Excerpt from The Map Thief

The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps
Michael Blanding
Gotham Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website (excerpt below):

Maps have long exerted a special fascination on viewers—both as beautiful works of art and as practical tools to navigate the world. But to those who collect them, the map trade can be a cutthroat business, inhabited by quirky and sometimes disreputable characters in search of a finite number of extremely rare objects.

Once considered a respectable antiquarian map dealer, E. Forbes Smiley spent years doubling as a map thief —until he was finally arrested slipping maps out of books in the Yale University library. The Map Thief delves into the untold history of this fascinating high-stakes criminal and the inside story of the industry that consumed him.

Acclaimed reporter Michael Blanding has interviewed all the key players in this stranger-than-fiction story, and shares the fascinating histories of maps that charted the New World, and how they went from being practical instruments to quirky heirlooms to highly coveted objects. Though pieces of the map theft story have been written before, Blanding is the first reporter to explore the story in full—and had the rare privilege of having access to Smiley himself after he’d gone silent in the wake of his crimes. Moreover, although Smiley swears he has admitted to all of the maps he stole, libraries claim he stole hundreds more—and offer intriguing clues to prove it. Now, through a series of exclusive interviews with Smiley and other key individuals, Blanding teases out an astonishing tale of destruction and redemption.

The Map Thief interweaves Smiley’s escapades with the stories of the explorers and mapmakers he knew better than anyone. Tracking a series of thefts as brazen as the art heists in Provenance and a subculture as obsessive as the oenophiles in The Billionaire’s Vinegar, Blanding has pieced together an unforgettable story of high-stakes crime.

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Excerpt from The Map Thief:

From Chapter 1: The Explorer and the Thief 

When  people  thought  of Forbes Smiley—as he was universally known by friends, dealers, librarians, and clients—a few words inevitably sprang to mind: gregarious; jolly; larger-than-life. He spoke with the resonance of an Italian tenor mangled by a nasally Waspish affectation. His voice, like Daisy Buchanan's, was "full of money." When he made phone calls, he made sure to announce that he was calling "from the Vineyard." His upper-crust affectations, however, were tempered by a charming self-deprecation. He'd ingratiated himself with many a librarian by inquiring after her spouse or children, and reciprocated with entertaining stories of travels around the world or the progress of the new home he was building on the Vineyard. 

Most of all, people thought of his laugh. For years, friends had reveled in Smiley's laugh, which rolled up out of his belly and wracked his body in a cackle that only increased in volume the longer it went on. It was the kind of laugh that in college had earned him free tickets from theater producers, who sat him in the front row to egg on the audience. And it generally caused people to excuse the pretension that crept 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 Beinecke's public services desk recognized him. Had they known him, they would have been shocked at the transformation he'd 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 his thoughts away from the problems that multiplied in his mind whenever he was sober. As gifted as he was at remembering details about maps, he was abysmal at managing the details of the business through which he earned his livelihood. No matter how entertaining his stories, the truth was that he was overextended and hemorrhaging money.  

The stress had taken a physical toll, leading to a constant pain in his back for the past two years. This morning, it was particularly awful. Each time a cough wracked his body, fresh bullets of pain rocketed up his spine. Smiley made two phone calls that morning: one to his wife and one to a client; neither ended well. His spirits were already sinking as he headed across town to Yale's campus. If anyone had stopped to wonder, they might have thought he looked strange in a tweedy olive blazer on this warm summer day. Then again, Yale was full of eccentric professors who might be found doing just that. Probably no one gave him a second glance as he crossed the Beinecke's broad plaza to enter the building. 

THE BEINECKE LIBRARY'S modern architecture is an anomaly among Yale's predominantly Gothic-style buildings. A heavy granite lattice creates a series of squares on its façade, each framing a thin, octagonal sheet of translucent white marble. On a sunny day, the sun bathes the interior mezzanine in a soft, church-like light. Inside, the library resembles nothing so much as a giant literary aquarium, with a rectangular tank of steel and glass stacked with five stories of weathered bindings-a literal tower of knowledge. Completed in the 1960s, the Beinecke remains one of the largest libraries in the world devoted exclusively to rare books. Nearly two hundred thousand volumes fill its tower, with space for a half million more in its subterranean stacks. 

Smiley entered at the mezzanine and headed downstairs, where a much smaller aquarium tank houses the library's reading room. On his way, he passed by one of the jewels of the Beinecke's collection: a six-foot­ long framed world map by Henricus Martellus dating from 1489. As Smiley—and few other visitors—knew, the one-of-a-kind map is the closest representation we have to Europeans' worldview on the eve of Christopher Columbus's first voyage. Smiley stopped at the public services desk to request the books and atlases he'd come to see, then headed into the reading room, where he sat at a window table looking out on a sunken courtyard of white marble sculptures. For a while he worked, leaning over books hundreds of years old, carefully taking notes in pencil.  

As studious as he looked, he was feeling a fresh sense of desperation by the time he left to get lunch around eleven. Sitting in a coffee shop around the corner, he turned his options over in his mind. He could take the train to New York today and fly to London a day early in hopes of putting together a deal before the map fair began. Or he could abandon the whole plan and head back to the Vineyard, saving the expense and hoping to find another way out of his financial mess. 

While he sat pondering his predicament without reaching a conclusion, the situation in the reading room had changed radically in his absence. Smiley may have missed the X-Acto knife blade that fell from his pocket, but a librarian named Naomi Saito had not. The Beinecke's librarians make regular sweeps of the room to ensure that materials are handled properly—and to subtly alert patrons they are being watched. As Saito had entered to make her check, 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 the pages of a book from its binding. Saito picked up the blade in a tissue and walked back out of the room. 

From THE MAP THIEF: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps by Michael Blanding. Published by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), LLC. Copyright (c) 2014 by Blanding Enterprises, LLC.