The island of lost maps
by Miles Harvey · first published 2000
3mentions
3recommended by
3HN commenters
2015–2023first – last mentioned
100% recommend
"The Island of Lost Maps is the story of a curious crime spree: the theft of scores of valuable centuries-old maps from some of the most prominent research libraries in the United States and Canada. The perpetrator was the Al Capone of cartography, a man with the unlikely name of Gilbert Bland, Jr., an enigmatic antiques dealer from south Florida whose cross-country slash-and-dash operation went virtually undetected until he was caught in December 1995.". "This is also the story of author Miles Harvey's quest to understand America's greatest map thief, a chameleon who changed careers and fami
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If you want to learn more about this kind of crime, I highly recommend a little book by Miles Harvey called THE ISLAND OF LOST MAPS: A TRUE STORY OF CARTOGRAPHIC CRIME. Fascinating whodunit regarding thieves who would go into rare book collections and quietly use a razor blade to carefullytear out an ancient map inside some hundreds-of-years-old…
on “Rare book experts join forces to stop tome raiders” ↗Reminds me of the book "The Island of Lost Maps"[0], although there are no acrobatics there is still stealthy thievery. [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108762.The_Island_of_Los...
on “Cracking the case of London’s elusive, acrobatic rare-book thieves” ↗…this story, there’s a more modern cousin of it: in the 90s, a map ‘dealer’ named Gilbert Bland stole hundreds of centuries-old maps from museums before he was caught. The full story is in the book “The Island of Lost Maps”: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-island-of-lo... https://m.alibris.com/The-Island-of-Lost-Maps-A-True-Story-o...
on “He Steals Them, of Course” ↗