History tv. 48 hours of programming on American History every weekend on cspan 3. Follow us on twitter at cspan history for information on our schedule, upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. Dealer rare map admitted in federal court to steeling almost one00 rare maps worth almost a Million Dollars. In this event, author Michael Blanding recounts smileys career as a dealer and thief and describes the historical significance of the maps he stole from several libraries and universities. This is about an hour. Thank you all so much for coming here this afternoon. Im particularly pleased to be giving this talk here at the national archives, such a wonderful repozztoir of old books and manuscripts, and in the reporting of this book i became a great lover of archives going to the institutions that smiley ended up taking rare maps out of. I got to see a lot of these old documents like myself and theres nothing like seeing an original document to be able to touch it with your fingers and see with your own eyes, and its really a Wonderful Service that buildings like this provide in providing access to these materials. So im just going to dive right in here with a reading from the beginning of my book. I start with the first sentence of the first chapter, so theres nothing you need to know going in. Then im going to talk a little bit about the strange character of Forbes Smiley who i got to know very well over the past three years then show you some images of the some of the maps he stole, particularly focusing on the virginia and washington, d. C. Area. So let me dive right in here. This is the beginning of my book the map thief. E. Forbes smiley iii couldnt stop coughing. No matter how he tried to suppress it it broke out into a hacking cough drawing glances from the pate trons sitting around him. The glass fish bowl at the library at Yale University was quiet, except for the low mum of the air conditioning and the clicking of fingers on key boards, making smiley painfully aware of the noise he was making. At one point he pulled a hanker chief out of his pocket to uffle the size, and an blade fell onto the floor. He folded the cloth and put it back in his pocket, oblivious to hat had just happened. When people thought of Forbes Smiley, as he was universally known by friends, dealers, lie brarnse and clients, a few words sprang to mind. Gregarious, jolly, larger than life. He spoke with a resonance of an italian tenor mangled by. His voice, was full of money. When he made phone calls he made sure to announce he was calling from the vine yard. His upper crust were tempered by a charming self deppry cation. He ingratiated himself with many librarians by inquiring after her spouse or children and resip crated with entertaining stories of travel around the world or progress of the new home he was building. Most of all people thought of his laugh. For years friends has reveled in smileys laugh which rolled up out of his belly. It was the kind of laugh that in college had earned him free ickets from theater producers. It caused people to excuse the pretension that kept into his voice when he was ex pounding on any of his obsessions, architecture, new england history, the blues, and of course maps. Whether they liked him or not his colleagues and rivals in the map business had all been seduced by his knowledge which in certain areas exceeded that of anyone else in the world. On the morning of june 8, 2005 however, none of the librarians at the desk recognized him. Had they known him, they would have been shocked at the transformation hed under gone. In addition to the cough that had developed overnight, he was suffering from a splitting headache left over from a night of drinking. Smiley had been drinking a lot these days. It was the only thing that took away from problems that multiplied in his mind whenever he was sober. As gifted as he was at remembering maps, he was abysmal when it came to his lyelihood. The truth was he was overextended. As studious as he looked he was feeling a fresh sense of desperation by the the time he went to get lunch around 11 00. Sitting in a coffee shop around the corner he turned his options over in hi mind. He could take the train to new york today and fly to london early before the map fair began. Or he could abandon the whole plan heading back to the vine yard and hoping to find another way out of his financial mess. While he sat pondering his priment without reaching a conclusion, the situation in the reading room had changed. Smiley may have missed the blade that fell from his pocket, but a librarian had not. The librarians make regular sweeps of the room to ensure materials are handled properly and to let them know theyre being watched. She immediately spied the blade on the floor. Few objects could be more disturbing to someone who works in a Building Full of rare books than a tool that can separate he pages from the binding. So that just gives you a bit of if flavor for how i start the book and also a flavor for this character of Forbes Smiley. Who, as i said i got to know very well in all of his contradictions. Even though thats the beginning of my book, it was the end of the story for Forbes Smiley. That day, as the librarians found the knife blade they began googling the patrons and the names of the patrons in the library and discovered that Forbes Smiley was a dealer in rare maps and this of course made them even more nervous, and so they called the police left the and as he library a plains clothe Police Officer was following behind. This is the map i made for the book, i say i made it, i thought i was originally going to make my own maps. I thought i should have some of my own maps, but it only took 10 minutes of drawing to realize that wasnt going to happen. So i hired an illustrator who happened to be from the netherlands which i was