The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  But make no mistake: the fact that Ruderman was one of the only dealers candid enough to publicly discuss his dealings with Bland in no way means that he was the only one to have had such dealings. Indeed, the majority of Gilbert Bland’s customers appear to have been dealers, including some of the most respected names in the trade. The map thief and his wife did little to encourage a walk-in business at their Florida store, which, like the brand-new home they bought for $151,400 in nearby Coral Springs, was owned by Karen Bland. Instead, they concentrated on developing a long-distance clientele, advertising in international trade publications and sending out catalogs. In retrospect, they seem to have penetrated the world of antique maps with startling speed and effectiveness.

  Bland’s inwardness worked to his advantage. Someone else in his position might have tried to ingratiate himself, make friends, become an indispensable member of the group—in short, to do what con men do: gain people’s confidence. But whether by intent or natural inclination, Bland was less of a con man than an un man, inducing unmindfulness, lulling people into believing he was simply not worth much thought one way or another. As one dealer later put it: “Mr. Bland was bland. He looked bland, he sounded bland, he acted bland. There was no personality: nothing there.”

  Along the same lines, Ruderman remembered him as being “pleasant, not a fabulous conversationalist, but nice enough, friendly enough, a tad bit socially awkward, maybe. Just your average Joe…. There was nothing to raise an eyebrow about, other than the fact that here was a guy with a large cache of material whom nobody had dealt with before.”

  And, luckily for Bland, many in the industry were then in need of a just such a “large cache.” The map business was undergoing something of a sea change when Bland arrived on the scene. With big numbers of new collectors and traders entering the market, the demand for antique maps was higher than ever. For obvious reasons, however, the supply had remained pretty much stable. That meant not only higher prices but fewer maps in active circulation. This was no problem for major players like Graham Arader, who could afford a huge overhead. But for midsize and smaller dealers, the capital that had once bought five or ten maps now might purchase only one—if that item was even available. Hard-pressed to maintain an adequate inventory, these dealers found themselves scrambling for new sources of material. It was no wonder that word spread quickly about a Florida store with an incredible supply of low- to mid-priced maps.

  For his own part, Ruderman “bought actively with Bland for probably six or eight months.” On occasion he entertained doubts about his business associate, in part because he seemed to know so little about maps. One time Ruderman even “sort of cross-examined Bland” about the provenance of his materials. Bland replied that he and his wife had been involved in scripophily—the collecting of old stock certificates and bonds—and had incidentally been accumulating old maps. “That was an acceptable answer,” said Ruderman, “because frankly there are two or three respected dealers who fit that general MO.” In the end, Ruderman concluded, “Gil passed the smell test.”

  FOR OTHERS, HOWEVER, THE ODOR EMANATING FROM South Florida had become increasingly foul. Among those who bought items from Bland were a pair of dealers who have operated a respected map store for several decades. The partners, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, became increasingly suspicious of Bland, eventually severing ties with him and privately informing other dealers of their concerns. We’ll refer to them as Once Bitten and Twice Shy.

  Their first contact with Gilbert and Karen Bland came in May 1994, just three months after Antique Maps & Collectibles had opened. “We heard about him from another dealer whom we’re quite friendly with,” recalled Once Bitten. “During a phone conversation, the fellow said, ‘Well, this couple in Florida seems to have a lot of material. You probably want to get in touch with them.’ So that’s what we did. At first the Blands were very pleasant They didn’t seem terribly knowledgeable, but they seemed to want to learn. So we tried to be helpful, just as people were helpful to us when we started.”

  Thus began a short-lived relationship in which the veteran dealers functioned both as customers and as mentors to the Blands, educating the newcomers on what they were doing wrong and how they might correct it. There was much to discuss. Among other problems, the Florida firm’s early catalogs contained a number of descriptions that were “ignorantly inaccurate,” according to Twice Shy. For example, the Blands misidentified the mapmaker of an eighteenth-century French map of China as Échelle. They had apparently found this word in the cartouche, the part of the map where the cartographer’s name usually appears. Ah, but Monsieur Échelle, he was no mapmaker! Poor soul, he did not even exist! Échelle, the veteran partners dutifully informed the Blands, is the French word for “scale.”

