It used to be that maps showed the way to treasure. Their twisting, dotted lines quietly guided the adventurers, buccaneers and wayward thrill-seekers to an oversized X somewhere on a remote land. Now those treasures have been found and the gold doubloons or priceless jewels have been carted away. All that's left behind is the map, growing gray and silently aging.
Picking up that map is Miles Harvey and his book of cartographic crime, 'The Island of Lost Maps.' What Harvey reveals is a previously uncharted world that has turned the centuries-old treasure map into the treasure it used to reveal.
Apparently there's a whole subculture of librarians, private collectors and historians who have recently turned the maps of long ago into a sprawling business. Suddenly we see that the sketches from the Age of Exploration are now the centerpieces of Sotheby's auction house and fetch bids of more than $1,000,000. While this exchange of maps has produced its share of wealthy people, it has also spawned an occasional criminal.
The deeper and more sinister side of 'The Island of Lost Maps' is the focus on the most famous carto-criminal of this era, Gilbert Bland.
Following his crime spree in 1994 and 1995, the reader is taken through various libraries and rare collections with this overwhelmingly ordinary man. Bland manages to blend in and slice up 16th and 17th century atlases before selling them to map dealers. Like any good map, Bland's story reveals more than would allow from first glance.
Harvey manages to evenly spread out his material among the life of the enigmatic Bland, the growing map business and his own route of exploration. While Harvey's personal experiences have a habit of intruding like the equator across Indonesia, he uses it skillfully to explore the mysterious islands of Bland.
The book resembles the Mercator projection of the world. At the center all areas are equal, but they become a bit extended toward the poles of his topics. Bland's life is well explained, but his motivations are stretched. The explanation of the cartographic business frenzy remains undistorted across the middle but is a little bigger in the upper latitudes.
'The Island of Lost Maps' is as straightforward as a highway map but as detailed as a complete atlas. With Harvey's book you need neither the treasure map nor the treasure because you're already holding both.
