Review: Way to 'The Island of Lost Maps' fascinating

"The Island of Lost Maps"
By Miles Harvey
Random House
Current Affairs/Travel
405 pages

In this story: The breeding of a map thief Main story interesting, tangents distracting RELATED SITES

By Joshua Kuritzky
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- Good journalists must also be good collectors. To research stories and lives requires the patience and eagerness to sift through books, interviews, and public records; the willingness to follow tangents (and tangents of tangents); and the understanding that in the end, a collection, like a biography or an article about a map thief, can never be complete.

What happens, then, when the journalist submits his or her story, knowing that the final submission is only a small portion of what it could have been? What happens to all the collected stuff -- the digressions that didn't make it into the story, the 3,000-word paths not taken?

	EXCERPT
Excerpt: 'The Island of Lost Maps'

If you are Miles Harvey and have just written a fascinating article about a map thief for Outside Magazine, you survey your collection, refuse to let it go, and write a book. Perhaps something like "The Island of Lost Maps."

The story begins a few years ago. Miles Harvey, a journalist, reads a newspaper article about a map thief who had been apprehended outside of Baltimore's Peabody library. The thief, who had been caught cutting maps out of a rare book, is one Gilbert Bland (although he had given one of his many false names to the library). And it turns out that Bland, with his oddly descriptive name, is a suspect in numerous map-related crimes across the continent.

This piques Harvey's interest. What breeds a map thief? What set of circumstances and desires lead someone to pass himself off as someone else, walk into a library's rare book room, and proceed to take a razor blade to an old book, excising maps that will later be sold and collected?

Harvey, then an editor at Outside magazine, decides to write an article about Gilbert Bland. The story here -- the story of the story, if you will -- is that Harvey's interest in the life of Gilbert Bland only increases after he's submitted his article. As Harvey writes of himself, "(I)n my journalistic travels, as in my personal wanderings, I'm a sucker for detours, back roads, tourist traps, scenic views, and historic landmarks."

The result of these detours and back roads is "The Island of Lost Maps," which is a book that is about Gilbert Bland, map thief, but also about everything else one must pass through to "get at" Bland and his story. Harvey gives us information about everything, from map-dealing to map-stealing. We learn about "book breaking" (when maps are removed from books and sold individually so as to increase their value), the financial troubles of the Peabody library, and even the sea monsters that appear on old maps.

In the midst of all this, we -- along with Harvey -- attempt to discover how a wayward youth can go from stealing cars to serving in Vietnam to slicing up a book in the Peabody.

In some ways, "The Island of Lost Maps" resembles a book that has been "broken" and then reassembled. The main story, the detailed history of a modern thief who is not nearly as glamorous as his fictional counterparts, is interesting, but the many tangents and digressions can be exhausting and distracting.

What began as research for a magazine article turned into writing the book "The Island of Lost Maps" for Miles Harvey

Some of this distraction may be a result of having judged the book by its cover. The cover description of "The Island of Lost Maps" suggests a literary true-crime book -- a mixture of Dava Sobel's "Longitude" and one of those garish books that interview the neighbors of serial killers. In this context, Harvey disappoints. Although some neighbors are interviewed, what one hopes will be up-all-night reading turns out to be something best read in bits and pieces.

What redeems even the most boring passages is Harvey himself. Although the first half of the book reads very much like an article turned into a book, the second half, when Harvey begins to understand the extent of his collection and his need to collect, contributes something new to this type of book.

As Harvey finds himself with a collection (from court documents to letters from prison) of all things Gilbert Bland, he begins to realize that a collection speaks just as much about the collector as it does the subject. These glimpses inside the process of researching and writing "The Island of Lost Maps" make even the most obvious detours and back roads readable and understandable. The reader may not always share Harvey's interests, but his interest in these interests is intoxicating.

In the end, Harvey forces us to be a bit like Bland -- to break the book, picking it apart for the things that interest us. And, with a collection this vast, we'll have no trouble finding something.

Miles Harvey's home page
Random House

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