"The Island of Lost Maps is the story of a curious crime spree: the theft of scores of valuable centuries-old maps from some of the most prominent research libraries in the United States and Canada. The perpetrator was the Al Capone of cartography, a man with the unlikely name of Gilbert Bland, Jr. , an enigmatic antiques dealer from south Florida whose cross-country slash-and-dash operation went virtually undetected until he was caught in December 1995. ". "This is also the story of author Miles Harvey's quest to understand America's greatest map thief, a chameleon who changed careers and families without ever looking back. Gilbert Bland was a cipher, a blank slate - for Harvey, journalistic terra incognita. Filling in Bland's life was like filling in a map, and grew from an investigation into an intellectual adventure. "--BOOK JACKET.