Book tells true story of prolific map thief

A newspaper article spurred Miles Harvey to research the story of a mild-mannered antiques dealer who allegedly stole scores of historic maps. The story is told is Harvey's new book "The Island of Lost Maps"

In this story: 'More of an un-man' Subculture of collectors and experts Reads like a detective novel RELATED SITES

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Miles Harvey was sipping coffee and reading a newspaper article as he relaxed in a coffeehouse fit to inspire anyone in search of adventure.

At Kopi: A Traveler's Cafe, clocks give the time in Pago Pago, Paris and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Masks from Bali adorn the walls. Lonely Planet travel guides and maps line the shelves.

But all it took to send Harvey, then a literary critic for Outside magazine, on an intellectual adventure that would consume the next four years of his life was a newspaper article about a convicted thief of antique maps named Gilbert Bland Jr.

That was 1995. Now, in his new nonfiction book, "The Island of Lost Maps," Harvey details his quest to understand how and why the mild-mannered antiques dealer allegedly stole scores of centuries-old maps from some of the top research libraries in the United States and Canada.

Ultimately, Harvey's quest would turn into an unfulfilled obsession to get to know the slash-and-dash thief, a man so elusive the book's only picture of him shows Bland handcuffed outside a North Carolina courthouse with his hands hiding his face.

"I can't tell you how many times people described Mr. Bland as bland," Harvey said during a recent interview inside Chicago's Newberry Library, which Bland visited, but without making off with any maps.

Nineteen other libraries were less fortunate. In libraries from the University of Chicago to the British Columbia Archives in Victoria, the enigmatic Bland drew little, if any, attention as he allegedly made off with rare maps the FBI valued at about $500,000.

"Medium height, medium weight, middle-aged, middle everything -- he was a cipher, a blank slate. ... He was Bland," writes Harvey.

And that made it all too easy for the former petty crook to take a razor blade, slash the maps from the valuable books that had been protected for centuries, and quietly walk away unnoticed.

"I describe him in the book as less of a con man and more of an un-man -- you know, just someone who didn't look for a lot of attention one way or the other," says Harvey, himself a lover of maps old and new.

"The great mystery about him is his mixture of a meek exterior and this totally brazen act, not only going into libraries and literally slicing maps out of books as people must have been watching," but also openly selling the maps to dealers and collectors.

Ultimately, Bland, who also went by the name James Perry, served less than 1 1/2 years in prison for convictions in three of the cases.

In a federal plea bargain, Bland got limited immunity from further prosecution. He agreed to try to match the stolen maps with their rightful owners, and authorities have not pursued the other cases.

Harvey describes Bland as intelligent and labels him the "Al Capone of cartography."

"He certainly wasn't a violent man as Capone was," Harvey says. But, "like Capone, he figured out ways to make money by finding people's dark needs and servicing them. So that whereas Capone was running ... liquor and gambling and prostitution, Bland was running maps."

Harvey's research for the book took him coast to coast and into Canada as he prowled the genteel and intriguing subculture of map collectors and experts.

"The Island of Lost Maps" is home to such colorful and not-so-colorful figures as: