The Island of Lost Maps: A Story of Cartographic Crime – Miles Harvey

A bit heavy going if I’m honest, The Island of Lost Maps felt like it would have made a great magazine article, but had to be stretched too thin to make a book.

The two themes that run through the book are the history of maps and cartographic kleptomaniac Gilbert Bland who stole an unknown number of maps from university and city library collections across North America. There were a few points of interest: how tempting it is for collectors to break bound books because they can make more by selling off the individual maps than they can the whole; how some of the institutions that had maps stolen were/are reluctant to admit this for fear of highlighting how lax their security is (and how low on their list of expenditure library collections have sunk); but the main thrust is Harvey’s own quest to find Gilbert Bland, which just wasn’t that interesting to me.

Amazon.co.uk link: The Island of Lost Maps: A Story of Cartographic Crime