very pleased by because the netherlands was where the golden age of map making was, in the 1,500s and 1,600s. But this was a map he drew of the Yale University campus. You can see right up here at the top is the library, and smiley walked down the street past the Sterling Memorial Library, past the tower, all the way to the yale british arts center. It was there that the Police Officer introduesed himself and said he was with the library and asked the smiley had taken anything with him. And smiley even though he was under no obligation to cooperate he decided that he would go back with this officer and they began looking through his things. And first they looked through his brief case and they found a number of rare maps there, but smiley said that he had brought those with him, and they found no evidence to show that that wasnt true. And then as he was standing there, they noticed him sort of fidgetting with his blazer pocket, and something in his blazer, and they asked him to take it out. And when they did, he took out this. This is a map of new england by john smith, it was originally done in 1616 and this is actually yales copy that was done in 1631. And just want to pause for a moment and tell you a little bit about this map and explain what makes it so important and what makes it so valuable. So, we all know of john smith from the virginia colony, down the street from here and his role in founding that, in 1607, but he had sort of a Second Chapter in his life. After he was sort of drummed out of virginia for reasons i wont go into, he started exploring the area that was known as north virginia, with the idea of founding a new colony there. He thought it needed a snappier name so he came up with new england, john smith is the person who coined that term as a way to claim this territory for his home country and tell the other countries this is english territory. And he also wanted to claim this territory for himself and make sure that he got credit for discovering it and that he was going to be involved in building it so he put an enormous portrait of himself in the corner. He was so vain that he actually updated the portrait over the years on different versions of the map. So this is a later version of the map and you can see his than otherch bushier versions and his jacket is more decorated. The thing about this map is you probably cant see it from there, but all up and down the coastline here are names of english towns and cities. London is there, and cambridge, oxford and other places. In 1616 before the pilgrims landed in new england, none of those cities or towns existed. The reason i say there on the map is because after he made the map, he brought it to england and he presented it to Prince Charles and asked him to change the names of all of the native americans settlements to english towns and cities. So it was sort after a breathtaking act of virtual colony zation that occurred. It did succeed in claiming the territory for england. And interestingly most of the towns and cities on the map have since disappeared, or at least theyre not in the places that he put them. One of them has remained, right down in the corner you can see where he wrote plymouth. That was where the pilgrims when they sailed from plymouth with a copy of smiths map in hand on the mayflower they steered to that location and founded their colony there and took the name for the plymouth colony. Its a really important map, and really seminal document in the founding and exploration of north america. Its also a quite rare map. So even though its not a one of a kind, there are only a few dozen copies of this map that exist in various institutions throughout the country and the world. And because of that, its a very valuable map. So at auction, this map could go easily for 50,000 to a map collector. So when smile wri was found with this map that was both rare and valuable, one of the librarians at the time noticed the hand writing at the bottom of the map, and recognized it as belonging to a patron of yale who had donated a lot of rare books and maps to the library so she immediately cried out that use our map and hay put handcuffs on smiley and led him away to spend the night in jail. So the f. B. I. Was called in to investigate this case, and immediately they realized they had a problem. As i mentioned, there may have been only a few dozen copies of this map, but its not so rare that theres only one copy, its not like a work of art in a new sem where theres only one copy of it, if its missing everyone knows that it was stolen. The f. B. I. Came in and said i understand that smiley had a copy of this map, that you are missing a copy of the map. But how do i know the copy that youre missing is the copy that smiley took . And they actually got lucky very early on in the case with another map that smiley had on him that day. A maps this one, this is by one of those dutch map makers from the 1500s and 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 very well in the first place and very few copies survive. Probably worth about 150,000 at auction. And so it wasnt what was on the front of the map that interested investigators, it was what was on the back of this map. You can see that on the back of the map there were these four little worm holes that had been made by these pests, probably hundreds of years ago sitting on the dusty shelf of a library, and the four holes on the map lined up exactly with four holes in the atlas that was in the yale selection that smiley was looking at that day. And so this was as good as a fingerprint to investigators. It was sort of this c. S. I. That they were able to really catch him red handed and say yes, he took this map and yes 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 of theft of a object of Cultural Heritage which carries a hefty sentence. The f. B. I. , now