The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  He was still living in a dormitory when he began his career as a dealer. His initial break came when he cajoled a New Haven bookseller into giving him the names of three members of the Yale medical faculty who had paid to have maps framed at the store: “That’s how I got my first customers. I called them up and said, ‘Are you interested in collecting maps?’ They said they were—and they’re still good customers to this day.”

  In 1973, using a $150,000 loan from his father, Arader set up shop in earnest, issuing his first catalog. Business boomed. “It was incredible,” he said of those early days. “You could buy the things very cheaply. You’d buy something for a hundred bucks and sell it for two hundred. You know, you doubled your money pretty easily back then.”

  But why settle for only two hundred dollars, when you might get a whole lot more for a given map? Arader understood that antique maps prices were low because the market was tiny, and he was determined to expand the base of customers beyond the insular realm of aficionados. Some of his competitors probably had similar aspirations, but few of them had his capital, creativity, or connections—and none of them had his charisma. That was the important thing. Arader realized that through his own hustle, savvy, and force of personality, he could actually create value. An experienced collector might not be willing to pay three thousand dollars for a map that Arader had purchased for only a thousand. But a wealthy physician, looking for something interesting and fashionable to hang in his waiting room, might indeed be willing to spend that much—especially on a map that came with the imprimatur of W. Graham Arader III, a dealer known to carry only the finest merchandise and devote his considerable energy, talent, and knowledge to only the most exclusive clients. And eventually—after Arader was able to make a few more such sales, and after other dealers adjusted their prices accordingly—the map was no longer worth a thousand dollars in anyone’s mind. It was now a three-thousand-dollar map—that is, until Arader decided to ask nine thousand for it.

  By reaching out to nonexperts with cash to burn and corporations with offices to decorate, Arader has been able to steadily increase the demand for old maps. In so doing he has made many of his clients, not to mention some of his competitors, considerably more wealthy. He also has helped give antique maps unprecedented visibility, not only as investments (“These Old Maps Offer You a New Way to Double Your Money,” read one optimistic headline from the March 1997 issue of Money magazine) but as mass-media artifacts. You can now find images of historic maps on greeting cards and wrapping paper, T-shirts and photo albums, coffee mugs and clock-faces, popcorn canisters and computer mouse pads. You can see them in casinos and coffeehouses, children’s books and Playboy magazine spreads. They have quietly become pop culture icons.

  Arader has also helped transform other markets—most notably, the one for prints by John James Audubon and other natural history artists. These days, the biggest share of his business comes from such works. Antique maps total only about 20 percent of his trade. Nonetheless, he insists that “maps are my first love and always will be my first love.”

  Love, however, is a complicated thing. For all the time and passion Graham Arader has poured into the world of antique maps, the world of antique maps has shown him precious little gratitude. Respect, maybe, but not gratitude. And certainly not love.

  ONE WAY OF MAKING A BID AT SOTHEBY’S IS TO TAKE THE little paddle provided by the auction house specifically for that purpose and raise it into the air. This is the method of the inexperienced and unhip. Those in the know rely on subtler techniques: the pointedly flicked wrist, for instance, or the pithily raised finger. Graham Arader doesn’t use his hands at all. He bids with his head. A quick nod, accompanied by a fiery stare over his reading glasses, indicates that he is willing to top the previous bid; a side-to-side shake, so slight he seems to be experiencing nothing more than a sudden draft, means that he is bowing out. As the auction progressed that afternoon, Arader’s skull was in a constant state of jiggle. He looked like a very tightly sprung version of one of those Bobbin’ Heads dolls.

  He did not purchase Lot 553, the first work up for bid, but he did buy the next two items—a nineteenth-century book of bird engravings by Jean Baptiste Audebert and Louis-Jean Pierre Vieillot for $7,500; and a first edition of John James Audubon and John Bachman’s The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America for $200,000. Arader was just getting started. In a flurry of spending over the next few minutes, he would snap up Mathew Carey’s Carey’s American Atlas for $2,000; Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands for $100,000; and John Gould’s A Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of Humming-Birds, again for $100,000. On a number of other items—including natural history books by George Edwards and Gould; lithographs of Native Americans by George Catlin; and travelogues by Captain James Cook—he would help to drive the bidding up, often pulling out at the very last opportunity.

  On Lot 585—the geologist and mapmaker Ferdinand V. Hayden’s 1876 book on Yellowstone National Park—Arader won the bidding, then immediately reached for his cell phone. “You got it. One hundred and fifteen thousand,” he barked to a client whom he was representing at the auction (and whom he later identified as Mark Rockefeller, Nelson’s son). “Congratulations.”

  As he was finishing the call, another man strolled by him on his way out of the gallery. “Quiet, Graham,” the man said, apparently in jest.

  “You want me to be quiet? All right.” I couldn’t tell whether Arader had taken it as a friendly gibe or an insult. Whatever the case, his voice was noticeably louder when he added, ever so slowly, “I’ll be as quiet as you please.”

