Thank you for coming. I am pleased to be here at the national archives. I became a great lover of archives by going to institutions smiley ended up taking rare maps out of. I got to see a lot of the old documents myself. There is nothing like being able to see an original document and touch it and see it with your own eyes. It is a Wonderful Service buildings like this provide in providing access to these materials. Im going to dive in with a reading from the beginning of my book. With the first sentence in the first chapter so there is nothing you need to know going in. The im going to talk about same character i got to know well over the past three years and show you images of some of the maps he still, particularly focusing on the virginia and washington, d. C. Area. Let me dive right in. This is the beginning of my book, the map thief. No matter how much you try to suppress it, the tickle cap freaking out into a cough kept breaking out into a cough. The Manuscript Library at Yale University was quiet except for the low hum of the air conditioning and the click of fingers on keyboards making smiley painfully aware of the noise he was making. At one point, he pulled a handkerchief from out of his pocket. As he did and xacto knife blade dropped on the carpeted floor. He folded the cloth and put it back in his pocket oblivious to what happened. Studying rare atlases in preparation for the annual gathering of map collectors who came to buy, sell, and trade antiquarian maps. A few words inevitably spring to mind about smiley. Gregarious, larger than life. He spoke with the residents of an italian tenor mangled by a neighborly affectation. His voice was full of money. When he made phone calls, he made sure to announce he was calling from the vineyard. His upperclass [indiscernible] he ingratiated himself with librarians by inquiring about family and updated them on the new home he was built on Marthas Vineyard. Most of all, people thought of his laugh. His smile world up out of his belly with a cackle that only increased in volume the longer it went on. Theater producers sat him in the front row to egg on the audience. Caused people to excuse the pretension in his voice when expounding on his obsessions. Architecture, new england history, the blues, and of course, maps. Whether they liked them or not, his colleagues and rivals have been seduced by his knowledge which in certain areas exceeded that of anyone else in the world. On the morning of june 8, two thousand five, however, none of the librarians at the service desk recognized him. Had they known him, they would have been shocked at the transformation he had undergone. In addition to the cough that developed overnight, he was suffering from a splitting headache left over from a night of drinking. Smiley have been drinking a lot these days. It was the only thing that took his thoughts away from problems that multiplied in his mind when he was sober. Managing theod at details of the business. He was overextended and hemorrhaging money. He was feeling a fresh sense of desperation by the time he left to get lunch around 11 00. Sitting in a coffee shop around the corner, he turned his options around in his mind. He could take the train to new york and fly to london or he could abandon the plan heading back to the vineyard sparing the expense and hoping to find another way out of this mess. While pondering his predicament, the situation in the reading room changed in his absence. He might have missed the blade fell from his pocket, but a library and had not. They make regular sweeps of the room to make sure materials are handled properly and alert patrons they are being watched. She immediately spied the blade on the floor. Onele is more alarming to who works with rare books. She picked up the blade in a tissue and walked back out of the room. That gives you a flavor for how i start the book and this character of Forbes Smiley, who i got to know well in all of his contradictions. Even though that is the beginning of my book, it was the end of the story for Forbes Smiley. Librarian found the xacto knife blade, they began googling the names of patrons in the library and discovered Forbes Smiley was a dealer in rare maps. This made them even more nervous, so they called the police department. As smiley left a library, a plainclothes policeman was following was behind. This is a map i made for the book. I say i made it. I thought i would make my own map for the book. I thought if i was going to write a book about maps, i should have some of my own in it. It only took me about 10 minutes of drawing to realize that would not happen. I hired an illustrator from the netherlands, which i was pleased by, because the netherlands is where the golden age of map making was in the 1500s and 1600s. This is a map teacher of the Yale University campus. The top is the library. Smiley walked down the street past the tower all the way to the art center. It was there that the Police Officer introduced himself and said he was with the library and asked if smiley had inadvertently taken anything with him. Even though he was under no obligation to cooperate, decided he would go back with the officer and they began looking through his things. First, they looked through his briefcase and found a number of rare maps which smiley said he had brought with him. They found no evidence to show that was not true. There, theyanding noticed him fidgeting with his blazer pocket and something in his blazer. They asked him to take it out. When he did, he took out this. This is a map of new england by john smith. It was originally done in 1616. This is a yale copy done in 1631. I want to pause for a moment and tell you a bit about this map and explain what makes it so important and value both. Valuable. We all know john smith from the and the founding of that in 1607. But he had a Second Chapter in his life after he was drummed out of virginia for reasons i will not go into. He started exploring the area then known as north virginia with the idea of founding a new colony. He thought it needed a snappier name so he came up with the name new