ELEVATION - Maphead - page 69

and faced huge losses if they too turned out to be stolen property. Other libraries began to
report missing maps from books that Smiley had handled over a period of years. The Bo-
stonPublicLibrarywasmissingthirty-four;theNewYorkPublicLibrary,hisoldstomping
ground, was missing thirty-two. The total value of the heisted maps was close to $3 milli-
on.Intheend,theFBIcouldlinkSmileytoonlyeighteenthefts;aspartofhispleabargain,
hecoppedtoeightyothersandhelpedauthoritiesrecoverthemapsfromdealerslikeCohen
& Taliaferro, which found itself out $880,000. Smiley explained to prosecutors that he had
stolen because of mounting debts and had chosen institutions that he blamed for some past
slight. Outraged map librarians testified that Smiley was “a thief who had assaulted his-
tory” and argued for an eight-year sentence, but in light of Smiley's cooperation, the judge
sentenced him to only three and a half years in a minimum-security Massachusetts prison.
That seemed plenty harsh to her. “When he leaves prison,” she pointed out, “he will have
no assets, no career in the field he loves. He will be a pariah, he will lose years of liberty,
and years with his young son.” Indeed, in his courtroom appearances, the once oversized
and ebullient Smiley appeared to be a broken man, haggard and hesitant.
Stealing antique maps sounds like such an esoteric niche of felony that it's hard to be-
lieve it's becoming commonplace all over the world. In fiction, a sudden rash of old map
theftswouldmeanonlyonething:acunningnewcriminalgeniusintown.(“Holyhachured
contour, Batman! It's the Cartographer!”) But when real-life map thieves are apprehended,
they'redisappointinglyordinary:desperate,underpaidmisfitsfromtheworldofrarebooks
or academia. In fact, their obvious nonmastermind status explains the recent popularity of
this kind of crime: maps are pilfered because they're so easy to pilfer.
It'sthenatureofthebeast:thewholepurposeofalibraryistomakerarematerials avail-
able to the public. These materials are valueless if nobody can see them. It's hard to spirit
a big bulky book out of a reading room—they get checked in and out carefully—but re-
moving pages is, as Gilbert Bland and Forbes Smiley have demonstrated, heartbreakingly
easy. (Smiley might never have been caught if not for a fluke: he accidentally dropped his
knife.)They'relightandsmall,andtheirabsencemightnotbenoticedforyears.Butwhich
pages to remove? “ If you take a page out of a rare book, you've got a worthless piece of
paper,” says Tony Campbell, a former map librarian at the British Library. “But if you take
a map, youhaven't destroyed its worth. It'slikely to have a fair value, and it'svirtually un-
traceable.” Maps, unlike booksorpaintings, are almost never sold with a provenance; their
history, a cartographer might say, is Terra Incognita. Most often, they bear no identifying
marks at all. (Yale was able to prove ownership of Smiley's maps only by matching up
wormholes with those on adjacent pages.) During the Smiley trial, the defense made much
ofthefactthatmanyoftheinstitutionshetargetedreportedmapsmissingthathehadnever
handled or that later turned up elsewhere in their archives. Libraries, frankly, don't always
know what they have, especially if little larcenies like this have been going on under the
radar for decades, as seems likely.