The Island of Lost Maps Read online

  The mappa mundi that spoke of Bland was a reproduction of a brightly colored illustration found in a thirteenth-century book of psalms. The original, housed in the British Library and widely known as the Psalter Map, is less than six inches high and four inches wide—just the right size for a napkin of the world—but a much larger version of it is thought to have hung in the residence of the English king Henry III. At the exact middle of the map, like a bull’s-eye on a dart board, is Jerusalem, the “navel of the world” in Christian teaching: “Thus saith the Lord God; This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nation and countries that are round about her” (Ezekiel 5:5). From Jerusalem extends the known world—Europe, Africa, and Asia (with the last on top because the map is oriented to the east). The unknown world begins at the margins.

  In these borderlands lie the spots that medieval Europeans had never actually seen but wanted to exist, the landmarks of their fondest hopes and darkest fears. At the top edge of the Psalter Map, for example, is the Garden of Eden, complete with the images of Adam and Eve standing by the Tree of Knowledge. On the northeastern border are the nations of Gog and Magog, from which the dreaded servants of the Antichrist were expected to overrun Christendom on the Judgment Day. (Gog and Magog are surrounded on the map by a huge wall, which, according to legend, was built by Alexander the Great to keep those nations’ flesh-eating citizens at bay.) And on the map’s southernmost margins, standing side by side like criminals in a police lineup, are representatives of the various monstrous races: the Artibatirae, who walk on all fours; the Cynocephali, who have the heads of dogs; the Epiphagi, whose eyes are on their shoulders; the Maritimi, who have four eyes; the Sciopods, who have one giant foot; the Troglodytes, who live in caves.40 In the coming centuries the borders of the world would expand, and such monsters would move steadily farther from the civilized center, becoming extinct only when their natural habitat, terra incognita, finally ceased to exist.

  In some very real ways, however, they are with us still, those monsters. We’ve added four new continents to our maps since the Middle Ages, subtracted Gog, Magog, and the Earthly Paradise, firmed up our ideas about sphericality, gravity, and heliocentricity. Yet, as I stared at the Psalter Map that day, I was struck not by its geographical failings but by its psychological accuracy. “Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins,” wrote Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, in his 1956 book, Heaven and Hell.41 Huxley called these regions “the antipodes of the mind”—a reference to a mythical landmass found on the southern edges of many mappae mundi (though, technically, not on the Psalter Map).42 Just as the geographical antipodes were thought to be inhabited by physical mutants, Huxley’s antipodes of the mind are home to “strange psychological creatures leading an autonomous existence according to the law of their own being.” Huxley, who found his own way to these antipodes by ingesting mescaline, insisted that we all have “an Old World of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Worlds.”43 For some, he wrote, seeking out “the mind’s far continents” leads to a heaven of visionary experience; for others, a private hell.44

  I was meditating on such notions when the Psalter Map suddenly seemed to be telling me about Gilbert Bland’s life, describing in vivid shades of green and red and blue a series of journeys back and forth between the center and the margins, between a mainstream middle-class existence and a criminal life on the edge, between a core identity and a pack of imaginary beings. Then it occurred to me that the map was also saying something about the kind of person drawn to such desperate excursions: you don’t go unless you’re either extremely self-delusional or self-destructive, unless you think you can reach an Earthly Paradise or are searching for your own version of Gog and Magog. You have to believe in other things, too: that there are places in the world where you can get lost, places where you can leave your old life behind, places where normal rules don’t apply. And although I had never been prone to such adventures myself, I now realized that, in following Bland, I would be somehow traveling on a parallel journey to the margins. It struck me that mine, too, should begin at the center.

  I knew that, in the antique maps business, no one is more central than a charismatic figure named W. Graham Arader III—though perhaps calling him the navel of the map world would be taking the metaphor too far. Some of his more cynical contemporaries might pick a different body part.

