The Island of Lost Maps Page 30

  4 how long it took See C. Koeman, Joan Blaeu and His Grand Atlas: Introduction to the Facsimile Edition of Le Grand Atlas, 1663 (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1970), pp. 43–46.

  5 “The planning involved” Ibid., p. 43.

  6 “The crossing of the border” Avner Falk, “Border Symbolism,” in Maps from the Mind: Readings in Psychogeography, ed. Howard F. Stein and William G. Niederland (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), p. 145.

  7 “The theological collection” Michael H. Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World, 4th ed. (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995), p. 8.

  8 God would smite dead 2 Samuel 6:7.

  9 “Some people seem to seek” G. Raymond Babineau, “The Compulsive Border Crosser,” Psychiatry, vol. 35 (August 1972): 281–290. Further quotations from Babineau also come from this article. “Perhaps the most outstanding conclusion” The Warren Report: The Official Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Associated Press, ed. (N.P.: Associated Press, 1964), pp. 160–161.

  10 “Countless governments” Mark Monmonier, Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), p. 146.

  CHAPTER SIX: THE INVISIBLE CRIME SPREE

  1 he introduced the first modern ventilation system See James H. Bready, “Book and Authors,” Baltimore Sun (July 17, 1949).

  2 “If you get bitten by a flea” Quoted in Peter Young, “Lloyd to Assemble Historical Annapolis Data,” Baltimore Evening Sun (November 30, 1960).

  3 He delighted in recounting See Bready, “Books and Authors.” The rough estimate of the number of books listed in Lloyd’s bibliography is my own.

  4 nineteen libraries In addition to the Peabody Library in Baltimore, the FBI reported that Bland stole materials from the following institutions: the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts; the British Columbia Archives in Victoria; Brown University; Duke University; the Library of Virginia in Richmond; the New York State Library in Albany; Northwestern University; the University of British Columbia in Vancouver; the University of Chicago; the University of Delaware; the University of Florida; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the University of Rochester; the University of South Carolina; the University of Virginia; the University of Washington in Seattle; Washington University in St. Louis; and Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. In addition, officials at the Newberry Library in Chicago told me that someone identifying himself as James Perry visited their reading rooms in 1994 but does not appear to have stolen anything—probably because the maps he examined had been stamped as property of the institution.

  5 Learned Men of the Magic Library See Michael H. Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World, 4th ed. (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995), pp. 17–35. See also Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Viking Press, 1996), pp. 187–199.

  6 “war with the forces of oblivion” Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 38.

  7 “books are humanity in print” Barbara W Tuchman, “Excerpts of Barbara Tuchman’s Lecture at Library of Congress,” Authors Guild Bulletin (November-December 1979): 15–18.

  8 returned by law enforcement officials In addition to the Ogilby maps, two plates from a Mercator atlas were stolen from the University of Washington. Both were later recovered and returned by the FBI.

  9 “poets and prose-writers” Quoted in Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library, trans. Martin Ryle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 20. “it is possible to sail” Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), p. 433. “Eratosthenes’ measurement” Norman J. W. Thrower, Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 21.

  10 “distance ruled” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 250.

  11 only 2,760 miles See chart in Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), p. 68. Although Morison gives the figures in nautical miles, I have, for the sake of clarity, approximated them here in statute miles.

  12 “had not the remotest idea” Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492–1616 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 336.

  13 “the shrinkage of space” Arendt, Human Condition, p. 250.

  14 “will help to shrink the world” Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1977), p. 279.

  15 “In this modern age, very little remains” Quoted in Peter Whitfield, New Found Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 186.

  16 “must thrill for the saddle” Theodore Roosevelt, A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), p. vii.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CARTOGRAPHIC CRIME

  1 The man in the picture See John Goss, The Mapmaker’s Art: An Illustrated History of Cartography (Skokie, Ill.: Rand McNally, 1993), pp. 141–148.

  2 All cultures are thought to make maps See David Stea, James M. Blaut, and Jennifer Stephens, “Mapping as a Cultural Universal,” in The Construction of Cognitive Maps, ed. Juval Portugali (Boston: Kluwer, 1996), pp. 1–16.

