| July 26, 2008 | Saturday | Rajab 22, 1429 |
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‘The island of lost maps’
YEARS ago, somebody complained about our family house in Karachi that walking into it was like entering a library: there were books everywhere, and everyone was always reading. Fortunately, this person has not darkened our door for years.
It is true that few homes I know have more books than ours. My parents and my brothers and I have accumulated a large collection over the years. When armed robbers broke in one night, they complained to my brother Salman that the house had nothing of value, being full of books instead. Salman laughed at this comment, and was beaten up for showing his odd sense of humour. After he died five years ago, we decided to place a quotation from Cicero on his tombstone: “A house without books is like a body without a soul.”
We have been fortunate in growing up in a house where we were free to delve into our father’s eclectic library. While many of the books I read at a young age went over my head, some of the serious stuff has stayed with me. But more than individual titles and authors, it was the abiding respect for books and scholarship that was really valuable. So I am often appalled to find otherwise intelligent, cultured people taking such a cavalier attitude towards books.
They borrow freely from your library, and then take offence when you ask them to return the volume. Or worse, they pass it on to others without your permission. And when you remonstrate with them, they snap: “But it was only a book!” If you press them further, they explode: “OK, I’ll pay you for it!” They forget that that particular book may no longer be in print. And it is not the monetary value of the volume you are concerned about: you are conscious of the comforting heft of the volume, the gap in your bookshelf, and the link you established with the author while you were reading it. For such people, the following curse from an inscription in the library of the San Pedro monastery in Barcelona is most apt:
“For him that steals, or borrows and returns not, a book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sings in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw at his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not. And when he goes to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.”This quotation is from The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey, a book I picked up at random from a second-hand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye last month. Nobody had recommended it to me, and nor had I read any reviews. But by sheer serendipity (this marvellous word comes from ‘Serendip’, the old name for Sri Lanka), the title appealed to me, so I added it to my little pile on the counter. When I was packing for our trip to St Andrews in Canada, I slipped it into my suitcase, together with the other books I planned to read. As I turned each page, my delight grew, as did my amazement.
The book is about the author’s years spent trying to explore the motive for a series of thefts committed by Gilbert Bland in the mid-nineties. The items stolen were valuable old maps sliced out of ancient collections, and by the time he was finally caught, Bland had walked away with some 250 maps. The retracing of the thief’s steps becomes an obsession with Harvey, and we are with him as he discovers the arcane world of cartography and map collectors.
In these days of Google Earth and global positioning systems that place the contours of our planet at your fingertips, it seems odd to find that there are still people around willing to spend years and fortunes in order to acquire a map collection. But prices for rare and seldom-seen examples of ancient cartography have been rising steadily. Harvey sits in on one auction in New York where Ptolemy’s Geographia, printed in 1492, was finally sold for $1,150,000 after fierce bidding.
The author describes the process of map-making in some detail, and after having read this section of the book, I will be more respectful of old maps in future: “It may take you months, even years, to draft a single map. It’s not just the continents, oceans, mountains, lakes, rivers, and political borders you have to worry about…. And once you’re finally finished describing the world, you have to transfer it to a copper plate for printing. This, too, takes time…. Then you have to polish the smoothest side to a mirror-like finish…. Perfection is a must: any minor scratch might show up as a line on your map….”
Given the limited stock of old maps, and the rising number of collectors, it is easy to see why Bland went on his crime spree. But what comes as a revelation is how easy it was. Time after time, the thief walked in with a fake ID, settled down in the reading room with old collections provided by helpful librarians, sliced out the maps he was looking for, folded them under his shirt, and walked off. He then advertised his wares in specialist catalogues, and until he was caught, most librarians were unaware they had been robbed. Even later, many of them refused to press charges as they feared that donors might ask them tough questions.
Such is the power of good writing that I began feeling really angry, and wished for the death penalty for Bland. As it was, he was given a short sentence as he cooperated with the investigation, and is now free.
Ultimately, this book is a story of how, little by little, the ancients wrested the secrets of our planet by dint of long, dangerous journeys, rigorous scholarship and unrelenting curiosity. And of course, mercantile greed financed many of these ventures. Layer by layer, they added to the knowledge uncovered by past generations. When we flip through a brightly coloured atlas today, we should remember how these maps came into being.
irfan.husain@gmail.com