  DETAIL FROM A MAP OF THE TURKISH EMPIRE IN JOAN BLAEU’S FAMOUS ATLAS MAJOR.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Map Mogul

  IS THIS BORING OR WHAT?” GRAHAM ARADER growled at me as he entered a sales gallery at the elegant New York offices of Sotheby’s, the venerable auction house. “Didn’t I warn you? Didn’t I say that this thing would be a big bore?”

  It was late in the afternoon of a summer day so maniacally hot that even Manhattan seemed to have succumbed to a mood of small-town languor. A sale of rare books and manuscripts had been going on since morning, and now the gallery was less than half full, its chairs in disarray. A few hours earlier the place had been crammed with TV crews and scurrying newspaper reporters, all there to witness the much-publicized sale of some recently discovered love letters between Albert Einstein and a reputed Russian spy. The journalists, however, had gone home disappointed: the top bid on the Einstein correspondence—$180,000—proved to be less than the preestablished minimum price, prompting Sotheby’s to take a pass on the sale. Since then a steady stream of literary curiosities had gone on the auction block: Sigmund Freud’s note to an associate, begging for book royalties; galley proofs for a snippet of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; Elvis Presley’s epistolary vow that his love for a Memphis TV personality could not “be equaled or surpassed by anyone”; and the final shooting script for the second half of Gone with the Wind, complete with a proposal to change “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” to “Frankly, my dear, I just don’t care.” Either line would have suited my mood at that moment. Coming from the Midwest, where auctions usually involve farm implements, I had expected to find this event completely entertaining if not engrossing. But as the afternoon wore on, I had grown tired of the practiced nonchalance of the clientele, who bid thousands of dollars on rare first editions with all the enthusiasm of someone ordering scrambled eggs, and of the endlessly solicitous patter of the auctioneer, a man with the prim voice of a BBC newsreader and the unctuous charm of an American game show host. By now, the pretensions of the place had begun to feel as stifling as the heat outside.

  Arader was right: this was boring. I knew, however, that it was unlikely to remain that way now that he was on the scene. W. Graham Arader III has been accused of a lot of things by a lot of people, but no one has ever charged him with being dull. Brash and bombastic, brilliant and bigger than life, he has been the subject of lengthy profiles in such prominent publications as The New Yorker and Smithsonian magazine. He has also served as the thinly veiled model for the central character of a recent novel and is without question the most recognizable figure in the world of antique maps. When I began my research on that world, I quickly learned two things: (1) almost everybody in the business seemed to cherish the chance to discuss Arader, often in reproachful terms (and usually off the record), and (2) Arader had an equal enthusiasm for talking about himself, almost always in the most laudatory manner. “I’m the biggest map dealer in the twentieth century,” he said in one typical moment of bravado. “There’s no question about it. I sell $10 million in maps every year. I can pick up the phone and make $10,000 in a single hour. Yes, collecting has made me a very rich man.”

  And yet, as even Arader’s worst critics would probably concede, these were not empty boasts. At the time of the Sotheby’s auction, June 1998, I had been keeping in touch with this complex, contradictory man for two years. I was drawn to Arader in part because listening to him talk was like consuming a gallon of espresso in one sitting—an overwhelming sensation,
to be sure, and one that could leave a decidedly bitter aftertaste, but also an experience that left you wired and, once the buzz wore off, wanting another cup. And while there was absolutely no indication that Arader and Gilbert Bland had ever met, I realized early on that if I wanted to understand the antique maps business I would first need to know something about its biggest player. Over the past few decades the market for old maps had spread steadily from the esoteric fringes to the mainstream. By Arader’s own estimation, “It’s straight up since I started collecting in 1971, increasing 5 to 20 percent each year.” And no one had played a bigger role in this rise than Arader himself.

  I had already talked with Arader many times over the phone and had twice traveled to his main residence—an eighty-six-acre estate in the rolling horse country of Middleburg, Virginia, one of three homes that he and his wife own—to sit in his map-filled den and talk with him. By now I felt that we were pretty much talked out. I had come to Sotheby’s to see him in action.