  3 “In the Roman Empire” Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself(New York: Random House, 1983), p. 269.

  4 locked in the innermost vaults See Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949), pp. 8–9.

  5 having failed to sell Portugal’s King John II In fact, the king may have been up to some thievery himself—with Columbus as his victim. Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote that “the King of Portugal wormed more and more information out of Christopher Columbus and [then]…he secretly equipped a caravel with Portuguese sailors and set it on the ocean to follow the route Columbus had charted for himself.” A storm, however, forced the caravel back to Lisbon. Realizing he had “been the object of a double deal,” Columbus “decided to leave Lisbon and come to Castile,” wrote Las Casas. See Bartolomé de Las Casas, History of the Indies, trans. and ed. Andree Collard (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 23.

  6 “fearing the king would send” Quoted in John Noble Wilford,The Mysterious History of Columbus: An Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 84.

  7 “Bartholomeo prepared to join” Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996), pp. 300–301.

  8 the Italian secret agent Ibid., pp. 107–108.

  9 “brought with him a well-painted globe” Quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492–1616 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 319.

  10 “In making the globe” Jardine, Worldly Goods, p. 299.

  11 Jorge Reinel See Edouard Roditi’s discussion of the Behaim-Reinel question in Magellan of the Pacific (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 103–111 and 129–136. See also Simon Berthon and Andrew Robinson, The Shape of the World (London: George Philip, 1991), p. 78.

  12 “He knew where to sail” Quoted in Morison, European Discovery, p. 381.

  13 “The Spanish … kept their official charts” Boorstin, Discoverers, pp. 267–268.

  14 “master thief of the unknown world” Quoted in John H. Parry, “Drake and the World Encompassed,” in Sir Francis Drake and the Famous Voyage, 1577–1580: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of Drake’s Circumnavigation of the Earth, ed. Norman J. W. Thrower (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 2.

  15 “prized these greatly” Quoted in Alexander McKee, The Queen’s Corsair: Drake’s Journey of Circumnavigation, 1577–1580 (New York: Stein & Day, 1978), p. 216.

  16 “exactly what he re
quired” Ibid.

  17 “Drake’s smooth passage” John Hampden, Introduction to Francis Drake: Privateer, ed. John Hampden (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1972), p. 16.

  18 “In the sixteenth century” Brown, Story of Maps, p. 9.

  19 “a great Book full of Sea-Charts” Quoted in A Buccaneer’s Atlas: Basil Ringrose’s South Sea Waggoner, ed. Derek Howse and Norman J. W. Thrower (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 22.

  20 “The Spaniards cried” Quoted in ibid., p. 22.

  21 “royal influence” Ibid., p. 1.

  22 “the plans of some fortified places” Quoted in Peter Barber, “Espionage!” in Tales from the Map Room: Fact and Fiction About Maps and Their Makers, ed. Peter Barber and Christopher Board (London: BBC Books, 1993), pp. 90–91.

  23 the Battle of the Brandywine See G.J.A. O’Toole, Honorable Treachery: A History of U.S. Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action from the American Revolution to the CIA (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), p. 42.

  24 “Spies directed by Washington” J. B. Harley, “The Map User in the Revolution,” in Mapping the American Revolutionary War, ed. J. B. Harley, Barbara Bartz Petchenik, and Lawrence W Towner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 104.

  25 “men were … prepared to risk their lives” Ibid., p. 105.

  26 “brought in with me” Quoted in ibid., p. 103.

  27 “knew no more about the [local] topography” Quoted in Christopher Nelson, Mapping the Civil War: Featuring Rare Maps from the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.: Starwood, 1992), p. 9.

  28 “I know that the principal northern papers” Quoted in O’Toole, Honorable Treachery, p. 132.

  29 “There was no doubt” Jay Robert Nash, Spies: A Narrative Encyclopedia of Dirty Tricks and Double Dealing from Biblical Times to the Present (New York: M. Evans, 1997), p. 251.

