When we first began compiling a list of our favorite books—and as that list evolved and begot other lists that recall the enormously rich tradition of outdoor literature—we were reminded of the old man who loved books so much that he amassed 10,000 of them in his small studio apartment. In that little room, somewhere in southern California, neatly stacked tomes towered everywhere. The only space not landlocked by literature was a pathway from his door to his bed.

Since bibliophiles and lovers of the outdoors alike yearn for those moments of discovery often found at the remote edges of our world, we began to view the old man as an adventurer himself. We like to imagine that as he drifted off to sleep each night, the stacks of secondhand hardbacks looked to him like shadowy Himalayan mountains. And that beneath those dark peaks, he would dream of the next day's climb.

Until the moment those peaks came crashing down. Early one morning, an earthquake split California, triggering a bookslide in the old man’s apartment. Our hero was buried deep beneath millions of words. For 11 hours he lay there, waiting to be rescued. Did he suddenly see himself as a tragic clown, the victim of his own peculiar excesses? Did he curse the obsession that had brought the gods—not to mention his entire library—down upon him? We hope not. Instead we like to think that amidst the chaos the man felt strangely sheltered. Perhaps his thoughts were not unlike those of the great alpinist Maurice Herzog, who faced a similar brush with death on his famous 1950 climb of Annapurna: “I knew the end was near, but it was the end that all mountaineers wished for—an end in keeping with their ruling passion.”

As we’ve collected the following books for the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Canon—some of which come from our favorite writers, sages, argonauts, athletes, and other friends—the old man has never been far from our thoughts. Nor has this concept of a canon, taken most often to mean some sacred scroll of books dreamed up by gray-bearded men smoking cigars. In our case, of course, there can be no cigars about it. And while our canon only begins to encompass the entire world’s outdoor literature (in fact, in the name of space, we’ve limited ourselves to one book per writer here, and chiefly to books written in English), we hope you’ll find it by turns provocative, idiosyncratic, and just plain useful. Enough to fill your shelves for years to come. And should the earth take a sudden shift, may you, too, be sheltered by these many million good words.

The World’s Great Places

‘Sailing Alone Around the World’ by Joshua Slocum

Slocum was the first man to circumnavigate the globe single-handed, in a 37-foot boat that he rebuilt himself from a derelict oyster sloop. , he recounts one life-threatening escapade after another with unwavering Victorian good cheer.

‘Seven Years in Tibet’ by Heinrich Harrer

Austrian mountaineer Harrer had the bad luck to be in Karachi when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. He was arrested and sent to an internment camp in northern India. He escaped, made a perilous mountain trek to Tibet, and eventually became pals with the young Dalai Lama. tells his story—intense and incredible.

‘The Innocents Abroad’ by Mark Twain

“A long sea voyage not only brings out all the mean traits one has, but raises up others he never suspected he possessed, and even creates new ones,” writes Twain in of a “pleasure excursion” to Europe and the Middle East. Who but Twain could have initiated the flip, no-bullshit style emulated by travel writers ever since?

‘West with the Night’ by Beryl Markham

Ernest Hemingway declared that after reading , “I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.” Largely ignored when first brought out in 1942, this lively account of a childhood in Kenya and a career as a record-breaking aviator was a huge hit after being republished in 1983.

‘Out of Africa’ by Isak Dinesen

on a Kenyan coffee plantation, full of sharp vignettes about native people and wildlife, is fascinating—all the more so when read side-by-side with Beryl Markham's West with the Night. The two works cover the same countryside and many of the same characters, including men who played important roles in the lives of both of these exceptional women.

‘Journeys’ by Jan Morris

“You could do a lot worse than Hico,” Morris writes about a town in Texas—no small praise from a travel writer who during the course of a 40-year career has been everywhere and done everything. , published in 1984, Morris takes us from the Lone Star State to Australia to Yugoslavia to China, with many delightful diversions along the way.

‘Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China’ by Colin Thubron

Thubron won a couple of literary awards for of a brutal solo journey into the enigmatic land of “a billion uncomprehended people.” During the course of the 10,000-mile trip, he tours underground nuclear shelters, visits a tongue doctor whose diagnoses include “insufficient Yin,” and has an uneasy night’s sleep in the bed of the late Chairman Mao.

‘A Small Place’ by Jamaica Kincaid

“The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being,” writes Kincaid. And in , in which she writes with passion and precision about her native Antigua, she looks at travel through the eyes of the visited rather than the visitor, exploring the links among tourism, imperialism, and racism.

‘The Songlines’ by Bruce Chatwin

The gifted author of In Patagonia Australian aborigines map their world by ritual singing as they travel—and in doing so explores our contradictory urges to own land and to wander.

‘Jaguars Ripped My Flesh’ by Tim Cahill

The șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű editor at large happens to be one of the world’s funniest and finest bards of adventure travel. takes him from the jungles of Peru, where he searches for the ruins of a lost civilization, to the cloud forests of Rwanda, where he follows gorillas, to the icy waters of Alaska, where he kayaks among orcas.

‘The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia’ by Paul Theroux

, about a hilariously improvised railway journey from London to Tokyo, became a surprising 1975 bestseller and launched the career of one of the world's top misadventure writers.

‘Arabian Sands’ by Wilfred Thesiger

An enterprising Brit travels to the Empty Quarter to satisfy that proverbial “urge to go where others had not been.”  of grueling adventures includes forward-looking insights into the bedouin culture and the environment.

‘An Area of Darkness’ by V. S. Naipaul

, the land of his ancestors, has been criticized as being politically incorrect, but it is undeniably fine travel writing, full of humor and disturbing details.

‘Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers’ edited by Mary Morris

Morris has put together that includes everyone from pioneering 18th-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to Vita Sackville-West to Joan Didion.

‘Batfishing in the Rainforest: Strange Tales of Travel and Fishing’ by Randy Wayne White

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s ever amusing Out There columnist in search of adventure and absurdity—and always finds both, in locales ranging from a plush health spa in Florida to the terrorist-infested mountains of Peru.

Journeys to Hell

‘Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8,000-Meter Peak’ by Maurice Herzog

After being swept off his feet in an avalanche and left dangling by a rope around his neck, Herzog “began to pass water, violently and uncontrollably.” Your reaction may be only slightly less extreme as you move from one nail-biting moment to the next in of triumph and frostbite.

‘The Worst Journey in the World’ by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Cherry-Garrard was one of the men who survived Robert Falcon Scott's doomed 1910–1913 Antarctica expedition. During the journey, he and his companions had to endure temperatures so cold that “we began to look upon minus fifties as a luxury.” And although Cherry-Garrard maintains that “no words could express [the trip’s] horror,” he gives it an unforgettable try , originally published in 1922.

‘The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor’ by Gabriel García Márquez

First appearing as a series of newspaper articles in 1955, early in the Nobel Prize–winning novelist’s career, tells the story of a Colombian sailor who survived for ten days in a lifeboat without food or water after being washed overboard in the Caribbean.

‘Into the Heart of Borneo’ by Redmond O’Hanlon

“But they eat people there! They’re cannibals! Blowpipes! Phut. Phut. You die,” a helpful official warns O’Hanlon at the beginning of . But perils be damned, nothing stops him from making a harrowing and hilarious journey into wildest Borneo.

‘Into the Wild’ by Jon Krakauer

Was Chris McCandless a nut case or simply another idealistic thrill-seeker in search of the ultimate adventure? Krakauer, a former contributing editor of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, handles the question ingeniously of a complex character who starved to death after giving away $24,000 in savings and walking into the Alaskan bush, determined to live off the land.

‘Ninety-Two Days: The Account of a Tropical Journey Through British Guiana and Part of Brazil’ by Evelyn Waugh

A great tale of not getting there: —hilarious in spite of its colonialist stereotyping—Waugh attempts a difficult expedition through British Guiana and Brazil but gets stranded in a backwater Amazon town inhabited by people “naturally homicidal by inclination.”

‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ by Eric Newby

Near the end of this epic mountaineering misadventure in Afghanistan, Newby passes a group of lepers. “That's about all we’ve got left to catch,” comments his ever wry sidekick, Hugh. Written in 1958, of dysentery, ill-fitting boots, and failed climbing is a comic masterpiece.

‘The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst’ by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall

In 1968, Crowhurst attempted to become the first person to sail solo around the world without stopping. His boat broke down first, then his mind. For months he drifted aimlessly in the Atlantic, sending fraudulent reports about his progress back to London, slowly coming to believe that he was the son of God. Somehow, Tomalin and Hall make marvelous sense of this of madness and tragedy at sea.

