Michael BlandingRezensionen

I always pore over maps in books, I can't pass a globe without checking certain borders, I really enjoy anything that explores boundaries and liminal environments. So I found this an interesting topic, or at least I felt a bit of outrage any time someone razored a map out of a book. Still, I'm not sure I'd want to close-read this book. Great for listening to with less than full attention while I did other tasks.

This book scratched a very specific and nerdy itch for me. It had everything: intrigue, map history, map theft history, a GIS librarian, name-checking places I’ve worked, and above all else, the heroics of cataloging.

Interesting from a historical perspective. The theft and capture was kind of a snoozefest.

What is it about old maps? Perhaps because of what is not presented, as much as what is, they draw us in and beguile us. They offer us a snapshot of the world before photography--a piece of history intimately connected to a specific time and place, with an unstated undercurrent of politics, religion, entrepreneurship, and exploration. These unique pieces of art offer us an interpretation of the known world that, in their time, demanded to be improved upon by succeeding cartographers and discoverers.

There is a tight knit global community of wealthy map dealers and collectors that hunt for and prize the world's rarest maps, some going back 500 years. This book is the story of one northeastern American man, E. Forbes Smiley III, who became so enamored with his role in the world of rare map collecting that he began living beyond his means, and one day made the decision that in order to pay his mounting debts, he would begin stealing the very maps he spent a lifetime buying and selling. Starting with the Boston Public Library, he lifted rare maps from the most prestigious libraries and collections in the world. Then in the early 2000s he got caught. This is his story.

Through Smiley's rise and fall, Michael Blanding presents us with a fascinating look into the often dark world of rare map collecting. For mapheads, as Ken Jennings calls them, this book is a must read. The story unfolds like good fiction. If you care even a little about places and how they were discovered and interpreted, you will love reading this book. I did.

North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar's Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard's Work by Michael Blanding is a very highly recommended, and apparently controversial, examination of who may have inspired Shakespeare in the writing of his plays.

This is a very interesting investigation that summarizes Dennis McCarthy's close scrutiny of the works of William Shakespeare compared to the life and works of Sir Thomas North. "McCarthy’s contention, that Shakespeare borrowed his material from Thomas North - a gentleman and scholar who moved in the uppermost levels of Queen Elizabeth’s court - provides an intriguing and wholly original solution, in which the playwright could have legitimately put his own name on his rewritten plays, at the same time borrowing their essence from someone who fit all of the requirements for writing them. In addition to being a translator, North was a lawyer, soldier, diplomat, and courtier - a sixteenth-century Zelig who participated in some of the most crucial events of the age, and brushed shoulders with the brightest minds of the Renaissance."

Dennis McCarthy is a self-taught Shakespeare researcher who has relentlessly worked on his theory and looked into the true origins of Shakespeare’s works for fifteen years. He uses plagiarism software and has found links between the plays and North's published and unpublished writings. At the end of the narrative in Appendix B, Blanding includes a section showing examples of McCarthy’s "techniques for using plagiarism software to explore parallel passages between Thomas North’s prose translations and William Shakespeare’s plays."

North by Shakespeare is a summary, but it is also a dense book and not a leisurely read. To cover the theory McCarthy sets forth, Blanding tackles topics that could fill several volumes, but manages to succinctly organize and integrate Shakespearean literary criticism, Elizabethan history, a modern-day travelogue, and McCarthy's research into a fascinating and compelling presentation of the theory that Shakespeare based his plays on the work and life of Sir Thomas North. Included is Appendix A, which " includes Dennis McCarthy’s estimated chronology of Thomas North’s plays versus the conventional chronology proposed by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust," Appendix B, the example of using plagiarism software, a bibliography, and notes.

I found this whole theory and the presentation of it engrossing and was irresistibly pulled into the intriguing investigation McCarthy sets forth. I am not a Shakespearean scholar and, although I know about several of them, I haven't closely followed any of the various conspiracy theories over the years about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. They will always be by Shakespeare, even if he was inspired by or freely rewrote the work of someone else. At this point it is an interesting historical exploration of how he came to write so knowledgeably about places and experiences he would not have had access to or experience with in his life.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Hachette Books in exchange for my honest opinion.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2021/03/north-by-shakespeare.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3911685865

Michael Blanding's The Map Thief is both an education on maps and mapmaking and the true story of E. Forbes Smiley, a map expert and dealer in rare maps who stole at least 100 rare maps from libraries and museums.

Blanding had Smiley's cooperation when he began researching this book, then lost it. His research on the rare books and antique map world did include many others who were victims or beneficiaries of their relationship with Smiley. As he builds the story of Smiley's life and career, Blanding dives deep into the history of some of the individual maps that Smiley dealt with, educating us along the way.

This is a short book that I found to be an interesting read but it wasn't completely satisfying. Perhaps because really understanding what happened depends so much on Smiley's willingness and ability to tell (he was an admitted inveterate liar who found it hard to stick to the truth), there are gaps and unknowns in the telling:

* Smiley compiled a list of 97 maps he stole at the time he went to trial in 2006, claiming he wanted to make amends for what he had done, but it soon became clear that the total number was more than that. No one knows for sure how many maps he actually stole.