  For their part, the newcomers always seemed grateful for such enlightenment, however humiliating. In one obsequious letter Gilbert Bland praised the partners’ “eminence and experience in the field of cartography/map collecting,” vowing to “accept and incorporate” their ideas “into my own limited knowledge of this business.”

  Karen Bland also had regular correspondence with the pair. It should be stressed that no criminal charges were ever filed against the map thief’s wife; even so, observed Once Bitten and Twice Shy, she seemed to be intimately involved in the day-today operations of the store. “She knew as much as he did, that was my impression,” said Once Bitten. “My feeling was that if we wanted to engage in any sort of business with them, we could talk to her as readily as him. I thought that she was an active part of the business.”

  Despite the cordial relationship, it did not take long for Once Bitten and Twice Shy to notice that some of their most important advice was being ignored. They became particularly frustrated with the Florida couple’s continued failure to adequately describe the materials for sale in their catalogs. This was not a mere matter of snotty etiquette: the Blands were listing items in a way that implied that they were in top condition when in fact many of them were in “wretched shape,” according to Twice Shy. “We’d send stuff back and say, ‘Listen, we’re not being picky. Here’s what people want and here’s how you should describe it.’ Then the same items would appear on the next list with no correction at all. And Gil would always blame it on the computer—somehow it didn’t catch in the computer when he made the correction.”

  Trying hard to give the newcomers the benefit of the doubt, Once Bitten and Twice Shy offered advice about which software might solve the problem—unaware that, in another, not-so-distant life, the Blands had been computer consultants. After a number of frustrating incidents, however, the veteran pair’s patience finally wore out. “I remember one of the things they sent to us actually was missing a chunk,” said Once Bitten. “We sent it back. And in the next catalog, there it was again without any description indicating it was incomplete At that point, it was pretty clear that they were being deceptive. When someone is told in no uncertain terms that a map is incomplete, is missing a piece, and should not be described in the way they were describing it—and then chooses to do it again, it’s hard to think of another excuse for their actions. They weren’t stupid.”

  By the time they broke off ties with Antique Maps & Collectibles in late 1994, Once Bitten and Twice Shy had begun to have other suspicions about Gilbert Bland. They were troubled, for instance, by his “bizarre” style of negotiation. Bland’s prices were fairly cheap to begin with, yet he always seemed willing to take a lower offer. “He never counteroffered,” said Once Bitten.“He’d just say, ‘Well okay.’…In retrospect, we know that he didn’t care so much about the price as long as he got something. It was all profit.”

  Worse, the partners had growing doubts about where Bland was getting his materials. At first, explained Once Bitten, they had assumed that he “lucked into something. Maybe he had bought an antique shop and there was a pile of stuff in the basement or something of that sort.” But over time they began to suspect more ominous origins.

&n
bsp; On the day I interviewed the partners at their store, they took out some of Bland’s old catalogs, shaking their heads as they recalled the way his inventory mysteriously expanded to include multiple copies of fairly rare items. “It was frustrating to comprehend how this guy, whom I considered a classic jerk, was getting access to materials that we who had been in the trade for so long had to wait for years to pop up,” said Twice Shy.

  Because they had no hard evidence against Bland, the partners did not go to the police or denounce him in a public way. They did, however, begin to share their hunches with other dealers. “It was not like we called everybody up and said, ‘Wow! We think this guy is rotten!’ ” explained Twice Shy. “People in this trade chat each other up all the time. We’re as gossipy as a bunch of old ladies. And Bland’s name would just come up in conversation.”

  They soon discovered that others had similar concerns. “As those of us old-timers in the trade started questioning how this guy was getting duplicates of some more interesting material, I was speaking with another dealer and I said, ‘If I had money, I would hire a private detective to follow Bland,’ ” said Twice Shy. “I was that suspicious.”