‘The Oblivion Seekers and Other Writings’ by Isabelle Eberhardt

They don’t make them like Isabelle Eberhardt anymore—then again, they never did. Traveling widely in North Africa at the turn of the century, she became a Muslim, dressed as a man, and engaged in more than her share of kif-smoking and random sex. offers fascinating glimpses into what the author herself describes as “the life of an adventurous soul.”

Discoveries of America

‘șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in the Unknown Interior of America’ by Alvar Nuez Cabeza de Vaca

Talk about tough trekking: In , originally published in 1542, a Spanish conquistador recounts an eight-year, 6,000-mile walk to Mexico that began as an ill-fated exploration of Florida in 1527.

‘The Journals of Lewis and Clark’ by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

They shot buffaloe. They were stung by muskeetors. They found an inland route to the Pacific ocian. But hey—President Thomas Jefferson wasn’t paying them for their spelling ability. The quirky and at the same time majestic log of the most important trip in American history, in 1904, a century after the trip itself, never ceases to fascinate.

‘The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology’ edited by William Kittredge and Annick Smith

Kittredge and Smith—each a brilliant chronicler of the West—have put together as grand as the state itself. More than 1,100 pages long, it covers everything from Native myths to the accounts of early explorers to the work of contemporary writers such as James Welch, Ivan Doig, and Richard Ford.

‘The Travels of William Bartram’ by William Bartram

In 1773, Bartram undertook the first botanical exploration of the then wild terrain of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. , full of beautiful Cherokee maidens, noble Creek warriors, and “blessed unviolated spot[s] of earth,” was published 18 years later and is still a delight.

‘Great Plains’ by Ian Frazier

Frazier, a rare satirist who understands the difference between real humor and hip smugness, drives 25,000 miles up and down and across the often overlooked region between Montana and Texas. —which take us from the spot where Sitting Bull's cabin stood to a house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde to an abandoned Cold War command center—is equal parts absurdity and profundity.

‘Making Hay’ by Verlyn Klinkenborg

“If farmers were at all disposed to rhapsody,” , “they might get eloquent about [their] work.” Luckily we’ve got Klinkenborg to get eloquent for them in this lively account of visits to rural Minnesota, Iowa, and Montana at haying season. Who would ever have guessed that alfalfa could be so interesting?

‘Notes from the Century Before: A Journal from British Columbia’ by Edward Hoagland

“In the cabin I'm in, a grizzly skin is pinned to the wall like a spread-eagled moth. I should probably note that I'm allergic to it,” writes Hoagland in of travel writing, which set the contrarian tone for the extraordinary career that has followed.

‘Old Glory: An American Voyage’ by Jonathan Raban

of his three-month, 2,000-mile boat trip down the Mississippi is among the best works of a growing genre of Twain-inspired Big Muddy travelogues.

Natural History

‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’ by Annie Dillard

Hard upon its 1974 publication, produced a plague of Dillard wannabes, yammering on endlessly about their supposed mystical revelations in nature. But what distinguishes the real thing is Dillard’s grace, wit, and flat-out talent to convince us that she experiences religious ecstasy at the sight of a muskrat in her local creek–and to make us feel it ourselves.

‘The Land of Little Rain’ by Mary Austin

“So stupid and tiresome and dull!” That was the way Mark Twain viewed the desert, and few argued with him until Austin came along. , published in 1903, brings to life the fascinating and complex worlds, both natural and human, of the American Southwest.

‘Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape’ by Barry Lopez

The Antichrist lives in the Arctic—at least that’s what seventh-century theologians believed. It’s just one of the many fascinating notions that Lopez ponders in at the Arctic’s place in the human imagination, a study that took him to every corner of this vast and stunning landscape.

‘The Sound of Mountain Water’ by Wallace Stegner

Anyone unfamiliar with need only read this eclectic set of essays, published in 1969, to understand the deep respect—even love—with which he’s regarded by present-day writers about wilderness and the West. “We simply need … wild country available to us,” he writes, “even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

‘Coming into the Country’ by John McPhee

“I’d kill the last pregnant wolf on earth right in front of the president at high noon,” declares one of the many unforgettable characters in at environmental issues that faced the Alaskan wilderness in the mid-seventies and that have only intensified since. Coming into the Country, published in 1977, ranks among the finest of this gifted writer’s works.

‘The Log from the Sea of Cortez’ by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck contemplates Hitler, Marx, and Henry Ford on one page and then moves on to naked mollusks and keyhole limpets in this of a scientific expedition he took with marine biologist E. F. Ricketts to the Gulf of California.

‘Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place’ by Terry Tempest Williams

Williams juxtaposes two types of inundation: the changing water level in the Great Salt Lake, which devastates a local bird refuge, and the spread of cancer through her mother’s body. The result is , both a meditation on the horror of death and a celebration of the raw power of life.

‘The Moon by Whale Light: And Other șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs Among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales’ by Diane Ackerman

“I often find things renewing about ordeal,” writes Ackerman. And in about exotic animals, her ordeals are the reader’s delight, whether she’s floating with whales off Patagonia or straddling alligators in Florida.

‘Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History’ by Stephen Jay Gould

How did Homo sapiens come to be? According to Gould, the answer has more to do with plain old luck than with the supposed superiority of the species. In on unusual 530-million-year-old fossils found in the Canadian Rockies, the noted science writer argues that evolution works more like a big lottery than a competition in which only the strong survive.

‘The Diversity of Life’ by Edward O. Wilson

Scientists know of at least 750,000 species of insect—but that’s mostly a comment about what we don’t know: The tropical rainforests may hold tens of millions more. In , the Harvard entomologist and Pulitzer Prize winner tells us why biodiversity is important—and why the insects won’t be the only victims of rainforest destruction.

‘Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature’ by David Quammen

For those șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű readers who find themselves craving Quammen’s wry, incisive view on all things natural, is a must. It delightfully digresses on everything from sea cucumber anuses to virgin birth among turkeys and is a wonderful introduction to the books that have followed it: his 1988 essay collection The Flight of the Iguana and the much-anticipated The Song of the Dodo.

‘The Immense Journey’ by Loren Eiseley

Trivia quiz for Talking Heads fans: Who first used the repeated phrase “once in a lifetime” when writing about the flow of water? Apparently David Byrne is among the many admirers of these lyrical essays on the origins and future of the universe. Some of the science in is now outdated, but Eiseley’s prose is brilliant—same as it ever was.

‘Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education’ by Michael Pollan

Like a Venus flytrap, appears innocuous but packs a mean bite. Disguised as just another gardening tome, it is in fact a muscular meditation on the natural world, covering everything from Thoreauvian philosophy to raccoon turds.

Manifestos

‘Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit’ by Al Gore

The vice president’s about an ecological “race against time” is full of excellent information and solid proposals, even if the administration didn’t always practiced what its Number Two man preached. Hope you didn’t hold your breath, for instance, waiting on Gore’s Global Marshall Plan for the environment.

‘The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture’ by Wendell Berry

Not every writer can draw plausible links between U.S. farm policy and sex, but then again Wendell Berry, acclaimed poet, fiction writer, and essayist, isn’t exactly a hack. In , he argues that Americans must regain a sense of fidelity—to our families, to our communities, and especially to our land.

‘A Moment on the Earth: Why Nature Needs Us’ by Gregg Easterbrook

Pollution and global warming are nothing to worry about, and population growth is a darn good thing. These are just some of the contrarian views outlined in , which contains something to piss off just about everyone. Nonetheless, A Moment on the Earth is well worth reading—even if only to sharpen your arguments against the emerging “optimist” school of environmentalism.

‘Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park’ by Alston Chase

Chase, a leading “optimist,” infuriated everyone from environmentalists to Reaganites with . An attack not only on National Park Service policies but on the popular ecological beliefs that inspired them, Playing God in Yellowstone may make you mad but it will also make you think.

‘Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run: A Call to Those Who Would Save the Earth’ by David Brower with Steve Chapple

“I'm old growth myself,” jokes Brower, the elder statesman of the “pessimist” school. In , the 83-year-old Archdruid mixes sweeping calls for change-from the establishment of a World Ecological Bank to the development of hyperefficient cars—with eco-cheerleading and welcome doses of humor. Let the Mountains Talk is an excellent demonstration of Brower’s inspiring fury.

‘The Everglades: River of Grass’ by Marjory Stoneman Douglas

“There are no other Everglades in the world,” Douglas writes in the urgent opening of about south Florida’s threatened ecosystem. In 1947 she warned that the Everglades was in its eleventh hour, and her words have long gone unheeded.

Nature and Culture

‘Nature’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“So we shall come to look at the world with new eyes,” writes Emerson. Prophetic words indeed: of humankind’s mystical links to the environment, published in 1836, inspired everyone from Thoreau to Annie Dillard.