  30 “Securing the blueprint” Quoted in ibid., p. 54.

  31 the largest and most spectacular escape See John Hammond Moore’s fine book on this episode, The Faustball Tunnel: German POWs in America and Their Great Escape (New York: Random House, 1978).

  32 “stood traditional cartography on its ear” Stephen S. Hall, Mapping the Next Millennium: The Discovery of New Geographies (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 67.

  33 no substitute for a good map Some subsequent news reports suggested that the embassy bombing was no accident, after all. Quoting “senior U.S. and European military sources,” the London Observer declared that the embassy was purposely targeted because it had been serving as a rebroadcast station for the Yugoslavian army. As one source at the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency told the Observer, the “wrong map” story is “a damned lie.” See John Sweeney, Jens Holsoe, and Ed Vulliamy, “Revealed: NATO Bombed Chinese Deliberately,” London Observer (October 17, 1999): I. See also Joel Bleifuss, ‘A Tragic Mistake?,” In These Times, vol. 24, no. I (December 12, 1999): 2–3.

  34 a Michigan man named Bill Stewart See Jack Lessenberry, “Making a Federal Case of It,” Detroit Metro Times (August 9–15, 1995). A number of people protested Stewart’s conviction, arguing that while the material he attempted to sell was technically restricted, it was neither secret nor particularly sensitive. As Lessenberry observed, National Geographic magazine had just published “even better maps of the same area.”

  35 a couple of priests See unsigned article, “Thieves Steal Valuable Books from Yale Library,” Yale Alumni Magazine, vol. 36, no. 8 (May 1973): 30. See also John Mongillo, Jr., and Jack Mil-lea, “Two ‘Priests’ Are Indicted in Theft of Yale Volumes,” New Haven Register (March 17, 1973): 1–2, as well as Dan Collins and John Mongillo, Jr., “Two Hundred Rare Volumes Missing at Yale,” New Haven Register (March 18, 1973): 1–2A. I also consulted court records for this section.

  36 ‘Avoid, as you would the plague” St. Jerome, “Letter 52,” Select Letters of St. Jerome, trans. F. A. Wright, eds. T. E. Page, E. Capps, and W.H.D. Rouse (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933), p. 201.

  37 unusual rogues’ gallery My list of modern-day cartographic criminals is not comprehensive, of course. Among the omissions are two notorious U.S. library crooks, Stephen Carrie Blumberg and James Shinn, neither of whom specialized in maps per se but both of whom had a fondness for travel literature. I’ve also excluded European thieves like Ian Hart, who during the early 1980s stole a fortune in old maps and atlases from the Bodleian Library at Oxford by hiding them in his trousers.

  38 “was regarded with that special undergraduate awe” Walt Philbin, “American Dream Now a Nightmare for Tulane Prof,” New Orleans States-Item (January 13, 1979): A-6.

  39 “I was there, I was tempted” Ibid.

  40 “I indeed ruined my life and career” Quoted in unsigned story, “Tulane Prof Sentenced to One Year,” New Orleans States-Item (January 8, 1979).

  41 “the standard reference” Unsigned, “Trade Reviews,” AB Bookman’s Weekly, vol. 85, no. 24 (June 11, 1990): 2524–2525.

  42 “few great counterfeiters” Lynn Glaser, Counterfeiting in America: The History of an American Way to Wealth (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1968), p. 118.

  43 In July 1974 Glaser was arrested See Richard Yurko, “Library Theft Disclosed; Prime Suspect Arraigned,” The Dartmouth (July 9, 1974): I, 6. In preparing this section, I also consulted an unsigned Associated Press report, “Antique Document Dealer Is Sentenced for Thefts of Rare Maps from ‘U’,” in the Minneapolis Tribune (November 25, 1982), as well as court documents.

  44 $300,000 and $100,000 In May 1999, books containing the 1613 and 1632 maps were auctioned for $398,500 and $134,500, respectively. Selby Kiffer of the rare books and manuscripts department at Sotheby’s informed me that the individual Champlain maps accounted for the overwhelming part of each book’s value.

