Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [45]
But competitive advantage isn’t the only reason why antique map dealers are wary of outsiders these days. There’s been a flurry of recent media interest in their quiet little community, but nobody’s covering the standard map-world controversies: whether it’s good form for collectors to add new outline color to uncolored maps, for example, or whether the “Dieppe maps” of 1547 provide evidence that the Portuguese were the first to land in Australia. Instead, the articles have been written by crime beat reporters, because of a recent rash of high-profile map thefts that have rocked the trade to its foundations. Maps have gone missing in libraries from Madrid to Mumbai, but by far the most notorious case is that of E. Forbes Smiley III.
Smiley was one of the world’s most knowledgeable map dealers, but if his name makes him sound instead like a sitcom millionaire, that’s not a coincidence. By all accounts, this scion of a middle-class New Hampshire family carefully cultivated an über-preppy image—“right down to the deck shoes with no socks,” said one dealer—in order to project reliability and taste to his high-roller clients. He had helped build some of the most magnificent collections of colonial American maps ever assembled and sat on the steering committee of the New York Public Library’s Mercator Society. On the morning of June 8, 2005, Smiley was sitting with four valuable map books in the reading room of Yale’s Beinecke Library for rare books and manuscripts when a library employee found an X-Acto knife near him on the floor. A small blade in a university library is a red flag; a best-selling book had recently told the story of Gilbert Bland, the Florida map dealer who’d used a hobby knife to slash valuable maps and prints out of old books in libraries coast to coast. After learning that Smiley had been looking at rare maps and that some maps he’d recently handled at Yale’s Sterling Library had been reported missing, the librarians began videotaping Smiley and had him followed by campus police when he left the building. When detectives stopped him, they discovered that his metal briefcase was full of old maps and that an inside pocket of his tweed blazer contained a John Smith map of New England that, it turned out, had gone missing from the very book he’d been reading.* He was charged with first-degree larceny and led away in handcuffs.
“The Forbes Smiley case did a lot of damage, because he was one of us,” says Paul Cohen. His own gallery had recently bought a large number of high-quality maps from Smiley and faced huge losses if they too turned out to be stolen property. Other libraries began to report missing maps from books that Smiley had handled over a period of years. The Boston Public Library was missing thirty-four; the New York Public Library, his old stomping ground, was missing thirty-two. The total value of the heisted maps was close to $3 million. In the end, the FBI could link Smiley to only eighteen thefts; as part of his plea bargain, he copped to eighty others and helped authorities recover the maps from dealers like Cohen & Taliaferro, which found itself out $880,000. Smiley explained to prosecutors that he had stolen because of mounting debts and had chosen institutions that he blamed for some past slight. Outraged map librarians testified that Smiley was “a thief who had assaulted history” and argued for an eight-year sentence, but in light of Smiley’s cooperation, the judge sentenced him to only three and a half years in a minimum-security