‘Wilderness and the American Mind’ by Roderick Nash

±·ČčČőłó’s at our culture’s changing views of nature takes us from Puritan days, when Cotton Mather preached that the wilds were full of Droves of Devils and Fiery Flying Serpents, to the beginnings of the modern era.

‘The Practice of the Wild’ by Gary Snyder

“A rude thought about a Ground Squirrel or a Flicker or a Porcupine will not go unnoticed,” Snyder writes. From anybody else such statements would be cause to break out the lithium, but from the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and Zen philosopher they make brilliant sense, especially in on humankind’s need for wildness.

‘Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas’ by Donald Worster

The label “ecologist” has been applied to everyone from Darwin to the Unabomber. So what does it mean? That's the question that environmental historian Worster probes in . By looking at the diverse ideological paths that led to modern environmentalism, he offers profound clues about the road ahead.

“The Significance of the Frontier in American History” by Frederick Jackson Turner

—still highly readable after more than 100 years—argues that the very wildness of the American continent stripped settlers of their European ways and fostered individualism, independence, and democracy. Hugely influential among historians, Turner’s argument gave Cotton Mather’s nasty old wilderness a righteous new image: birthplace of American virtue. (In Early Writings of Frederick J. Turner)

‘The Age of Missing Information’ by Bill McKibben

McKibben conducts . First he watches a single day’s worth of cable TV programming—more than 1,000 hours of tape. Then he spends 24 hours camped on a mountaintop. What’s fascinating here is not his obvious conclusion (nature is better) but his fine, penetrating observations about both worlds.

‘World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth’ by Stephen J. Pyne

“Fire and humans have coevolved, like the bonded strands of a DNA molecule,” writes Pyne in that examines our world’s love-hate relationship with conflagration. His engrossing ideas leave bright embers in the memory.

‘Forests: The Shadow of Civilization’ by Robert Pogue Harrison

The forest has been populated by a variety of strange creatures in the human imagination, from jolly green giants to goddesses wearing garlands of bull testicles. In —surprisingly accessible for a scholarly treatise—Harrison looks at what our mythical, literary, and artistic conceptions of the forest tell us about ourselves.

‘Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility’ by Keith Thomas

Full of deliciously bizarre events and characters—such as a British lord who kept pet leeches, which he named after prominent surgeons— looks at the period between 1500 and 1800, when Western culture began to develop a revolutionary new respect for the natural world.

Sportswriting

‘Sketches from a Hunter’s Album’ by Ivan Turgenev

Published in 1852, may have led to Turgenev’s arrest—not because Russian bureaucrats had anything against hunting, but because they were shocked by the author's revolutionary portrayal of serfs as human beings. Politics aside, the collection is full of beautifully sensual evocations of a hunter’s life in the natural world.

‘An șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Chance: Classic and New Essays on Sport’ by Thomas McGuane

Acclaimed novelist McGuane writes about his own experiences with fishing, sailing, cowboying, motorcycling, and hunting. But are inevitably about more fundamental subjects, too, from “the necessary, ecstatic resignation to the moment” to the nature of death.

‘Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero’ by Charles Sprawson

ł§±è°ùČč·ÉČőŽÇČÔ’s looks at the cultural and psychological meanings of swimming throughout history, from ancient Greece to our own pool-possessed culture.

‘The Curse of Lono’ by Hunter S. Thompson

The originator and chief practitioner of gonzo journalism flashes more than enough of his switchblade wit to make , set around the 1980 Honolulu marathon, well worth your time.

‘The Early Climbs: Deborah and the Mountain of My Fear’ by David Roberts

brings together the first two books by one of the great writers of mountaineering narratives. The Mountain of My Fear, originally published in 1968, is especially gripping, recounting the first successful ascent of the west face of Alaska’s Mount Huntington—an adventure that ends horribly when one of the author’s fellow climbers falls to his death.

‘Silent Seasons: 21 Fishing Stories’ edited and illustrated by Russell Chatham

In , Chatham pulls together essays by some of the great modern bards of angling, including Jack Curtis, Jim Harrison, and William Hjortsberg.

‘Running and Being: The Total Experience’ by George Sheehan

“When I run the roads, I am a saint,” writes Sheehan in about the spiritual advantages of the sport. And despite moments of strange diatribe, Sheehan’s far-ranging exploration—which draws on everyone from Gandhi to Vince Lombardi to George Santayana—is certain to get your mind racing, if not your feet.

‘Zen in the Art of Archery’ by Eugen Herrigel

When athletes talk about getting into a zone, they are speaking of a consciousness-free state central to Zen Buddhism. Attempting to achieve this “exquisite state of unconcerned immersion in oneself,” Herrigel, a German philosopher, studied archery for six years under a Zen master. of his attempt to become “simultaneously the aimer and the aim” is captivating and hilarious.

‘Sun and Steel’ by Yukio Mishima

We tend to remember this great Japanese writer’s death more than his 40 novels; in 1970, Mishima plunged a sword into his own abdomen and was then beheaded by one of his disciples. Sun and ł§łÙ±đ±đ±ô—ČŃŸ±ČőłóŸ±łŸČč’s of his attempts to achieve a “sense of existence” through years of compulsive weight-lifting—offers engrossing insights not only into his suicide but into our own culture’s obsession with muscle.

How-To Bibles

‘How to Stay Alive in the Woods’ by Bradford Angier

You’ll find here on everything from sparking a fire by using a drop of water as a lens to making emergency snowshoes.

‘How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art’ by Kathleen Meyer

uses wonderfully childish humor to address some very adult health and ecological problems. In addition to such chapters as “For Women Only: How Not to Pee on Your Boots,” the revised edition includes a new section, “Plight of the Solo Poop Packer.”

‘The Modern Backpacker's Handbook: An Environmental Guide’ by Glenn Randall

There are several fine books on low-impact backpacking—including Harvey Manning’s Backpacking One Step at a Time and Chris Townsend's Backpacker’s Handbook—but is our favorite.

‘Desert Hiking’ by David Ganci

Along with a lot of very useful information on subjects such as safety, clothing, water, plants, and wildlife, , now in its third edition, conveys a sense of the beauty and mystery of the desert.

Winter Sports

‘The Snow Skier’s Bible’ by Peter Shelton

Written by an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű correspondent, covers alpine, cross-country, and backcountry forms of the sport, as well as less traditional pursuits from snowboarding to ballet skiing.

‘Free-Heel Skiing: Telemark and Parallel Techniques for All Conditions’ by Paul Parker

Telly freaks need look no further than the second edition of for both beginners and veterans. Parker keeps things lively with anecdotes about his own adventures on Denali, Mount Sopris, the Haute Route, and more.

‘Cross-Country Skiing’ by Ned Gillette and John Dostal

Gillette is an insatiable adventurer whose resume of thrills includes the first circumnavigation of Everest by ski. Dostal is a respected expert and instructor whom șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű readers know well. In , wonderful, twisted humor is used to get across the finer points of hoofing it on nordic boards.

‘Winter șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű: A Complete Guide to Winter Sports’ by Peter Stark and Steven M. Krauzer

covers an impressive variety of cold endeavors, including winter camping, snowboarding, ice skating, ice climbing, sledding, snowshoeing, mushing, curling, and, uh, ice golf.

‘Snow Sense: A Guide to Evaluating Snow Avalanche Hazard’ by Jill Fredston and Doug Fesler

Avalanches are not acts of God. details how to read terrain, snowpack, and weather variables to determine the possibilities of avalanche—and how to save yourself in case of one.

Climbing

‘Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills’ edited by Don Graydon

A consensus favorite of mountaineering experts, the beautifully designed fifth edition of covers everything from climbing techniques to snow and glacier travel to the perils of explosive weather.

‘How to Rock Climb’ by John Long

Long is a legendary climber and an able writer, and the second edition of is arguably the most complete instruction manual on free climbing. From history to rope management to crack-climbing skills, it offers a great introduction to life on the rocks.

‘Climbing Ice’ by Yvon Chouinard

Before there was Yvon Chouinard, king of the Patagonia clothing empire, there was Yvon Chouinard, rock and ice climber extraordinaire. , spiced with tales from his own career, remains a classic.

‘Ice World: Techniques and Experiences of Modern Ice Climbing’ by Jeff Lowe

for the slippery game offers state-of-the art information on tools and techniques from a current master.

Bicycling

‘Greg LeMond’s Complete Book of Bicycling’ by Greg LeMond and Kent Gordis

The three-time Tour de France champ mixes autobiography, history, and practical instruction in , which puts emphasis on racing techniques as well as training and fitness for serious cyclists.