england. John smith was the person who coined that term as a way to claim this territory for his home country and tell the other countries this is a new territory. He also wanted to claim this territory for himself and make sure he got credit for discovering it and would be involved in the colonization. He put an enormous portrait of himself in the corner. He was so vain he updated the portrait over the years on different versions of the map. This is a later version. You can see his beard is much than earlier versions and his jacket is more elaborately decorated. All up and down the coastline here are names of english towns and cities. London, cambridge, oxford, and other places. In 1616 before the pilgrims landed in new england, none of the cities or towns existed. The reason they are on the map is because after he made the map, he brought it to england and presented it to Prince Charles and asked him to change the names of all of the native american settlements to english towns and cities. Act ofthis breathtaking virtual colonization that occurred before a single english settler could set foot on the territory. He did succeed claiming the territory for england. Interestingly, most towns and cities on the map have disappeared or are not in the places he put them. In the corner, you can see where he wrote plymouth. Whenwas where the pilgrims they sailed with a copy of his map steered to that location and founded their colony there and took the name for the plymouth colony. This is a really important map. In the seminal document founding and exploration of north america. It is also a quite rare map. Even though it is not a oneofakind, there are only a few dozen copies of this map that exist in various institutions in the world. Because of that, it is a very valuable map. At auction, this map could easily go for 50,000 to a collector. When smiley was found with this map that was rare and valuable, one of the librarians noticed the handwriting at the bottom of as belonging to a patron of yale who had donated a lot of rare maps and books to the library. She immediately cried out, that is our map. They put handcuffs on smiley and let him away to spend the night in jail. The fbi was called in to investigate this case. Immediately, they realized they had a problem. As i mentioned, there may have been only a few dozen copies of this map. But it is not so rare there is only one copy. It is not like a work of art in a museum where there is only one copy and if it is missing everyone knows it was stolen. The fbi agent came in and said i understand smiley had a copy of this map, that you are missing a copy, but how do i know the copy you are missing is the copy smiley took . I actually got lucky early on in the case they actually got lucky early on in the case with another map smiley had on him that day. It was this when. This is a map by one of the dutch mapmakers i was talking about from the 1500s. This is the world map from his atlas, which is even more rare than the smith map. It was only produced in the First Edition of the atlas which never sold well. Very few copies of the map survived. Probably worth at least 150,000 at auction. It was not what was on the front of the map that interested investigators. It was what was on the back of the map. You can see on the back there were four little wormholes made by parasitic pests, probably hundreds of years ago as it was sitting on the dusty shelf of a library. Linedur holes on the map up exactly with four holes in the atlas that was in yields collection smiley was looking at yales smiley was looking at that date. They were able to catch him redhanded and say yes, he took this map and it came from this volume belonging to yale. Because it was an object worth over 100,000, they could charge him with a federal crime which carries a hefty federal sentence. Agents knew he had stolen at least two maps and probably more. The fbi agents began to further investigate the case. You know he knew nothing about rare maps when he started working on the case, he did know a lot about thieves and he knew when a thief is caught redhanded, it is usually not the first time they have committed a theft. Calling around and sending emails out to other rare book and Manuscript Librarys around the country. Them two questions. Has Forbes Smiley been in your collection lately and are you missing any maps . These two universities answered yes. Both were missing maps. The new york library was missing maps from two divisions. The library at harvard and the British Library in london and the Newberry Library in chicago. Now it became this sort of Treasure Hunt where investigators had to determine what maps were missing from the librarys, what books smiley look at, which maps he might have taken and where those might have ended up it became quite an ordeal. Backibraries had to go through hundreds of call slips dating back several years to find out which items smiley had looked at and compare them to their catalog for those items. As you can imagine with these rare books acquired over 100 years ago, they were not adequately catalog in terms of what maps they contained. Some might just say map or maps. Some may list some but not others. Some may have been missing them long before smiley got there. It was a difficult enterprise they had to go into to figure out [indiscernible] lucky for them, he did come forward when he heard there were federal charges pending against him. Smiley did come forward and he offered to cooperate could he eventually admitted stealing 97 maps. But the libraries to this day accuse him of stealing more than he admitted to. The maps he stole were worth over 3 million in total. They were the creme de la creme of antique maps, the most value and expensive he stole. 