ELEVATION - Maphead - page 68

changed—I can see the barracks, the bowling alley, the chapel where I played in my sixth-
grade piano recital, the tennis court where my Boy Scout troop sold Christmas trees. But
if I bring up the same coordinates on Naver, by far the most popular South Korean search
engine, my childhood has been erased. The contours of the military garrison have been
carefully filled with imagery of forested mountainside, no doubt for government-imposed
security reasons. There's now a trackless 620-acre wilderness sitting incongruously in the
middleofoneoftheworld'smostdenselypopulatedcities, * alieaswhoppinglytransparent
as any Soviet-era skewing of railroad lines.
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 com-
munity, 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 re-
centrashofhigh-profilemaptheftsthathaverockedthetradetoitsfoundations.Mapshave
gonemissinginlibrariesfromMadridtoMumbai,butbyfarthemostnotoriouscaseisthat
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 im-
age—“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 magni-
ficent collections of colonial American maps ever assembled and sat on the steering com-
mitteeoftheNewYorkPublicLibrary'sMercatorSociety.OnthemorningofJune8,2005,
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 video-
taping 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
thataninsidepocketofhistweedblazercontained aJohnSmithmapofNewEnglandthat,
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 Co-
hen.Hisowngalleryhadrecentlyboughtalargenumberofhigh-qualitymapsfromSmiley