‘The Mountain Bike Book: Choosing, Riding and Maintaining the Off-Road Bicycle’ by Rob van der Plas

About half of deals with technology; you’re likely to learn more about elastomers than you ever thought possible.

‘Bicycling: Touring and Mountain Bike Basics’ by Peter Oliver

Another in the collection of how-to guides that accompanies the Trailside public-television series, Oliver’s covers an impressive range of topics, from buying a bike to advanced riding techniques.

Running

‘The Complete Book of Running’ by James F. Fixx

It’s a bit heavy on seventies psycho-babble about the spiritual benefits of running, but remains a fine introduction to the sport.

‘The Runner’s Handbook: The Bestselling Classic Fitness Guide for Beginner and Intermediate Runners’ by Bob Glover, Jack Shepherd, and Shelly-Lynn Florence Glover

The authors reject rigid approaches, arguing instead “running should be simple, easy, fun.”  examines everything from training programs to diet to physical disabilities.

Fishing

‘Curtis Creek Manifesto’ by Sheridan Anderson

ŽĄČÔ»ć±đ°ùČőŽÇČÔ’s is a first-rate guide for the beginning anglers, full of easy-to-follow instruction on equipment and technique.

‘The Orvis Fly Fishing Guide’ by Tom Rosenbauer

Recommended for novices who can’t tell a caddis fly from vacuum-cleaner lint, as well as for more seasoned anglers who want on stream tactics and insect imitation.

‘Joan Wulff’s Fly Fishing: Expert Advice from a Woman’s Perspective’ by Joan Salvato Wulff

The grande dame of the waders offers female anglers an of the basics.

Water Sports

‘The Complete Wilderness Paddler’ by James West Davidson and John Rugge

While the material from is somewhat dated, it’s still a classic. Readers looking for state-of-the-art info might pick up Laurie Gullion’s slickly designed 1994 book, Canoeing.

‘Sea Kayaking Basics’ by David Harrison

is a fine introduction to paddling the high seas. Hardcore enthusiasts may be more interested in John Dowd’s Sea Kayaking: A Manual for Long Distance Touring, which among other things details what you might do when stranded on an uninhabited island.

‘The Complete Sailor: Learning the Art of Sailing’ by David Seidman

Seidman, who is also the author of an excellent book on sea kayaking, offers but warns that “by its very nature sailing is enigmatic.”

‘Performance Kayaking’ by Stephen B. U’ren

A former member of the U.S. national whitewater slalom teams offers of whitewater kayaking, from how to get into the boat to how to win a slalom race.

‘The Complete Whitewater Rafter’ by Jeff Bennett

For novice and expert river runners alike, here is on everything from basic raft anatomy to leading exploratories.

‘The Complete Book of Swimming’ by Phillip Whitten

Like Jim Fixx’s book on running, attempts to proselytize as well as to inform.

Travel

‘The Traveler’s Handbook: The Essential Guide for International Travelers’ edited by Caroline Brandenburger

Whether you’re trying to find a cheap way to ship your Range Rover overseas or simply having trouble with a visa, to go for help.

‘The Ultimate șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Sourcebook’ edited by Paul McMenamin

Covering the gamut of outdoor sports, from bicycling to hang gliding, offers thorough resource listings, rates tour operators, and breaks down costs.

‘Eco-Journeys: The World Guide to Ecologically Aware Travel and șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’ by Stephen Foehr

offers useful information on hundreds of ecotourism opportunities worldwide, from researching dolphins in Belize to tracking black rhinos in Zimbabwe.

‘Wild Planet! 1,001 Extraordinary Events for the Inspired Traveler’ by Tom Clynes

of festivals, holiday celebrations, and other spectacles worldwide is so thorough that its index includes seven entries under “burning of effigies.”

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű List 101

‘The Life and Strange Surprising șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner’ by Daniel Defoe

The , published in 1719, was also its first great modern wilderness tale. And it starred literature’s original adventure traveler, a shipwrecked hero whose reliance on raisins set a trail-food standard for centuries to come.

‘The Portable Romantic Poets’ edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson

It’s easy to snicker at the exclamatory excesses of the original Sensitive White Guys. But because of their fascination with wild places, the Romantics gave legitimacy to an outdoor ethic still embraced today. includes, among many others, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Emerson, and Thoreau. 

‘Moby Dick, or the Whale’ by Herman Melville

A man called Ishmael, a big-blowing whale, and a wild ocean. Enough said. It’s also , with detailed observations about cetacean life.

‘Leaves of Grass’ by Walt Whitman

“I tuck’d my trouser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time,” the Good Gray Poet writes. His is a remarkable—and remarkably fresh—stroll through nature and culture.

‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much,” writes Conrad. of African intrigue looks unflinchingly at the horrors of subjugation and exploration.

‘My Antonia’ by Willa Cather

°äČčłÙłó±đ°ù’s about the settling of Nebraska’s great prairie is especially poignant today, when we realize just how badly we’ve obliterated the place where “the grass was the country, as the water is the sea.”

‘In Our Time’ by Ernest Hemingway

, mostly set in northern Michigan, is the work in which Hemingway’s love of the wild shines brightest, as exemplified by the dark and hypnotic trout-fishing tale “Big Two-Hearted River.”

‘Go Down, Moses’ by William Faulkner

Organized around a loose theme, the ritual of the hunt, includes Faulkner’s finest piece of nature writing, “The Bear,” set in a “doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness.”

‘Voss’ by Patrick White

The dominant myth in American literature is one of Anglos whupping the wilderness. In Australian storytelling, however, the outback is often the winner of that battle. Nowhere is the Down Under’s darker version of this encounter told more eloquently than in  about a 19-century German explorer who meets a nasty end while trying to cross Australia.

‘The Dharma Bums’ by Jack Kerouac

of group sex, Zen philosophizing, and mountain climbing features a character named Japhy Ryder—a thinly disguised stand-in for the poet Gary Snyder—whose beatnik wisdom includes lines like, “Yeah, man, you know to me a mountain is Buddha … just sittin there bein perfectly, perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures.” Go, cat, go!

‘Travels with My Aunt’ by Graham Greene

“Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow, like some people are only bearable under a sheet,” says the indomitable Aunt Augusta, the elderly globehopper at the center of about the joys of journeying, by one of the greatest of journeying writers.

Overlooked Gems

‘Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa’ edited by Robert Hass

We used to read a lot of haiku that seemed like a bad joke. Then came this eye-opening collection, edited by the U.S. poet laureate. Reviving the work of three old Japanese masters, shows haiku to be the purest kind of nature poetry of all.

‘The Country of the Pointed Firs’ by Sarah Orne Jewett

is set in an isolated fishing village on the eastern coast of Maine. Sadly, Willa Cather was only two-thirds right when she predicted that it would go down in history as one of the great American novels, along with The Scarlet Letter and The șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs of Huckleberry Finn.

‘Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers’ by Robinson Jeffers

The early part of this century was not lacking for great poets of the natural world, from William Butler Yeats to Marianne Moore to Robert Frost. But perhaps our favorite is the , a take-no-prisoners bard of the wild. His advocacy of “the value of rareness” in nature came decades before scientists began talking about the importance of biodiversity.

‘The Hurricane’ by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

Set on a remote Pacific atoll, is the kind of old-fashioned human-versus-nature potboiler ’s rarely written these days—and never with such chutzpah.

“Letters from Iceland” by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice

Under the pretext of writing a travel book, Auden persuaded his publisher to pay for his journey to Iceland in 1936. But when he got there, he realized that he had no idea how to pull the project off. So he asked fellow poet MacNeice to join him in Reykjavik and collaborate on the book. The result is , half poetry, half prose, and 100 percent delightful. (In , 1926–1938)

Modern Masters and Young Turks

‘At Play in the Fields of the Lord’ by Peter Matthiessen

about Western encroachment into the Amazon is noteworthy not only as a stirring piece of literature but as an early wake-up call about the razing of the rainforest.

‘Ceremony’ by Leslie Marmon Silko

In , regarded as the first full-length novel by an American Indian woman, ancient stories and reinvented ceremonies help a Laguna Pueblo man return to harmony with the earth after World War II.

‘The Sheltering Sky’ by Paul Bowles

, published in 1949, is set in the North African desert, a perfect place to explore what Bowles once called “the inner desert of the spirit.”

‘Swimming in the Volcano’ by Bob Shacochis

“Of the many things love could not provide, one was such a thing as a mountain,” reflects the protagonist of from șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing editor Bob Shacochis. Set beneath an active volcano on a fictional Caribbean island, the 1993 National Book Award nominee is a powerful political tale as well as an engrossing look at addictive passion and a stunning rendering of life and wildlife in the tropics.

