![]() ![]() Unlike Bland, who was an interloper whose catalogues suddenly filled up with suspiciously good items, Smiley was very much an insider in the world of map collecting. As stolen goods, antique maps are a curiosity: like art, but more stealable, because there are few copies, not just one. Map thieves fascinate us, even if they themselves are not that fascinating (see, for example, the essential blandness of Gilbert Bland, the subject of a previous book about map thefts, Miles Harvey's Island of Lost Maps), because of what they steal. Its publication, coming nine years after Smiley's arrest and four years after his release from prison, is something of an anticlimax, especially for those of us who followed the case so closely as it unfolded (I blogged about it more than 60 times, myself). With The Map Thief, Michael Blanding presents a book-length exploration of the Forbes Smiley affair, which stunned map collectors and map libraries alike in 2005. ![]() The libraries believed he stole many more. ![]() Smiley, who cooperated with the authorities, would eventually be sentenced to 3½ years for stealing nearly 100 maps from the British, Boston Public, New York Public, Harvard and Yale libraries, among others. Libraries he had frequented scrambled to check their own holdings and found additional maps missing. ![]() Then in 2005 he was caught - on videotape - stealing maps from Yale University's Beinecke Library. Forbes Smiley III was a well-known and well-connected map dealer, an expert who helped build the Slaughter and Leventhal map collections. ![]()
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