  But if some dealers were beginning to steer clear of Gilbert Bland, others were becoming increasingly enamored of his growing stock of materials, which by now included a number of older, rarer, and more expensive items. His reputation on the rise, Bland and his wife made high-profile appearances at the two big industry conventions of 1995—the Miami International Map Fair in February and the International Map Collectors’ Society fair, held in San Francisco during October. “Bland had a major presence at both fairs,” recalled James Hess, who owns the Heritage Map Museum and Auction House in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “He was putting himself out there with the major dealers.”

  Barry Lawrence Ruderman, who had dinner with Bland at the San Francisco event, added: “Most of all, he was interested in being a wheeler-dealer. He was looking for big buys. He was definitely crunching numbers a lot more than he was learning maps.”

  “It got to the point,” recalled one respected antiquarian, “that dealers would be saying, ‘My goodness, maps of City X have been selling rather well. Do you have any maps of City X?’ And Bland would say, ‘Let me check and I’ll get back to you.’ And the very next week he’d call and say, ‘Why yes, I just happen to have a map of City X.’ ”

  Which, of course, is exactly why the dealers should have been wary. The fact that many continued to do business with him right up until his misadventure at the Peabody Library says less about the nature of the map trade than it does about that oldest of human afflictions, temptation. Almost no one I interviewed believed Bland’s customers had firsthand knowledge of his crimes. More likely, the dealers were driven by what antiquarians sometimes describe as “a need not to know.” In the words of Once Bitten: “I’m sure a number of people closed their eyes. It’s very easy to do when there’s a chance to make money.”

  FOR GOD DOTH KNOW THAT IN THE DAY YE EAT THEREOF, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.10 Such were the words laid down in ancient times about what transpired “eastward in Eden.” Yes, wondered the people of later epochs, but where, exactly, was this Eden? Paradise was lost, quite literally—and for centuries theologians, scholars, pilgrims, and mapmakers were obsessed with finding it.

  Earlier civilizations, from the Sumerians to the Greeks, had established a lush and fragrant garden as the basic setting of Paradise—a word that comes from the Old Persian apiri-daeza, an orchard surrounded by a wall.11 The Hebrew Scriptures fleshed out those myths, offering a seemingly solid clue as to this enchanted garden’s whereabouts. According to the second chapter of Genesis, a stream flowed through the Earthly Paradise, then branched into four rivers—the Pishon, later thought to be the Indus, the Ganges, or the Danube; the Gihon, or Nile; the Hiddekel, or Tigris; and, finally, the Euphrates. This description, however, created more questions than answers—not the least of which being how four rivers whose headwaters were apparently so very far apart could possibly spring from the same source. Some early Christian scholars argued that such concerns were beside the point, since the Bible’s description was merely figurative. But many medieval theologians insisted that the Garden was an actual place on Earth, one whose rivers flowed underground before reaching their apparent starting points. The learned St. Isidore of Seville, for instance, located Eden in the Far East, surrounded by a “wall of fire whose flames rise as high as heaven,” making it “barred to humanity.”12 Reflecting such ideas, the mappae mundi of the Middle Ages usually show the Garden at the easternmost edges (or top) of the world, sometimes as a walled-off region on the mainland, sometimes as an island above “farthest India.” Such concepts remained pretty much standard until the Age of Exploration, when new possibilities arose, especially in the New World, where Christopher Columbus claimed to have seen “great evidence of the earthly Paradise” near the Orinoco River.13 The hunt would go on for centuries, although its focus would eventually shift from where Paradise still was to where it had been. Sir Walter Raleigh—who argued that the Garden itself could no longer be found, inasmuch as “the flood, and other accidents of time” had reduced Eden to the state of ordinary fields and pastures—placed its original location in Mesopotamia.14 Others put it in Armenia or Palestine or Africa or Ceylon. As late as the nineteenth century, a British general reported absolute proof of Eden’s existence on Praslin Island in the Indian Ocean. Charles Gordon, a war hero and religious zealot, was convinced that a species of palm on the island was none other than the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. After all, he noted, the plant bore fruit of both sexes, the male resembling a phallus, the female “shaped … when opened like a [woman’s] belly with thighs.”15 How could such suggestive vegetation be anything but proof that Adam and Eve had lived on the island?

