(I was going through my e-mail and stumbled across a link that Huw had submitted in late December and that, probably because of the holidays-induced chaos, I simply forgot to post. Anyway, here it is now.)

Last December, the BBC reported that map thief Peter Bellwood was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for stealing dozens of antique maps from the National Library of Wales. He used a razor to slice 50 pages away from antique atlases, and sold them to map collectors for £70,000.

His modus operandi sounds like it could have come straight from the pages of Miles Harvey’s Island of Lost Maps. This book, which takes as its focus another particularly successful map thief, also looks at the phenomenon of map thievery in general and the shadier side of map collecting.