  45 “For twenty-five years I have been handling” Lynn Glaser, America on Paper (Philadelphia: Associated Antiquaries, 1989), p. 3.

  46 wearing surgical gloves See Beverly Goldberg, “Judge to Reconsider Map Thief’s Probation Sentence,” American Libraries, vol. 23, no. 6 (June 1992): 429–431.

  47 “Mr. Straight” See Joe Earle, “Ex-UGA Librarian Described as ‘Mr. Straight,’ ” Atlanta Journal and Constitution (January 21, 1987): B-1. I also consulted a number of other Atlanta Journal and Constitution and Athens Daily News/Banner-Herald stories for this section, as well as Nicholas A. Basbanes’s account in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), pp. 488–490.

  48 as much as $600,000 This estimate was provided by Selby Kiffer at Sotheby’s.

  49 “a disgrace” Quoted in Associated Press story, “Texas Legislature Considers King Holiday” (May 2, 1985). See also David Streitfeld, “Dealer Held in Library of Congress Theft,” Washington Post (March 13, 1992): F2; as well as Streitfeld, “Book Thief Sentenced to Six Months,” Washington Post (October 1, 1992): C4.

  50 “a rising star” Ric Kahn, “Two Faces of Serial Thief Bared in N.H.,” Boston Globe (January 16, 1998): A1.

  51 “He only feels comfortable” Defense attorney Stephen Jeffco, quoted in ibid. I also consulted a number of other Boston Globe, Concord Monitor, and Manchester Union-Leader stories for this section, as well as court and law-enforcement records.

  52 “suspected of delivering weaponry” Randy Ellis and John Parker, “Man in Dutch Prison Not Tied to City Blast, Authorities Say,” Oklahoman (December 30, 1995).

  53 “I was involved in it” Quoted in Associated Press story, ‘American Held in Netherlands Denies Bombing Link,” in Oklahoman (January 12, 1996). 165 “Thirty Questions About Oklahoma City” See Big Sky Patriot website, June 5, 1997.

  54 Johnny Jenkins “Rare Book and Manuscript Thefts,” AB Bookman’s Weekly, vol. 69, no. 7 (February 15, 1982): 1224–1239.

  55 “I suppose he was a man” Calvin Trillin, ‘American Chronicles: Knowing Johnny Jenkins,” New Yorker, vol. 65, no. 37 (October 30, 1989): 79–97.

  56 “[He
and his assistant] have orders” Quoted in Berthon and Robinson, Shape of the World, p. 79. 172 “failed to mention” Katherine S. Van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (Folkestone, England: Wm. Dawson & Sons, 1976), p. 108.

  57 “made a special plea” Brown, Story of Maps, p. 169.

  58 “made ungenerous use” Letter from Jefferson to Humboldt, December 6, 1813, in The Journals of Zebulon Montgomery Pike: With Letters and Related Documents, vol. 2, ed. Donald Jackson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), p. 387. Interestingly, Jefferson made no such excuses for the British cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith, who apparently also borrowed from Humboldt. “That … Arrowsmith should have stolen your map of Mexico,” Jefferson wrote, “was in the piratical spirit of the country.”

  59 “Grand Peak” Pike, Journals, vol. 1, p. 350.

  60 “the highest altitude ever attained” Douglas Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 155. Although he climbed to a record-breaking height of 18,893 feet above sea level, Humboldt stopped some 1,800 feet short of Mount Chimborazo’s summit.

  61 “The study of maps” Quoted in Helmut de Terra’s Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt, 1769–1859 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p. 17.

  62 “a truly magnificent cartographic achievement” Carl I. Wheat, Mapping the Transmississippi West, 1540–1861, vol. 1: The Spanish Entrada to the Louisiana Purchase, 1540–1804 (San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1957), p. 132.

  63 “a great variety of data” Quoted in ibid., p. 134.

  64 firsthand information gathered by French explorers This is the same Delisle map mentioned in Chapter Ten. 180 “haunted by the feeling” Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), p. 54.