‘Solo Faces’ by James Salter

Celebrated for his lithe, lyrical prose, Salter sets high in the French Alps, unraveling a high-stakes, high-adrenaline tale of a complicated friendship between two climbers.

‘The Theory and Practice of Rivers’ by Jim Harrison

We might have included any of Harrison’s fiction works—Wolf to Dalva to Legends of the Fall—among the great works of contemporary outdoor literature. But we have a particular soft spot for , especially the title piece, a mournful meditation on the rush of water and the rush of time.

‘The Storyteller’ by Mario Vargas Llosa

The great Peruvian writer gives us about an outcast Jewish academic who recasts himself as a key member of an obscure Indian tribe deep in the Amazon jungle. It’s a superb look at how we are transformed by our journeys and how the line between tourist and native is sometimes surprisingly thin. 

‘Animal Dreams’ by Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver's formal training in biology informs about a science teacher who uncovers an eco-disaster caused by a mining company in her Arizona town. Kingsolver’s subtle touch keeps things from getting too didactic.

‘Omeros’ by Derek Walcott

The works of Homer inspired Nobel Prize winner Walcott as he worked on . A sailor from Walcott’s native island of Saint Lucia is the protagonist of this story about physical, historical, and spiritual travel.

‘All the Pretty Horses’ Cormac McCarthy

, about a 16-year-old cowboy’s coming of age amid the deserts and mountains of Texas and Mexico, is proof that landscape can be a compelling central character.

‘: Contemporary Poets and Nature’ edited by Christopher Merrill 

‘: Contemporary American Nature Poetry’ edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini

These two collections are excellent introductions to the varied and fascinating ways in which today’s poets interpret the natural world. They include verse from a striking variety of writers, including Sandra Alcosser, Wendell Berry, Amy Clampitt, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Stanley Kunitz, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, and Pattiann Rogers.

‘The Shipping News’ by E. Annie Proulx

Set in Newfoundland “on the most utterly desolate coast of the world,”  is an extraordinary exploration of both nature and culture, covering issues ranging from seals to child pornography, from birds and boatbuilding to the state of journalism.

‘American Noise’ by Campbell McGrath

Walt Whitman advocated a kind of poetry based on “genuineness,” a respect for the way things really are. One of his most energetic heirs is McGrath, a muscular poet who concerns himself with “America, the thing itself” and arises from the tension between the natural and man-made worlds, encompassing the Rocky Mountains and Captain Kirk all within a few lines.

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The enigmatic Anasazi, whose history remains seductively mysterious, have fascinated people for centuries. And while Roberts is not the first writer to become obsessed with their world, what sets In Search of the Old Ones apart from other books about the Southwest is his exuberant, hands-on approach, which combines the thrill of canyoneering and rock climbing with the intellectual sleuthing of archaeology. Piqued by a need to establish “some connection with the Anasazi that I could feel beneath my fingertips,” Roberts finds himself on a series of backcountry adventures in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. While trekking through canyons and climbing mesa walls in search of obscure ruins, he ponders the mysteries of Anasazi history, including the vexing question of whether the Old Ones practiced cannibalism. He also crosses paths with a number of Anasazi-obsessed eccentrics, who give many of his pages sparkle and depth.

In the end, Roberts's search for “communion” with the Old Ones is rewarded with not one grail, but two: He finds (but does not unearth) an intact vessel and a beautiful basket that have apparently gone undiscovered for at least 700 years. The reader of this absorbing hybrid of travel writing and amateur archaeology is in for comparable treasures.

In The Maze, Lucy Rees, an author of considerable panache and wit, undertakes a similar journey. With her partner, a part-time fire-eater named Rick, she notices that a stone carving in Cornwall, near their native Wales, is identical to one on a mesa in the Arizona homeland of the Hopi, the modern descendants of the Anasazi. The carvings themselves are complicated, circular mazes, full of sexual imagery, that become a psychological map for a book about what it means to be lost—physically, emotionally, spiritually—and then found again. Arriving in Arizona, the couple sets out on horseback in search of one of the mazes outside of Shipaulovi, an ancient Hopi village. In addition to the stunning desert landscape, Lucy and Rick encounter redneck elk hunters, tough-as-nails cowgirls, a brilliant Hopi medicine man, and their own darkest fears. The maze metaphor wears thin at times, but for the most part Rees's book–by turns funny and gut-wrenching, breezy and baroque–is a first-rate story of obsessive adventure in which the protagonists discover much more than an etching on a rock.

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The grand stack room of Baltimore’s , an elegant chamber built in 1878 and now run by Johns Hopkins University, has been aptly described as a “cathedral of books.” Rising 61 feet from its marble floor to its glass skylight, appointed in ornate cast iron and gold leaf, suffused with the smell of moldering volumes, the place indeed radiates a sense of the sacred.

On the afternoon of December 7, 1995, Jennifer Bryan, curator of manuscripts for the , was doing a little research inside the grand stack room when she started to get a bad feeling about a fellow patron. The man in question was sitting across the way from her, looking through some books that were obviously very old.

There was nothing unusual about his appearance—quite the contrary. A studious man in his midforties, wearing a blue blazer and khaki pants, he could have been mistaken for half the scholars who walk through the library’s doors. He was a withdrawn, slight-framed person with a biggish nose, smallish chin, reddish hair, and mustache.

Yet the man kept looking over his shoulder and flashing her “surreptitious” looks. Her suspicions soon deepened. “I just happened to look up and over in that direction and thought I saw him tear a page out of a book,” she remembers. “And I thought, well, now what do I do? Do I say something, or did I just imagine that?”

As time went on, the man seemed to grow flustered by her stares. Finally, he stood up and pulled open a card catalog drawer, purposely obstructing Bryan’s view. For Bryan, that was the last straw. She got up and reported him to Peabody Library officials.

A short time later, when three security officers confronted him, the man hastily gathered up his belongings and dashed out the Peabody’s front door. In a scene that might have come from some odd amalgamation of The Nutty Professor and The Fugitive, the bookworm led his pursuers through downtown Baltimore, all four of them in a jog. Crossing historic Charles Street, the procession threaded past a famous statue of Washington and around another of Lafayette. Finally, after ditching a notebook in a row of bushes, the man found himself trapped on the back steps of the .

Donald Pfouts, director of security at the Peabody Library, spoke to the man first. “I would really like to invite you back to the library,” Pfouts remembers telling him, “because I think there are some issues here that we have to deal with.”

The officers pulled the red spiral notebook—about the size of a steno pad—from the bushes and quickly discovered that Jennifer Bryan’s suspicions had been well founded. Tucked into its pages were three maps from a rare 1763 book, The General History of the Late War, by John Entick, a modest trove that the library later estimated to be worth around $2,000.

Earlier in the day, the man had presented library officials with a University of Florida ID card bearing the name James Perry, a fake. Now he told them his real identity: Gilbert Joseph Bland Jr.

An hour later, in what would turn out to be a controversial decision, the library released him after he promised to pay $700 to restore the book. Bland was in such a hurry that he forgot to take his notebook with him—and within minutes of the thief's departure, Pfouts made a startling discovery. As he looked more closely at the notebook, he realized that it was essentially a hit list containing the names and prices of rare maps as well as the names of several other major libraries at which they could be found. Then, as Peabody librarians went back through their own records, they discovered that more maps were missing from other texts that Bland had apparently handled during an earlier visit. “This guy was low,” says Pfouts. “He was violating the trust of practically every community in the country, committing crimes against our history.”

When Hopkins officials began to warn other libraries around the country about the unwelcome visitor, Pfouts’s worst fears were soon realized. James Perry had been to the University of Virginia. James Perry had been to Duke University. James Perry had been to the University of North Carolina and to Brown. At every stop, books handled by him now appeared to be missing maps and prints.

As news of the crime spread through Exlibris, an Internet site for librarians and rare book traders, Pfouts started hearing from legitimate map dealers around the country. “They’d say, ‘Look, we know this guy, and we know that he’s been doing this for a while,’”recalls Pfouts. “They didn't know how he was getting the maps, exactly, but they said he always had the rarest maps and he always had multiples of them. They could never understand why he always had everything.”

Soon the FBI would enter the case, and Bland’s name would be on the lips of nearly everyone in the world of vintage cartography, his cross-country string of heists casting a chill over this small, musty profession. Eventually, Bland would be arrested for his crimes, and after entering a series of guilty pleas, he would serve prison time while his case followed a convoluted course through federal and state jurisdictions. Late last month, Bland was set to be released from a New Jersey facility, completing an incarceration that lasted only a year-and-a-half. Though he still faces the possibility of further legal action, America’s greatest map thief will be, for the time being, a free man—a prospect that leaves curators and map collectors considerably ill at ease.