that they knew smiley had stolen at least two maps and probably more the f. B. I. Agent began to further investigate the case. And even though 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 red handed its usually not the first time theyve committed a theft. So he began calling around and sending emails out to other rare book and manuscript libraries around the country. And he asked them two questions. Has Forbes Smiley been in your collection lately and are you missing any rare maps. Six institutions answered yes to both of those questions. At yale, both the sterling and the other were missing maps. The boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, missing from the map division and the rare books division. The library at harvard, British Library in london and the Newberry Library in chicago. So now it became this Treasure Hunt where the investigators had to determine what maps from missing from the libraries, what books smiley looked at, which maps he may have taken and where hose maps may have ended up. The libraries had to go back through hundreds of call slips dating back several years to find which items smiley had looked at. And then compare them to their catalogs for both items and often times as you can imagine with the rare books that are acquired over a hundred years ago they were not catalogged in terms of what maps they contain. So some of them might say map or maps. Some of them may list some maps but not others. Some of them may have said they were a map but were missing it long before smiley got there. So it was really this difficult enterprise that they had to go into figure out. 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, as dade said, heavensly admitted to stealing 97 maps, but the libraries to this day accuse him ing more than he admitted. And ill get to that in a moment and show you some examples of that. The maps that he stole were worth over 3 million in total, so they were the cream of the crop of antique maps, the most expensive and valuable maps that he stole. So all this happened in 20052006, and this was all recorded in the newspapers, it was all pretty well known 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. Ive always been a map lover myself and i was always very intrigued by these rare objects and the fact that people were willing to pay thousands and tens of thousands of dollars for them. It made me curious to know more about why that was the case. But 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 give the fact that he was himself a rare map dealer, and by all accounts loved these maps and celebrated them. What was it that caused him to go to the dark side as it were and start actually taking these maps out of libraries. So that is the test task i set for myself. I was originally going to write an article for boston magazine and update the case, and tell it start to finish. Through a friend of smileys, he actually agreed to talk to me and i sat across the picnic table on marthas vine yard for four hours when he told me that story and by the end i was completely convinced that that was not a magazine article, that this was a book. He was such a complex character, and this world was so interesting. Finally the stories of the map makers were just as interesting as smileys story, if not more so. Im going to share a little bit about what i learned about both smiley and some of these maps that he stole. This is another map i had made for the book of new england, showing some of the key locations. Smiley grew up in this little town called bedford in new hampshire. Despite his name, he actually grew up middle class as the son of an electrical engineer. He didnt come from these vast pools of wealth that 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 air, particularly the history of new england. E went to college in am hurst, massachusetts, and he made history a specialty. History and religion, and he was known for all sorts of eccentric things like reciting the illiad in the middle of campus, or taking a walk and telling them about every church they passed and the history of the architecture of that church. After college he settled in new york and it was there that he entered the map trade. And he started at this Department Store which no longer exists, but had a Small Division that sold rare maps and atlases. It was conveniently located just a dozen blocks from the New York Public Library and thats where his real education in maps began. He became so fascinated by looking at the different maps and comparing them to each other and realizing which map maker had copied from whom and he couldnt get enough of this topic, and just became incredibly knowledgeable in a very short period of time. And originally as he went on his own as the map dealer he was quite successful. The late 1980s was a very good time to become a map dealer because the prices of maps were suddenly just increasing. And you know people, even wealthy people were no longer able to afford a lot of fine art, the prices for that had just become unattainable, so maps became a new way of collecting for folks who were wealthy but not billionaires. Doctors, lawyers, wall street executives, who would buy these rare maps, put them on their walls and have, if not a one of a kind item, a very rare item that was beautiful to look at and also had this historical story behind it. They became very popular and maps that went for a couple of thousand dollars went for tens of thousands of dollars, eventually approaching hundreds of thousands of dollars. Smiley was very successful in riding that wave for quite a while. He put together a collection of maps of the new york and midatlantic region, including washington and virginia for a man by the name of larry slaughter, which was donated to the New York Public Library at the slaughter collection of maps. He also put tog