  The final event of the day—a sale devoted to natural history books and atlases, Arader’s two main sources of wealth—was soon to begin. At long tables on either side of the auctioneer, flawlessly dressed young Sotheby’s employees sat ready to take phone bids from clients around the world. Those who would be bidding on the premises were finding their seats. As he strode into the gallery, Arader was accompanied by his teenage daughter, Lilli, and his cell phone. He would dote on both of them in the moments to come, turning from one to the other with terse but lively observations about ongoing events. He took a conspicuously inconspicuous chair at the very back of the room, next to a couple of clients or maybe prospective clients—a pleasant middle-aged man who told me he was a novice collector of botanical prints and his wife, who was passing the time by doing needlework. They were clearly not regular auction-goers, and when Arader discovered that they did not even have a catalog by which to follow the action, he obligingly scooted off to get them one. A few moments later, as he flipped through its pages, briefing the man on the upcoming items for sale, I saw him stop and jab his finger at one of the images. “It’s fabulous!” he whispered. “Fabulous!”

  It’s hard not to use exclamation marks when quoting Graham Arader: they seem to reflect not just the way he speaks (you get the feeling he even snores in superlatives) but his whole presence. Although his college sport was squash—he was captain of the Yale team—the forty-nine-year-old Arader has the hard-eyed, hard-boned look of a boxer, and a combative spirit to go with it. When he is making a particularly strong point about something, he tips back his head and sticks out his square jaw, as if expecting a punch from some unseen enemy and relishing the chance to return it. Even his name carries a certain belligerence: it’s pronounced not air-uh-der but uhraider, as in someone who attacks his target by storm. And that was precisely what he planned to do here at Sotheby’s. “I won’t start kicking ass until Lot 553,” he had told me a few days earlier. “That’s when I’ll really start getting nasty. I’ll be buying some things—or else prices are going to go very, very high.”

  Lot 553—a 1748 book of maps and maritime adventure tales by George Anson—was the very first item up for sale in this final phase of the auction. Its number was now posted on a big electronic tote board, designed to convert any bid instantly into its equivalent in pounds, francs, deutsche marks, lire, yen, and zlotys. As the bidding began, Arader’s competitors turned toward the auctioneer’s podium. Many of them were dressed in upscale suits, a measure of their respect for the august surroundings. Arader himself, I could not help but notice, was heading into battle in a tennis shirt, slightly rumpled green khakis, and a pair of Nikes.

  THE FIRST TIME I INTERVIEWED GRAHAM ARADER—I WAS working on the Outside magazine story at the time—he used some extremely offensive language to describe a group of people he didn’t like. One of the things I greatly admire about Arader is his willingness to speak his mind on almost any subject at almost any time, but these particular words were so objectionable, not to mention bizarre and beside the point, that I probably would not have been able to work them into the article even if I had wanted to. That, however, was not what I told Arader when he called me some time later, asking me to pull the quote. I simply reminded him that our entire conversation had been on the record and that, like any journalist, I could not allow a source to dictate what I wrote or didn’t write. At first he began to lose his temper—a legendary trait—but then he calmed down and made me a simple offer: What if he gave me an even more quotable quote on the same general subject? Let me hear it, I said. He did just that. It was indeed more quotable—irresistibly so—and I ended up using it in the article, feeling that I had been very clever in my dealings with him. But months later, when I repeated this anecdote to Hugh Kennedy, a longtime Arader observer, he began to laugh. “See?” Kennedy said. “He’s even got you buying and selling.”

  Kennedy knows plenty about such matters, having studied the controversial businessman for years, from the perspective of both employee and author. He worked for Arader from 1987 to 1990, starting out as a gallery assistant and later becoming the director of the Philadelphia office. (Arader also has galleries in Houston, San Francisco, and New York, as well as a kind of upscale annex, an ornate Beaux Arts town house on Madison Avenue, which he modestly describes as “the single most beautiful house in New York City, without question.”) After leaving Arader’s service, Kennedy began a career as a novelist. His second book, Original Color, published in 1996, tells the story of a high-powered map and print dealer who “pitched fine art with the dogged persistence of a used-car salesman.”1 Kennedy’s Arader-inspired character terrifies employees, bends laws, lies to customers, bounces checks, and farts in public—not an entirely complimentary characterization, in short. Nonetheless, it was Graham Arader himself who had insisted that I read the book.

