ashton—who is not particularly hopeful that her missing maps will ever be returned—explained the situation like this: “The market for maps is—what shall I say?—much more uncontrolled than the market for medieval manuscripts, for example. These early printed maps are bought not just by scholars or the rarefied collector. They’re sold as decorative objects, not as scholarly objects. And they may be sold in all kinds of ways that fall outside the system of security by the dealers and collectors of other kinds of rare materials—at flea markets, for example. So it’s far less likely that people can track down an individual map.”

  Ashton stopped short of directly blaming dealers, aware that even the most scrupulous ones often find it impossible to recognize a stolen map once it has been cut out of a book. But when I discussed the issue with Graham Arader, the longtime alpha male of the map kingdom was not so diplomatic. He insisted that his competitors are often less than thorough about checking the provenance of their merchandise. “It’s simple,” he said. “All you say is, ‘Where did you get this map?’ Then you listen to the story and you say, ‘Do you mind if I check your sources?’ And then if he starts waffling, you say, ‘Sir, get the hell out of my gallery!’ And if you really think he stinks, then you turn him in.”

  On a number of occasions, Arader has practiced exactly what he preached. It was he, for example, who sparked the investigation into Skeet Willingham, notifying University of Georgia authorities in 1985 that someone had offered him a letter by the Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene—a manuscript ostensibly in the university’s collection at the time. Still, Arader had to concede that even he has made mistakes, such as when he bought sixty-two maps from Andrew Antippas, unaware that more than forty of them had been stolen from his own alma mater. The fact that they were hot did not come to light until Arader offered some of them for sale to a Texas collector named Walter Reuben, who recognized the maps as belonging to Yale. “Antippas got me,” Arader conceded. “He definitely tricked me.”

  But, in his usually pugnacious style, the map mogul laid much of the blame for the ongoing wave of thefts squarely on the shoulders of librarians, who he claimed are simply not vigilant enough. “Most librarians are incompetent, boring, and dull,” he said. “And they have this easy life. Many of them view their collections as their personal fiefdoms. But really, they don’t look after their material. You know, it’s not hard to tell the difference between a thief and somebody who’s legitimate. If you’re not intelligent enough to see these guys coming, then you shouldn’t be a curator.”

  It’s easy to see why librarians don’t care much for Arader. Even so, few of them would deny that rare books rooms face serious security problems. And while the curators—especially those who think they are somehow above the nuts-and-bolts work of preventing theft—certainly deserve a good part of the blame, so do the institutions themselves. Well into the 1990s, for example, many university libraries lacked surveillance cameras for even their most rare and valuable collections, a shortcoming school administrators largely chose to ignore. Protecting books is “simply not what we value as a society,” observed the security expert Katharine Leab. “If there is a choice between providing funds to inventory the stacks or to get a new bus for the football team, what do we do? Well, we get a new bus for the football team.”

  But if the map industry and map libraries have not done enough to discourage theft, neither has the legal system. Willingham served only thirty months of a fifteen-year sentence before getting out on parole. Still, his punishment was comparatively harsh. McCallum, who could have served the rest of his life in prison for the nearly seventy counts against him, got a three-to-six-year term. Fathers Huback and Chapo each received only eighteen months. Antippas got one year, while Opie got just six months for his decade-long crime spree. Glaser, a habitual offender, received only three years of probation for his 1992 conviction. And even Spiegelman—whom the judge went out of his way to punish—got only five years in prison (of which he had alrea
dy served more than half) plus a $314,150 fine (of which he may never get around to paying more than a small fraction).

  “If you steal a Picasso or Rembrandt or any piece out of a museum,” observed Carol Miller, the former head of security for the Free Library of Philadelphia, “there is going to be publicity and there is going to be serious time given. But if you steal things out of a book, the sentences are just ludicrously low. People say, ‘Well, it’s just a book.’ What kind of message is this sending to people who are thinking about doing this? We’re saying, ‘Go ahead, because you’re not going to get in too much trouble.’ It’s sort of a joke.”

  As the prices of rare maps soared in the mid-1990s, the security problems that had plagued libraries and the rare books trade for decades remained largely unsolved or unaddressed. Which meant that the stage was set for the most prolific cartographic criminal in American history to make his quiet entrance.

  GILBERT BLAND STOLE IT FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF Washington. John Ogilby stole it from Arnold Montanus, who stole it from somebody else. Ogilby’s 1671 map of Virginia—one of those that Bland allegedly pilfered in Seattle—offers proof that the cartographers of yore were themselves shameless crooks. As the biographer Katherine S. Van Eerde so delicately put it, Ogilby “failed to mention” that he had borrowed the map from Montanus, who, in turn, forgot to announce that he had borrowed it from earlier cartographers. Save for a few decorative details, the Ogilby and Montanus maps of Virginia are dead ringers for a 1630 work by Willem Janszoon Blaeu, the leading Dutch cartographer of the seventeenth century (and father of the Joan Blaeu mentioned earlier in this chapter). For his part, Willem Blaeu tried to put a stop to such plagiarism. According to Lloyd A. Brown, Blaeu “made a special plea to … Holland and Friesland for protection against the vultures who were pirating his maps, asserting that he could support his family by honest means, with God’s mercy, if certain persons would desist from copying all his newest maps before the ink on them was dry.”57 But Blaeu himself was not above theft, as his own 1630 map of Virginia makes clear. He bought the plate for the map from the rival Hondius firm, replacing the Hondius name with his own (a change that left faint traces of the erased letters on his version). Yet the Hondius family had no rightful claim to the work either. Of all those who took credit for the map, the only legitimate one was the English adventurer John Smith, who drafted it in 1612.