  These days, of course, not even the truest of true believers would dare to put Paradise on a map. Yet despite the cynicism of our age, we humans have not lost our urge to quest after that place of perfect contentment, never quite finding it but never quite giving up hope, sometimes drawing so near that we can almost smell the faint sweet scent of its blossoms or spy the distant glimmer of its waters. I still don’t know precisely what motivated Gilbert Bland to open that store in South Florida. His detractors argue that his intentions were evil from the start, pointing out that James Perry’s visits to university libraries began just a few short months after the store opened. True enough, yet somehow I’d like to think Bland’s motives were more complex. My hunch—or maybe it’s just my hope—is that, in the beginning at least, his desire to start his life anew was sincere. But however the saga at the strip mall began, it ended as tragicomic trash-culture allegory: And the sinner and his wife were driven forth from the Gardens retail center, and their sorrows were greatly multiplied, and they knew then that they were naked before the Almighty Media Juggernaut.

  The Fall of Bland came in mid-December 1995, a week after he was detained at Johns Hopkins. With the University of Virginia’s Thomas Durrer and the FBI closing in on him, Bland had returned to Florida. At some point between the afternoon of December 14 and early morning of December 15, he cleaned out his store and left the Gardens forever, reportedly leaving a note for his landlord that said, “See you later.”16

  “I came in and a lot of the maps were gone,” said Laurie Bregman, a tenant at the Gardens whose business was just across from Antique Maps & Collectibles. “I thought that maybe he was just remodeling or that maybe he’d sold a lot of stuff. But it turned out that he had emptied the place in a middle-of-the-night kind of deal.”

  Although Bland had managed thus far to escape arrest, he had not escaped attention. A number of major media outlets, including the Baltimore Sun and Associated Press, had already run stories about the crime spree; many more, including The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and National Public Radio, would soon follow.

  The news spread quickly through the antiqu
e maps industry, prompting one of two sharply divergent reactions among dealers. For some, it was a fait accompli. “I was completely unsurprised when the story broke,” remembered Twice Shy. For others, however, it was a complete shock. “My jaw dropped,” said Jonathan Ramsay, the owner of a map and print business in the Bahamas. “I mean, the guy was straight as an arrow. When something like this happens, you say to yourself, ‘Wow, I just don’t understand human nature.’ ”

  Ramsay, who had both a business and a social relationship with Bland, heard about the map thief’s legal troubles when a friend from Florida faxed him a newspaper story. “I called my friend up and I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ Just then I heard a noise in the shop and I turned around and there were these three guys standing there. And I said, ‘Yes? Can I help you?’ And one of them said, ‘I’m an FBI agent.’ He’d been standing right behind me as I talked on the phone. He said, ‘Obviously I can hear from your phone conversation that you’ve heard the news.’ ”

  Another dealer who bought maps from Bland and met him face-to-face shared Ramsay’s surprise. “Bland was the most soft-spoken and considerate guy,” he said. “It was like a contradiction. On the phone and in person, he was so quiet, and then on the other hand, the crimes he committed were incredibly nervy. I guess he was a hell of a con man.”

  Those who lived in the same upscale subdivision as the Bland family could be forgiven if they, too, were taken aback by the news. The four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath, Italian-style house, part of a development called the Classics at Kensington, projected an air of respectability and affluence. But Gilbert Bland’s life had been full of misleading facades, and this one was no exception: The family’s financial picture was nowhere near as rosy as it appeared from the outside. On November 3, 1995—a little more than a month before Bland’s brief capture in Baltimore—Karen Bland, the owner of record for both the house and the store, had declared Chapter Seven bankruptcy.17 Court documents show that she owed more than forty thousand dollars in credit card debt alone.