20052006. Ppened in this had been reported in the newspapers. It was pretty wellknown by the time i started on this trail in 2011. I remember reading about this case in the new yorker and other places when it happened. I am a map lover myself and have always been intrigued by these rare objects and the fact people were willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for them. It made me curious to know more about why that was the case. I also wanted to know more about smiley. He had never talked to the press before. He had never given an interview. He never explained why he started taking these maps, especially given the fact he was himself a rare map dealer and loved these maps and celebrated them. What caused him to go to the dark side and start taking these maps out of libraries . That is the task i set for myself. Originally, i was going to write an article for boston magazine and update the case and tell it start to finish. Through a friend of smileys, he agreed to talk to me. I sat across a picnic table on Marthas Vineyard for four hours, and he told me the story. I was completely convinced this was not a magazine article. This was a book. He was such a complex character and that dealers were so interesting. The stories of the mapmakers were just as interesting as smiley story if not more so. I want to share about what i learned about smiley and some of these maps he stole. This is another map i had made for the book of new england showing key locations in the story. Smiley grew up in a little town in New Hampshire called bedford. Hepite his highfalutin name, grew up middleclass as the son of an electrical engineer. He did not come from the vast pools of well you might imagine. He was always fascinated with history. Even as a young boy, he would read about history and study the history of the area, particularly the history of new england. He went to Hampshire College in amherst, massachusetts. He made history his specialty, history and religion. He was known for all sorts of eccentric things like reciting the iliad in the middle of campus are telling his friends the history of every church they passed. After college, he settled in new york. It was there he entered the map trade. He started at this Department Store which no longer exists, but had a Small Division that sold rare maps analysis. It was located just a dozen blocks from the New York Public Library. That is where his real education in maps began. He became so fascinated looking at the different maps and comparing them and realizing which mapmaker had copied from that he could not get enough of this topic and became incredibly knowledgeable in a short time. Own as at out on his dealer, he was quite successful. The late 1980s was a very good time to become a map dealer because the prices were increasing exponentially. Even wealthy people were no longer able to afford a lot of fine art. The prices had become unattainable. Maps became a new way of collecting for folks who were wealthy but not billionaires. Wall streetyers, types who would buy these rare maps, put them on their walls and have a rare item that was beautiful to look at and had this historical story behind it. They became very popular. Maps that went for a couple of thousand dollars went for tens of thousand dollars, eventually approaching hundreds of thousands of dollars. Successful for quite a while. He put together a collection of maps of new york and the midatlantic region including washington and virginia for a man by the name of larry slaughter which was donated to the New York Public Library as the slaughter collection of maps. He also put together a collection of maps of boston and new england for a developer named norman leventhal. That was contributed to the boston Public Library as the leventhal collection of maps. ,oth ironic given later events that he was taking maps out of the libraries he was putting them into. Smiley, even though he was very successful putting together these collections and in selling maps for quite a while, he also had several flaws that were his undoing. One was he was a terrible business person. From the beginning, he was always chasing maps he could not afford and buying one to pay for another one. He became notorious for bouncing checks to fellow dealers. Some of them stopped doing business with him and hurt his client base. As maps became more valuable in the 1980s, there was more competition than ensued. A number of new dealers came in and looked at it as a business. We may think about dealing and collecting as a rarefied pursuit of people studying and libraries, but it is quite a business, and in some ways a cutthroat business of people bidding against each other at auctions for a small number of rare and valuable items. A number of these map dealers did not like smiley very much, either because he bounced checks to them or they thought he was all, so and a know it they would bid against him and sometimes drive the price up on him. Sometimes they would band together against him. Smiley was never a team player. He always had this sort of secretive, go it alone attitude, that he was going to make it on his own and did not need anyone elses help. That contributed to his financial problems because it was necessary sometimes for different dealers to band together bidding on certain items they would split up, so he became even less able to compete because of that. Me, helly, as he told was too proud to admit he had failed in this pursuit. He told me he was looking at a map at the Sterling Memorial Library on the table in front of him realizing he could fold it down to the size of a credit card, walk out with it in his pocket, and sell at the next day for 30,000. That was the moment temptation got the better of him. He sold the first map and told himself it was a onetime thing he would do to get out of financial duress. But of course, that started a slippery slope and he began stealing more maps and selling them for more money and became the map thief that i write about in my book. Im going to talk about a few of the maps he stole to give you an idea of the kind of items he valuablewhy they are and what he did with someone he took them. Johnis another map by smith, a map he made a few years before the map of new england. It is a map of the virginia colony. It is striking because john smith had written entry surveying materials rudimentary survey materials. He went up and down the river and had a sextant he would use on different landmarks. From that, he was ab