Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [46]
Stealing antique maps sounds like such an esoteric niche of felony that it’s hard to believe it’s becoming commonplace all over the world. In fiction, a sudden rash of old map thefts would mean only one thing: a cunning new criminal genius in town. (“Holy hachured contour, Batman! It’s the Cartographer!”) But when real-life map thieves are apprehended, they’re disappointingly ordinary: desperate, underpaid misfits from the world of rare books or academia. In fact, their obvious nonmastermind status explains the recent popularity of this kind of crime: maps are pilfered because they’re so easy to pilfer.
It’s the nature of the beast: the whole purpose of a library is to make rare materials available to the public. These materials are valueless if nobody can see them. It’s hard to spirit a big bulky book out of a reading room—they get checked in and out carefully—but removing pages is, as Gilbert Bland and Forbes Smiley have demonstrated, heartbreakingly easy. (Smiley might never have been caught if not for a fluke: he accidentally dropped his knife.) They’re light and small, and their absence might not be noticed for years. But which pages to remove? “If you take a page out of a rare book, you’ve got a worthless piece of paper,” says Tony Campbell, a former map librarian at the British Library. “But if you take a map, you haven’t destroyed its worth. It’s likely to have a fair value, and it’s virtually untraceable.” Maps, unlike books or paintings, are almost never sold with a provenance; their history, a cartographer might say, is Terra Incognita. Most often, they bear no identifying marks at all. (Yale was able to prove ownership of Smiley’s maps only by matching up wormholes with those on adjacent pages.) During the Smiley trial, the defense made much of the fact that many of the institutions he targeted reported maps missing that he had never handled or that later turned up elsewhere in their archives. Libraries, frankly, don’t always know what they have, especially if little larcenies like this have been going on under the radar for decades, as seems likely.
Despite the gloomy predictions of some dealers, the map trade didn’t collapse with Forbes Smiley’s downfall. Even in a major recession, sales have been strong and prices have stayed high. The antiquarian world, having lost its innocence, has begun to take precautions: libraries are keeping a closer eye on patrons, and dealers and auction houses are becoming more inquisitive about the provenance of the items they buy. For many years, “tome raiders” like Smiley were tacitly abetted by their victims—institutions were reluctant to report missing items, since the security lapses were embarrassing and might discourage future donors while encouraging future thieves. That’s now starting to change. Map librarians share more information on losses as they happen, so that dealers and auction houses know to be on the lookout for specific missing items, as the art world has done for decades. But there’s still no central online index of thefts and no map dealer who requires proof of title every time a map is offered for sale.
As much as I love maps, I’ve never felt the need to possess them. I understand the completist instinct of the collector, but I’ve always regarded maps as a kind of public utility. Like a nice sunset, I can look at one without wanting to take it home. But the recent crime wave in cartography demonstrates that maps do exert that kind of pull over many, many people. Not every map thief is a Forbes Smiley, stealing big-ticket items and quickly reselling for fear of losing a cabin on Martha’s Vineyard. Many just see a beautiful map and have to have it. My favorite case is that of Farhad Hakimzadeh,