On October 31, 1995—Halloween—Gilbert Bland had an especially good day. That morning he allegedly walked into the University of Chicago’s , signed in as James Perry, and calmly sat down in the special collections room. Then he opened one of the Western world’s more extraordinary texts: a 1584 edition of Theatrum orbis terrarum, compiled and edited by Abraham Ortelius, the father of modern geography. Ortelius, a Flemish cartographer born in 1527, took up his trade at a fortuitous time, in the afterglow of the great age of discovery. Columbus had landed in the Americas, Magellan’s expedition had circumnavigated the globe, Copernicus had made his case for a sun-centered universe. Yet cartography was behind the times. Maps came in a slapdash variety of sizes and styles, many of them based on ancient Greek notions of geography—which, of course, did not take into account the possibility of a North or South America. Ortelius set out to change that, painstakingly collecting the finest maps of places throughout the known world and bringing them together in a uniform size and format. Originally published in 1570, Theatrum orbis terrarum was the first modern atlas. Ortelius put the whole world at the fingertips of the traveler—a revolution in the human imagination.

Yet now the great master's text had wound up in the hands of a kind of Anti-Ortelius, a professional scatterer of maps and destroyer of books. Bland apparently paged through the volume until he came to a cartographic gem labeled “La Florida,” the first widely available map of the broad region that is now the southeastern United States. (Ortelius added it to Theatrum orbis terrarum in the 1584 edition.)

Although the book measures 17 inches by 12 inches and its pages are so thick that they faintly rumble when turned, Bland is believed to have removed “La Florida” and two more maps from the atlas, as well as ten maps from another book. The Regenstein’s special collections room is a kind of fish tank built expressly for security; its walls are made of glass and no briefcases or pens are allowed inside. Yet Bland seems to have sneaked the 13 maps into his clothes and walked out undetected. For good measure, he also altered a librarian’s pencil-written inventory at the front of the Ortelius book, making it appear that the pages he took had been missing for years.

But that wasn’t Bland’s only alleged theft during his brief Chicago stay. Only the day before, he’d paid a visit to Northwestern University’s Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. Curator R. Russell Maylone remembers him as “the proverbial man in a raincoat” with “a pile of books on the table spread out in a not very orderly fashion.” That day, Bland is believed to have removed six separate maps from the pages of several antique atlases, including a 1681 map of New York and three maps of the Caribbean. As Perry got up to leave, Maylone said, “I hope you found what you were looking for.”

Ultimately 18 institutions, including libraries at the University of Delaware, the University of Florida, and Washington University would report that they had been visited by a James Perry. It was an invisible crime spree, hidden amid the seldom-opened pages of centuries-old books. And now librarians, a legendarily docile people, wanted blood.

“If that man gets in front of my car,” said Northwestern's Maylone, “I’ll run over him—but in a nice way. Oh, and then I’ll back over him again.”

Gilbert Joseph Bland Jr. was something of a chameleon, a clever inventor of aliases. Over the years, law enforcement officials say, he went by the names James Morgan, Jason Pike, Jack Arnett, Richard Olinger, John David Rosche, Steven Spradling, James Bland, James Perry, Gilbert Anthony Bland, Joseph Bland. He changed careers and families without seeming to look back; when a daughter from his first marriage once asked him for a favor, she says he refused, telling her, “You're a stranger.”

People who’d met Bland would describe him only in the vaguest of terms: “clean-cut,” “quiet,” “mild-mannered,” “a shadow figure.” His face was neither young nor old. Medium height, medium weight, middle-aged, middle everything, he was a cipher—in cartographic terms, terra incognita. “The man was totally nondescript,” says Linda McCurdy, an official at Duke University’s Special Collections Library. “Part of the way he operated was to make as few ripples as possible.” Margaret Bing, a special collections curator at Florida’s Broward County Library, puts it this way: “I remember thinking the first time I met Bland, ‘Now this is a guy who fits his name.’”

Then again, the world of vintage cartography in which Bland so craftily operated is itself a decidedly staid realm. There are an estimated 10,000 antique map collectors in the United States, a punctilious subculture loosely bound together by organizations like the and the . Cartomaniacs, as these obsessive map-hounds sometimes call themselves, subscribe to periodicals such as or the more scholarly  and avidly discourse on the Internet's Map History Discussion List, exchanging esoterica or trading cartographic jokes. (What did the mapmaker send his sweetheart on Valentine's Day? A dozen compass roses.) The cartomaniacs’ calendars are dotted with trade fairs where they haggle over the price of a Willem Blaeu or a William Faden the way baseball-card collectors would bargain over a Hank Aaron or a Mickey Mantle.

“Cartomania is a sickness,” says Barry Lawrence Ruderman, a dealer and self-confessed map junkie from La Jolla, California. “It's obsessive. Once you’re in up to your ankles, you want to be in up to your knees; once you’re in up to your knees, you want to be in up to your waist. I like to think that it’s sort of a beautiful sickness, because all human beings need things that stimulate them intellectually and drive them to passion. But the secondary aspect is that many of us spend insane amounts of time dedicating ourselves to map collecting. It’s a twisted pursuit. But where’s the problem in that?”

“People collect maps for a wide range of reasons,” says Edward Ripley-Duggan of the . “It's a little world over which people can have total aesthetic control. And as in any economy, whether it’s Wall Street or whatever, there’s always a rogue element. Unfortunately, certain people are sticky-fingered where desirable artifacts are concerned.”

Gilbert Bland developed his “beautiful sickness” relatively late in life, sometime in his early forties, and unlike most of the afflicted, his interest in maps seems to have had more to do with money than with an authentic passion for the discipline of cartography. In February 1994, a little less than two years before he was caught in Baltimore, Bland and his wife, Karen, opened Antique Maps & Collectibles in The Gardens, a sleepy little office and retail complex in Tamarac, Florida. Tamarac is a Fort Lauderdale exurb, a placeless sprawl of strip malls and subdivisions. It's about the last spot you'd expect to find an antique map shop—but then again, this was one antique map shop that didn't want to be found.

Though his wife was the owner of record, Gilbert Bland was apparently the guiding force behind the store, which was located just a few miles from the home the couple shared with their two children in Coral Springs. The Blands kept a decidedly low profile at the mall. “The place was basically always empty,” says one employee of a business whose windows faced Bland's shop. “We were sitting here one day thinking, ‘I wonder how he makes money?’ And then we were wondering, ‘Who would be interested in those old maps?’”

When the store opened, Bland was a complete unknown in the world of antique maps. Nonetheless, he quickly built up a moderately impressive inventory and began to cultivate a long-distance clientele. Barry Ruderman was one early client. “Bland sent out a computerized list of maps for sale,” recalls Ruderman. “It was semiprofessional looking, nothing real fancy.”

From the beginning, it was obvious that Bland was not an expert. As one inside observer later put it, “Some of the dealers were awfully wary of him—the man didn't seem to know dick about maps.” Ruderman remembers that original offering as a “bizarre mix” of materials that included a lot of worthless junk. “The other thing that was a bit odd is he really didn't know his prices all that well,” Ruderman says. “He really just wanted you to make offers. And he accepted most of the offers.”

Ruderman, a bankruptcy lawyer, says he once “sort of cross-examined Bland” about the provenance of his materials. According to Ruderman, 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,” says 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.”

Bland's client base was growing. As Antique Maps & Collectibles sent out catalogs and advertised in international trade magazines, word began to spread that a little store in south Florida had an incredible supply of low- to mid-end maps. Some dealers grew a little suspicious of Bland's ability to find multiple copies of relatively scarce pieces. Others were beginning to raise eyebrows over what one dealer called Bland's “ridiculously low prices.”

But no one apparently ever directly accused him of stealing, much less demanded an investigation into his practices. “It's a very close community,” explains F. J. Manasek, a well-known Vermont dealer. “We're all friends, even though we compete in business. There's a lot of honor, which is probably why Bland could gain such easy entree.”

“The degree of trust in this business is staggering,” agrees another prominent dealer. “We literally sell tens of thousands of dollars of stuff around the world based on a phone call.”

The Blands made high-profile appearances at the two big industry conventions in 1995—the Miami International Map Fair in February and the International Map Collectors' Society Fair, in San Francisco, in October. “Bland had a major presence at both fairs,” recalls James Hess, who owns the Heritage Map Museum and Auction House in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “He was putting himself out there with the major dealers.”

Ruderman, who had dinner with Bland at the San Francisco convention, adds, “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,” recalls one respected map 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.’”

If Gilbert Bland had dollar signs in his eyes, it's not hard to understand why. He had entered the trade during a boom time, when the fascination with ancient maps was steadily spreading from the esoteric fringes into the mainstream. Over the previous decade or so, cartomania had become something of a bull market in the United States. (The trend continues today. Money magazine, for example, devoted its March 1997 Hot Stuff column to map collecting. The headline: “These Old Maps Offer You a New Way to Double Your Money.”)