  It was obvious that he did not consider the other bidders here his friends. He was not above slapping a few backs and shaking a few hands, but, in general, he kept his distance from them, and they kept their distance from him. (One of the other participants, who had noticed me taking notes on Arader, later pulled me aside. “That guy’s crazy, you know,” he said. “Did he use any foul language when you talked to him?”) Taking all this in, I was reminded of a conversation I had had with Arader a few weeks earlier.

  “What about the claim that you’re abrasive?” I had asked.

  “I am abrasive!” he replied. “I don’t have time to be nice to my competitors. So I agree with that: I’m abrasive.”

  “Ruthless? Cutthroat?”

  “I’m not ruthless. I’m a businessman. Tell the people who call me ruthless to get into the bond market or the stock market. You want to see ruthless? Tell them to try to compete against Bill Gates selling software. I’m a cupcake compared to real ruthlessness. I will buy whatever I can that’s of high quality. So I guess they call it ruthless when I buy all the good things that come up at auction. They end up going home with nothing; I end up going home with everything. Is that ruthless? No. It’s business.”

  I could not deny it: this pretty well described what was happening here at Sotheby’s. But I also knew that while simple jealousy did explain some critics’ resentment of Arader, others had real philosophical differences with him, not to mention longstanding concerns about his ethics. In 1983, for example, the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America drummed him from its ranks.2 The ouster stemmed from a feud between Arader and a Dutch bookseller who had sent him a five-volume set of John Gould hummingbirds (similar to the one he purchased today at Sotheby’s for a cool hundred grand). Arader had decided that the books were in unsatisfactory condition—and, in a typical moment of pugnacity, returned them to Amsterdam third-class and uninsured. The genteel governors of the ABAA found this slight unpardonable. They booted Arader—after which he upped the stakes by filing suit against the group. He lost, and wound up having to pay the ABAA’s legal fees as well as his own, to the tune of fifty thousand dollars.

  If the incident cemented Arader’s bad-boy reputation—an image he clearly relishes—it also added to concerns about his business practices. And of those practices few have been as controversial as a tactic he made
famous early in his career. It is known by a number of euphemisms: book breaking, disbinding, discollating, and liberating from bound portfolio. Purists simply call it destroying books.

  Graham Arader never claimed to be a purist, however, and when he was trying to make a name for himself in the 1970s, the sum value of the individual maps from an atlas was often greater than the value of the atlas itself. Predictably, Arader acted as businessman, not as bibliophile: he would buy up atlases and other art books, cut them apart, and sell off the plates one by one. He did not invent the concept—in fact, people have been breaking books for centuries—but he put it into practice so methodically and on such a large scale that, to this day, some lovers of literature still refuse to forgive him.

  True, Arader’s competitors might break an occasional atlas, especially if it already had missing plates or was otherwise damaged. But Arader systematically purchased pristine volumes with the express purpose of demolishing them. In one such instance, a fellow dealer named Bill Reese watched him break a first edition of John Smith’s 1624 work, Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles. Reese later told The New Yorker how Arader laid the book on a counter and began to massage its “gutter,” or inner margins. “I said, ‘Graham, what are you doing?’3 He said, ‘What do you think I’m doing, Billy? I’m testing the strength of the binding.’ Then—r-r-r-ip!—he razors the son of a bitch out.”

  It sounds ugly. Yet the more I looked into the matter, the more I wondered whether Arader really deserves to go down in infamy as the Bogeyman of Book Breaking. A great deal of hypocrisy surrounds this issue, as I once learned at a map fair where a California dealer named Robert Ross hosted a seminar on collecting. Someone asked Ross about the dreaded practice of cutting. He responded by telling a story about a time when he himself almost broke a low-quality atlas. “I had the knife out ready to go, but I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I put the knife back, because the atlas was complete.”

  But if Ross was hesitant to slice up atlases with his own hands, he seemed more than willing to let others do the dirty work. Most of the items hanging on the walls of his booth at the fair appeared to be from broken books, and the same was true for virtually every other dealer at the event. The reason was simple: precious few stand-alone antique maps are in circulation. Without broken books, the antique maps trade would virtually cease to exist.

  So many atlases have been broken, in fact, the practice is becoming increasingly unprofitable—even for Graham Arader. “I don’t break books anymore. I don’t have to,” he said. “Books are worth more than the sum of the parts at this point. Is it how I made my money in the first place? You bet your ass it is. Do I feel badly about it? Yes, I do feel badly about it. Looking back now from a very secure and lofty perch, I can say I wish I hadn’t been able to do it. But I couldn’t have made it without doing it. I mean, you could buy one of these atlases for ten thousand dollars and break it for a hundred thousand. It was wild. Now you buy one of these books for a hundred and fifty thousand and it breaks for ninety thousand. You just don’t do it.”