  I asked Kennedy why Arader would do that. “Because, in some ways, the book is about him,” he replied. “And he is, to a certain extent, self-obsessed. On the other hand, I’ve met very few people with his charisma. He’s completely driven, and can do business any time of the day or night. He also blurs the lines with his clients between vendor-buyer and friend. In any market where you’re selling something of premium value, you often need to sell yourself as well as the product. And the entertainment value of Graham is huge. When he’s on, he’s an enormously fun person to be around, and I think a lot of his clients have stuck with him just for that. They’re amused and occasionally delighted by him.”

  I shared those feelings. Arader could be a shameless flatterer and an equally shameless bully, but there was something very arresting about him nonetheless—not charm, exactly, but a kind of infectious exuberance for everything he said, did, thought, bought, or sold. And somehow, underneath all his seeming self-absorption, he had a skill for listening, for feeling out the needs of others and telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. Even a skeptic like Kennedy was not immune to his almost magical powers of persuasion. Once, on a book tour visit to Philadelphia, Kennedy stopped by to say hello to his former employer. “Within five minutes,” Kennedy remembered, “he was offering me a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job in the New York gallery, doing sales. I just felt like, ‘If I don’t get out of this room in five minutes, I’m going to say yes, and I won’t even be able to help myself.’ There was something bizarre about it.”

  Arader has used his uncanny charisma to amass a fortune worth, by his own count, $100 million. In doing so, he has led a dramatic transformation in the market for antique maps over the past quarter century, turning a historical artifact into a hip commodity. Before he entered the business in the early 1970s, old maps were mostly the province of librarians, historians, and a few tweedy collectors. One of them was Arader’s father, Walter G. Arader, a successful banker and businessman who began collecting maps in the mid-1960s—a passion that stemmed from his days as a navigator in the Navy. Walter Arader typically paid one or two hundred dollars for individual maps from atlases by grea
t Age of Discovery cartographers such as Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Gerard Mercator, and Abraham Ortelius. Today those same maps are listed in Graham Arader’s catalogs for prices ranging from five thousand to fifteen thousand dollars.

  The younger Arader got his feet wet in collecting as a teenager, during a year he spent in England before college. While studying at the Canford School in Dorset, he made frequent visits to map and book shops in London, where he carried out buying assignments for his father. It was during this time that he began to become enamored of maps himself. “The first map that I remember being wildly excited about was a map by Christopher Saxton of Dorset, which was printed in London in 1579,” Arader remembered. “It had beautiful late Renaissance designs on it and wonderful color. And it also showed where I went to school. Like most people, my interest in maps was very provincial. It was just incredibly exciting for me to buy.”

  But if Walter Arader saw maps as a fun way to spend his riches, his son viewed them as a potential way to make his own. When he enrolled at Yale, Graham Arader started to turn his enthusiasm for maps into an enterprise. The school has two great cartographic collections, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the map room at the Sterling Memorial Library. Together, they house literally hundreds of thousands of rare maps and atlases, including the controversial Vinland Map, reputed (by a dwindling number of experts) to be the only pre-Columbian map showing Norse discoveries in America; groundbreaking New World maps by Henricus Martellus and Johannes Ruysch; and a one-of-a-kind atlas previously owned by George Washington. The young Arader immediately sought these libraries out, determined to give himself a crash course in cartographic history. The scholars who worked in those secluded haunts were stunned to find a college freshman in their midst, but, as Arader would later explain: “That was my advantage. There were thirty world-class rare book librarians, historians, curators of collections—and nobody had any interest in what they were doing. So here were these lonely men and women, without anyone exhibiting any interest in their work, and then here comes this bright, young, aggressive man deluging them with questions. I’m the only guy in history who used Yale as a trade school.”