Much of the growth in antique map collecting has been fueled by one person: W. Graham Arader III, an intense and sometimes intimidating man from Middleburg, Virginia. Arader's main residence, an 86-acre estate in rolling horse country just up the road from Paul Mellon's place, is one of four that he and his wife own. Arader has made his multimillion-dollar fortune almost entirely from trading old maps and prints. “I'm the biggest map dealer of the twentieth century,” the 46-year-old Arader asserts. “There's no question about it. I sell $10 million in maps every year. I can pick up the phone and make $10,000 in a single hour. Yes, collecting has made me a very rich man.”

Before Arader entered the business in the early 1970s, old maps were mostly the province of librarians, historians, and a few tweedy collectors. Young, impudent, and by all accounts extremely savvy, Arader was determined to expand the base of investors beyond this small, druidic group. Reaching out to people with cash to burn and corporations with offices to decorate, he transformed antique maps from historical artifacts into trendy commodities.

Critics, especially rare collections librarians, have sometimes disputed Arader's cutthroat business practices, but no one would argue with his success. Luring wave after wave of new and inexperienced buyers into the market, he jacked his prices to the sky. His competitors—many of whom were appalled by his brash style—followed suit.

“It's been straight up since I started collecting in 1971, increasing 5 percent to 20 percent a year,” says Arader. Just to take one example, an edition of the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy’s famous map book, Geographia, printed in Ulm in 1482, could be had for $85 in 1884, $5,000 in 1950, and $28,000 in 1965. Today, if you could actually find a copy for sale, it might cost you as much as $400,000.

That’s good news for Arader and his fellow map dealers but bad news for the nation's librarians, who suddenly find themselves sitting on gold mines—often without the resources to protect their riches. Predictably, a new generation of map thieves has swarmed in. In 1978, for example, Andrew P. Antippas, a professor of English at Tulane University, pleaded guilty to stealing five rare maps from Yale University. Also at Yale in the 1970s, two men disguised as priests confessed they were part of a conspiracy to steal ancient atlases and maps by sneaking them under their robes. In Britain in the mid-1980s, a man named Ian Hart sneaked a huge haul of maps and atlases out of Oxford's Bodleian Library, much of it hidden in his trousers. In 1988, Robert M. “Skeet” Willingham Jr. was convicted of stealing an enormous cache of rare books, documents, and maps from the University of Georgia, where he worked as the head of special collections.

In his usual pugnacious style, Arader lays the blame for this wave of thefts squarely on the shoulders of librarians, whom he claims are simply not vigilant enough. “Most librarians are incompetent, boring, and dull,” says Arader. “And they have this easy life. Many of them view their collections as their personal fiefdoms. But really, they don't look after their material. You know, it's not hard to tell the difference between a thief and somebody who's legitimate. If you're not intelligent enough to see these guys coming, then you shouldn't be a curator.”

Earlier in his career Arader had purchased maps that had been stolen by none other than Andrew Antippas, but nowadays the Middleburg dealer likes to portray himself as the Argus of the industry, arguing that many of his fellow dealers are less than meticulous in ascertaining the backgrounds of their inventory. “It's simple,” he says. “All you say is, ‘Where did you get this map?’ Then you listen to the story and you say, ‘Do you mind if I check your sources?’ And then if he starts waffling, you say, ‘Sir, get the hell out of my gallery!’ And if you really think he stinks, then you turn him in. In their hearts, the dealers who bought from Bland knew what was going on. If something is too good to be true, then it's too good to be true.”

At the time of his brief detention at the Peabody Library, Bland provided officials only with a temporary address in Columbia, Maryland, the town where he had lived before moving to Florida in 1994. But as news of his crimes spread, Bland fled that address and disappeared. It took the authorities more than a week to catch up with him again—time that allowed him to dispose of much of his inventory.

By the early morning of December 15, Bland had emptied his store, reportedly leaving a note for his landlord that said, “See you later.”

“I came in and a lot of the maps were gone,” says Laurie Bregman, a tenant whose shop was located just across the way from Antique Maps & Collectibles. “He’d emptied the place in a middle-of-the night kind of deal.”

Within a week and a half of Bland's vanishing, FBI agents, working with a University of Virginia cop named Thomas Durrer, tracked him down at his residence in Florida and knocked on the door, a search warrant in hand. On January 2, 1996, Bland finally turned himself in to local police.

News of his arrest came as no great surprise to many people in the industry. But others, particularly those who'd had close business dealings with Bland, maintain that they were stunned when they heard of his arrest. “My jaw dropped,” remembers 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 heard about Bland'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 says. “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.”

Like any good con man, Bland did not surrender without retaining a certain amount of leverage: The feds still didn't know where his inventory was stashed. Somewhere Bland had old maps of New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland, as well as Italy, Sweden, and Norway. He had the fortifications of Montreal. He had the Missouri Territory. He had the Empire of China, the Empire of Japan, and India beyond the Ganges. He had the Eastern Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere, and the North Pole. He even had the trade winds locked up somewhere—and he wasn't telling anyone the location. Figuratively speaking, he was holding the world hostage.

As part of his plea negotiations, Bland would agree to tell the FBI the whereabouts of the cache—a rather cunning offer that FBI agent Hank Hanburger would later describe as “a very effective bargaining chip.”

So in February 1996, Bland finally directed authorities to a storage space in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, that he had rented under an assumed name. When FBI agents looked behind its bright orange doors, they discovered an extraordinary booty, some 150 maps in all, dating from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Taken together with the 100 or so other maps that authorities would gather from Bland's assorted clients across the country, the thief's total collection of some 250 maps would have had a market value estimated at as much as a half-million dollars. The inventory included the work of such seminal figures as Jodocus Hondius, whose seventeenth-century atlases popularized the now-standard latitude-longitude projection system of the great cartographer Gerard Mercator, and Thomas Jefferys, the eighteenth-century geographer who published one of the first important atlases devoted to North America.

FBI agents from Virginia flew down to impound the collection. Bland's “bargaining chip” had now been cashed in.

Werner Muensterberger, a New York psychoanalyst who is a nationally prominent expert on collecting and the author of Collecting: An Unruly Passion, says that the map lovers he has met tend to come from broken homes or from families that have moved around a good deal. They throw themselves into their hobby, at least in part, as a way to connect with a parent or to ground themselves in a more permanent sense of place. “Looking for maps, especially antique maps,” he says, “is really looking for the past—Where do I come from? Who were my ancestors?—and symbolically, finding security.”

Whether this profile more accurately describes Bland or the more avid collectors he preyed on, one does find certain resonances in Bland's background. Certainly his life has been a rocky one. His parents divorced when he was only three years old, and according to defense attorneys, he later suffered physical abuse at the hands of his stepfather. In June 1968 he graduated from high school in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, a New York suburb. That same month, he had his first run-in with the law. Arrested for possession of a stolen car, he was found guilty of a lesser charge and fined $100.

A few days later, he enlisted in the army and served in Vietnam. His combat experiences would later haunt him, causing him to suffer post-traumatic stress syndrome—or so his lawyers have recently claimed. While in the service, he continued to run afoul of the law. Among other things, he was charged and briefly detained for desertion and being absent without leave.

He was discharged in 1971 and later that year married Carol Ann Talt. The couple eventually had two daughters, but fatherhood didn't seem to soften Bland's wild streak. During the early 1970s, he had a string of arrests and convictions on various charges, including marijuana possession. Then, in 1976, after separating from his wife (they eventually divorced), he found himself in serious trouble with the law. Arrested for using fake identities to defraud the government in an unemployment compensation scam, he made a plea bargain and was sent to federal prison in El Reno, Oklahoma, to serve a three-year term.

After his release from prison, Bland evidently had very little contact with his children. “He's got two children that he totally abandoned and couldn't care less about,” says Heather Bland, his 24-year-old daughter by that first marriage Nonetheless, Bland appeared to have turned his life around, at least for a few years. He married again, and he and Karen had two more children. After receiving an associate's degree from Broward Community College in Fort Lauderdale, he moved to suburban Maryland, where he worked for Allied Signal Corporation. In 1992 he and Karen opened their own computer leasing business.

It was sometime in the early 1990s that Bland became interested in maps. According to statements he made to the FBI, it happened almost by accident. “His story is that he bought a bunch of items that someone had left unclaimed at one of these U-Store-It places,” says Gray Hill, a Virginia-based FBI special agent who's worked on the case nearly from the beginning. “Included were a bunch of maps. And someone told him, 'Hey, there might be some value here.'”