  He insists he has not broken “a complete, perfect atlas” in more than ten years. And yet questions about his ethics linger—in part, because he keeps getting embroiled in new controversies. In 1996, for example, Arader reportedly sent a check for $8,000 to a woman as payment for a 160-year-old map, believed to be the earliest plan of the city of Houston.4 He then had the piece restored and, in a quintessential application of Araderian economics, put it back on the market for $98,000. (“Yeah, I tried to buy it as cheaply as possible,” he later told me. “Yeah, I low-balled it I paid as little as I could for it, to put it bluntly. Who am I going to take advantage of the most: the people I buy from or the people I sell to?… Because, boy, I’ll sure as hell lose a client if I sell him something at more than it would go for at auction.”) At that point the story took a strange turn. A Houston man named John Fox filed suit against Arader, claiming that the map rightfully belonged to him. Fox said that his sister-in-law had taken the map to Arader, and that she had done so to have it appraised, not to sell it. The suit was settled in Fox’s favor: Arader agreed to ship it back and pay court costs. But then the story took a second curious twist. Employees of the Houston Title Company, who had read about the legal battle in a local newspaper, began to wonder whether the map was the same one that had disappeared some years earlier from their office, where Fox had once worked. It turned out that their suspicions were well-grounded. After confidential negotiations, Houston Title got back its map, and Fox (who claimed he had purchased the map from the company) never faced criminal charges.

  For his part, Arader cooperated with police to ensure that the map was returned to its rightful owner—just as he had done in a number of similar cases. “To this day,” he later said, “I am furious that they did not prosecute Fox…. The whole bad taste in my mouth from the thing is that the FBI and local police chose to let the case drop because the people at Houston Title wanted to sweep the thing under the rug, since they were embarrassed about it.” Yet the incident also revived old questions about the dealer himself. Had he dealt honestly with the woman who brought him the map? Did he have clear ownership when he put it up for sale? Had he been aware that only one other copy of the map—a later version at the Houston Public Library—was known to exist? And, if so, had he done enough to check its provenance?

  These are all, of course, important concerns. But what people will remember most about the incident, I suspect, is that whopping ninety-thousand-dollar markup on the map, that in-your-face 1,225 percent price hike. It may not be fair to hold Graham Arader entirely responsible for inflation in the antique maps trade. Yet as I watched him at Sotheby’s that day, buying up many items and bidding up others, it occurred to me that nothing—not his egotism or abrasiveness, not his book breaking or business imbroglios—has earned him more enemies. Yes, the changing market has spawned some big winners, not the least of them being Arader himself. But it has also created a lot of losers, among them middle-class collectors who no longer have access to the kinds of maps they once could easily afford, and small-scale dealers who find themselves without the capital to maintain adequate inventory. These are the same people who used to form the backbone of the industry—scholars and aficionados who care about maps primarily for their historic and aesthetic, not economic, value. They may have helped kick Arader out of the ABAA—but in a more profound way he not only forced his way into their refined little world but took it over. It’s no wonder they regard him with contempt.

  Arader seems well aware of this. I once asked him: “Has map collecting changed much since you began?”

  “Yeah. You’ve got to be richer,” he said. “Stuff has gone up faster than inflation. So a little librarian in Urbana, Illinois, who ten years ago was buying twenty maps with his twenty-thousand-dollar-per-year budget, is now buying one map.”

  True enough. But for librarians in particular that’s not the worst thing about rising prices. The worst thing about rising prices is that they have transformed libraries into gold mines, books into illicit booty, and patrons into crooks. If the librarians hate Arader, it’s not because he’s made it harder for them to buy books but because they’re having one hell of a time holding on to the ones already on their shelves.

  A DRAMATIC EXAMPLE OF THE WAY IN WHICH OLD MAPS are becoming big business was about to play out at Sotheby’s. Lot 599 was an edition of the ancient scholar Ptolemy’s famous map book, Geographia (also known as Cosmographia), printed in Ulm in 1482. If you wanted to buy this volume in 1884, it would have set you back $85.5 It went for $350 in 1901, $3,000 in 1933, $5,000 in 1950, $28,000 in 1965, and $42,500 in 1984. Today, the catalog listed an estimated price range of between $200,000 and $300,000.

  “On the other hand, it is an extraordinarily fine copy, it’s in a contemporary binding, and it has already received a great deal of interest,” Selby Kiffer, a Sotheby’s official, had told me a few days earlier. “One never knows what will happe
n at an auction, but I do think that this is a case where competitive bidding could push price beyond estimate range.”

  From the start, it was clear that Kiffer’s hunch was right. The bidding began at $100,000 but quickly moved past $150,000, then $200,000, then $250,000. A sense of urgency filled the gallery, as bids came in quick succession, from the floor and over the phone.

  For once not even Graham Arader was willing to keep pace with the competition. He dropped out around $300,000.

  The bidding continued to rise…

  It was hardly the first time buyers had clamored to get their hands on a copy of Geographia. The work, in fact, holds a central place in the history of collecting, as well as the history of cartography. Its author, Claudius Ptolemy, was one of the ancient world’s most intriguing and shadowy figures. Little is known about his life, other than that he lived in Alexandria during the second century A.D., was of Greek descent and was a Roman citizen. Nonetheless, he left behind a brilliant and wideranging body of work about astronomy, optics, mathematics, music, and geography. Geographia—a kind of empirical how-to guide for map drawing—is considered the high-water mark of ancient earth knowledge. Ptolemy systematized cartography by insisting that maps be drawn to scale and that they be oriented to the north. He was one of the first to offer a projection by which a spherical earth could be rendered on a flat surface.