A FORMER landscape gardener who is to be sentenced next month for stealing more than 50 rare maps from the National Library of Wales is suspected of plundering hundreds more maps from public collections across Britain and Europe, many of which have yet to be reported missing.

When Joseph Peter Bellwood, from Colchester, in Essex, finishes whatever sentence is given by a judge at Swansea Crown Court, where he confessed last week to the thefts from the Welsh library, the Danish Government hopes that he will stand trial for stealing some of the world’s rarest and most valuable maps from the Royal Library in Copenhagen.

His alleged haul included Petrus Plancius’s lavish 1594 double-hemisphere world map, Orbis Terrarum, Abraham Ortelius’s 1587 Typus Orbis Terrarum and John Speed’s 1627 map of North and South America, and was worth more than £100,000.

Highly decorative, full of minute and fascinating detail, and coloured by the perceptions of the age in which they were created, antique maps cross the boundaries between art and history. Some of the rarest are as valuable as Old Master paintings yet are sitting in store rooms of research libraries, where anyone with a plausible excuse can handle them. Bellwood, who had been jailed for four years in 1996 for stealing hundreds of prints worth £290,000 from the British Library, had discovered a new and lucrative goldmine.

The academic custodians of the leather-bound atlases from the great age of exploration had little idea of their value in the real world. His plundering was abetted by the mutual suspicion between the worlds of academia and the dealers in antique maps. According to Peter Barber, keeper of the four million maps in the British Library, many librarians have yet to suspect that they have been paid a visit by the softly- spoken “researcher”.

Mr Barber said: “He adopted the manner of a fuddyduddy scholar. On his first visit he would hand in a high-value note that he claimed to have found on the floor. Sometimes they’d just keep it. After that any suspicions they might have had were stilled.”

Bellwood would wear a baggy sweater to conceal the torn-out pages. His “tools” were as simple as a notepad and pencil, for which, naturally, he needed to carry a sharpener. Yet even that tiny blade would not have been essential: it is as quick and easy to remove a page from a book with nothing more suspicious than a short length of dental floss.

Bellwood steered clear of the British Library because his face was well known to security staff. But Mr Barber believes it is highly unlikely that his plundering was confined to the National Library in Wales. On his previous crime spree he had criss-crossed the country stealing prints from public collections in Leeds and Birmingham as well as London.

Staff in Aberystwyth were alerted to Bellwood’s activities by the Royal Library in Copenhagen, where he had been caught on CCTV apparently razoring pages from a 16th-century atlas in 2001.

Libraries across Scandinavia discovered that they had also been visited by Bellwood, who did not use a false name. Together with another British map thief, Melvin Perry, Bellwood’s “grand tour” is believed to have accounted for a significant proportion of the 4,500 maps subsequently found to be missing from libraries across Europe.

An audit at the Welsh library discovered that 105 maps were missing, only half of which Bellwood admitted he had stolen.

He was caught after several years on the run shortly after his name was placed on Scotland Yard’s “ten most wanted” list. Other libraries, including the Cambridge University library and the library at the National Maritime Museum, have also lost valuable maps, though most are reluctant to admit it publicly.

Mr Barber said: “If a page has been expertly removed it can be hard to tell it’s missing unless you are sure it was there in the first place. Many of the smaller institutions simply don’t know what they have.”

Even after the Welsh thefts were discovered no attempt was made to alert the map trade. The library refuses to discuss the thefts, claiming that it can say nothing as proceedings are still “active” even though Bellwood has confessed and been convicted.

None of the missing maps has been recovered.

Bellwood may have been Britain’s most prolific map thief but it is very unlikely he is the only one. According to Mr Barber, the success of the internet auction site eBay has made it easy for thieves to sell on stolen items quickly.

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