The Blands moved back to Florida in 1994, opening Antique Maps & Collectibles that February. In April, they purchased (in Karen's name) a four-bedroom house in an upscale subdivision of Coral Springs for $151,400. But their financial picture was nowhere near as rosy as it appeared from the outside. Their debts were mounting fast, eventually prompting Karen Bland to declare Chapter Seven bankruptcy in late October of 1995. Court documents show that at the time of the filing — a little more than a month before Bland's brief capture in Baltimore—Karen Bland owed more than $40,000 in credit card debt alone.

Bland's lawyers would later argue that it was the failure of his computer leasing firm in Maryland that led to these financial troubles and eventually to his crime spree. But that might not have been the only factor. “I'll put another scenario in front of you,” says dealer Jonathan Ramsay. “He came over here [to the Bahamas] about four or five times—and he liked to gamble. He'd say to me, ‘I'm over here on a gambling junket.’ He would come in to see me and then he would go off to the casino.”

Whether it was to pay off gambling debts or some other reason entirely, Bland clearly needed cash fast, and he seemed to know how to get it. “He found an easy avenue to make some quick money—and he really overdid it,” says Lieutenant Detective Clay Williams of the University of North Carolina Department of Public Safety. “He got in way over his head. It became addictive. I don't think he had any conception of the federal charges that could come down on him.”

And come down they did: In a federal court in Charlottesville, Virginia, Bland was initially charged with theft of major artwork and transporting stolen goods across state lines. He agreed to plea bargains in North Carolina and Delaware state courts as well as in the federal courts. In exchange for a reduced sentence and limited immunity from further prosecution, Bland promised, among other things, to cooperate with federal authorities and to advise libraries on ways to beef up their security to prevent future thefts. In the end, Bland would be forced to pay $70,000 in restitution in the federal case (an amount he would contest to a judge, noting that the damages he'd caused were easily remediable, as the maps could simply be glued back into their original atlases), plus an as-yet-undetermined amount in the Delaware case. All told, he would serve only 17 months in various prisons ranging from Virginia to North Carolina to Delaware.

Today, most people in the antique cartographic world are appalled by what they view as Bland's distressingly light sentence. “It's very easy for a prosecutor to say, 'He ripped a few pages out of a few books? I've got better things to do,'” says map dealer and lawyer Barry Ruderman. “To the 99 percent of people who don't understand the magnitude of what he's done, Bland just doesn't seem to represent a threat to society.”

However, there is still a possibility that Bland may face further legal action. Brown University's John Carter Brown Library, which is still missing two of three maps allegedly stolen by Bland, is now considering bringing a suit against him. “But the truth is,” notes library director Norman Fiering, “I would drop all the charges if he promised to come up with the missing pieces. There's an analogy to kidnappers: You're willing to let them go if they give you back your child.”

The history of cartography is full of peculiar islands. One of the manuscripts the FBI eventually recovered from Bland, for example, is eighteenth-century British cartographer Herman Moll's map of North America. It shows a continent that looks a lot like the one we now inhabit, except for one striking detail. Running the length of the west coast is a sprawling independent land mass — a famous and widely repeated cartographic fiction known as the Island of California. Many antique maps contain even weirder isles. A twelfth-century map by the Arab geographer al-Idrisi shows El Wakwak, an island said to be filled with trees whose fruit, shaped like the heads of women, continually cry out the apparently meaningless chant, “Wak-Wak.”

A good portion of the antiques stolen by Bland have themselves been consigned to a kind of island within the FBI, one that might be called the Island of Lost Maps. The lord of this peculiar domain is Gray Hill, a lanky, voluble, middle-aged special agent. Normally, Hill's job is to track down lawbreakers, but now his role has been reversed: He hunts victims. Despite an exhaustive search, the Bureau has so far been able to positively identify the owners of only about 100 of the 250 maps in Bland's collection. The rest face an uncertain exile here.

On this day, Hill is sitting beneath a photo of grim-faced J. Edgar Hoover in a conference room at the FBI office in Richmond, Virginia. On the table in front of him is a mountain of plastic bags and file folders, a zip-up art portfolio, and a U-Haul moving box. Hill is taking an inventory of his kingdom, carefully unfolding one fragile document after another, some of them printed more than four centuries ago. “I live in fear of getting these things wet,” he says, casting a suspicious glance at a can of soda sitting on the table's edge.

The maps are mesmerizingly beautiful. With the onset of copperplate printing in the sixteenth century, mapmakers had the ability to embellish their work with extraordinary detail. And in an age when art and science overlapped, the results were spectacular: Sea monsters float in the Atlantic, angels hover over the Pacific, fire-breathing horses gallop atop the the Arctic Circle. Hill pulls out a map from the 1607 edition of the famous Hondius-Mercator atlas. “This is another one that I don't have any idea where it came from,” he says.

As part of his federal plea bargain arrangement, Bland has been helping the FBI in its efforts to return the maps to their rightful owners. But even with his cooperation, the process has proven extremely difficult for Hill. For one thing, libraries don't always keep inventories of maps that are bound in books—so even if they discover one missing, they can rarely be sure when it disappeared. Moreover, most maps are unmarked. Some institutions put stamps or other identification marks on their maps, but to many librarians this practice is repugnant, the equivalent of stenciling PROPERTY OF THE LOUVRE across the Mona Lisa.

As a result, FBI experts have been forced to match each stolen map, jigsaw-puzzle style, with each damaged book, using ultraviolet light to make sure the edges line up perfectly and the paper stocks on both sides of the cut precisely match up.

Curiously, Hill sometimes finds that librarians remain in denial about thefts that have taken place under their noses, even when the evidence is incontrovertible. “I talked to one librarian who said, 'There's no way he could have stolen anything out of here.' Well, I said, 'I just know one thing. I know that Mr. Bland told me that he came to your library and stole maps.' But they won't accept it. They will not believe that they have had anything stolen.”

Or maybe they believe it all too well. As Robert Karrow, curator of maps at the Newberry Library in Chicago, points out, “A lot of library thefts have gone unreported in the past. You're embarrassed, and maybe you say to yourself, ‘What will the donors think?’ And you’re reluctant to talk about the whole issue because you don’t want to give the crazies ideas.”

On a bright, brisk day last December, in a federal courtroom just a few miles from Gray Hill's office, Gilbert Bland was scheduled to appear for a sentencing hearing, one of the many court dates that have dotted his life over the past two years. On his attorney's advice, Bland had steadfastly declined to speak with me about his case, so I'd come to Charlottesville in hopes of finally laying eyes on the man. At the appointed hour, Bland shuffled into the courtroom wearing blue prison scrubs. There were no well-wishers or family members seated in the gallery—just a few reporters quietly scribbling notes. Bland was a sunken man with a wan, jowly face. His eyes were dark and piercing. A couple of times, he leaned back and sneaked nervous glances at me, and I imagined just how Jennifer Bryan must have felt when he darted his “surreptitious” eyes at her in the Peabody Library that day: It was the look of a man who intensely dislikes to be observed.

Prison had not been good to Bland. Earlier in his incarceration, while staying at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, he'd written the U.S. District judge to complain about having to live in crowded conditions with a number of violent criminals. He attempted to pass the days and months by reading, he said, but found it “impossible to concentrate” in a place where the television constantly blared, “with rap music videos, cartoons and wrestling [as] the mainstay.”

“I have tried, with the help of anti-depressant medication…to cope,” he wrote, “[but] the stress is unbearable.” Noting that two other inmates had hanged themselves since his arrival several months earlier, he said he was worried about “retain[ing] my sanity.”

In court that day, Bland's attorney argued that his troubled emotions were indeed at the heart of this case. In urging a light sentence for his client, Roanoke-based lawyer Paul R. Thomson Jr. said that Bland's map thefts were connected to his experience in Vietnam 25 years earlier. “He has a pattern of problems largely triggered by depression, a very common problem of post-traumatic stress syndrome,” said Thomson, who assured the court that his client would remain in an out-patient treatment program once he returned home to Florida.

“He recognizes that this was singularly poor judgment,” Thomson concluded.

For his own part, Bland offered no insights into the crimes, giving instead what amounted to a stock repentant-felon speech. He spoke in a meek voice that occasionally snagged with emotion. “The first thing I'd like to say, Your Honor, is that I'm truly sorry for what I've done—I'm ashamed of myself. In the year that has gone by, I've had a lot of time to think about why this happened… It will never happen again.”

Then Bland quietly slouched back to the defense table and seemed to melt into his chair, the soul of inconspicuousness.

Correspondent Miles Harvey, who regularly writes book reviews for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, wrote “The șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Canon,” which appeared in the May 1996 issue. Photographs by Chris Hartlove

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