* Nor does anyone know for sure when he began stealing maps. When originally apprehended he said 1998, then at trial he maintained he began in 2002. He dealt in rare maps for several years before 1998, so who really knows?

* In Smiley's telling, his rare map gallery was burgled in 1989 and, he says he lost a quarter of a million dollars. Not having insurance, this was the beginning of his financial troubles that were well known among his fellow rare map dealers. But the author reports there are no newspaper reports of the burglary, nor could the NYPD, FBI or Interpol produce any records of having investigated. So was the burglary story perhaps Smiley's way of hinting that his map thefts began much earlier than he was actually willing to admit?

Despite the gaps, I rate this book 3 Stars ⭐⭐⭐ - I wasn't completely satisfied with this book but I liked it well enough. If you have in interest in true crime / art theft stories, you might like it too.

I've had this on my shelf forever, and I don't even remember why it caught my eye. But I'm glad I did, because it is a very readable story of a map dealer in our own recent history subverted by his own grandiosity and greed, ultimately ruining his career and damaging the collections of many libraries, both prestigious and obscure.

E. Forbes Smiley III is from a middle class family, despite the very upper-class sounding name, and finds himself working in the rare books division of B. Altman & Co. on 5th Avenue in New York, displaying a rare affinity for collectible maps. From there he pursues a career as a map dealer, helping others develop premier private map collections and becoming a true expert on early maps. But somewhere along the way, his various ambitions steer him off the rails, and he spends years stealing maps to sell to clients and other dealers to keep up with his own spending.

Blanding's book is a biography, a case study of antiquarian knowledge and art crime, a catalog of institutional carelessness, and an education on the history of maps and the exploration of the Americas from the 16th century onward. Recommended.

I'd NEVER have imagined that there was so much money in old maps (not the treasure they point to, mind you, just the maps.) Odd little history about a real map thief.

About E Forbes Smiley III

Blanding's audiobook portrays E. Forbes Smiley III, a rare maps dealer as someone that became obsessed with an image. When the dealer's sales did not finance his lifestyle he turned to theft. Smiley's thefts exposed the vulnerability of libraries and archives and the lack of concern among dealers and buyers for the provenance of rare maps.

Interesting to learn about the old maps (and a bit about the history of the new Leventhal map center at the Boston Public Library), but not so interesting to learn about the thief or his crimes.

A pretty good book with a nice story, a quick and easy read. E. Forbes Smiley was a New England boy who, mostly by chance, became a rare map dealer in the 1980s. He moved in high circles, often selling items for tens of thousands of dollars apiece. But he was not a good manager of money. Often in debt and over-extended, by the 1990s he turned to theft to keep up his stock. He started stealing maps, becoming quite adept, it seems, in removing printed maps from rare books. He took maps from libraries and universities in America and Britain, focusing on the seminal maps of the great age of discovery (from the 1500s through the 1700s).

Smiley is an accomplished liar, as any good conman should be. It is quite proved that he stole more maps than he admitted to in his plea agreement. It is pretty much proved that he sliced paper to remove maps when he needed (a dropped razor knife led to his downfall). He probably started stealing before the year he admitted. (Graham Arader thinks that Smiley was stealing for most of his career.) Smiley (much more than Gilbert Bland) was a swift kick in the pants for libraries, universities, and special collections, goading them into instituting more stringent security procedures. (Which, as a researcher is annoying... but I understand it. Like when I have to fly an airplane.) Blanding notes that, unlike paintings, which only come in editions of one, numerous printings of maps were made, so when you steal one and sell it to somebody, it's harder to prove if it was stolen or legitimate.

Blanding is a decent writer, though he makes a few minor mistakes in his history of maps, cartographers, and exploration, but he can be forgiven. The story is interesting, especially if you like old maps and true crime.

'A remarkable man, an ordinary man, a horrible criminal, a great history of Western and Northeastern cartography, a well-researched, entertaining book.½

While it was written in a fast pace, it wss more a documentation than a crime story and the ending was a bit sudden

The Daily Beast
Charting a Crime
The Million-Dollar Map Thief
Nick Romeo
07.30.14

An X-Acto knife slips out of the pocket of a man studying an old book in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. He doesn’t notice it has fallen, but a librarian spots it on the floor. A discreet blade, perfect for detaching old paper from a fragile binding, is the last thing that a librarian in a rare books department wants to see.

When the man starts fidgeting with something in the pocket of his blazer, the librarian’s suspicions grow. Her supervisor calls the campus police. A detective trails the man for a few minutes after he leaves the Beinecke before stopping him and asking if he wouldn’t mind returning to the library. The man agrees. Back at the library, he pulls from his pocket a stolen map worth between $50,000 and $100,000.

The man was E. Forbes Smiley III, and the map was from John Smith’s 1616 book A Description of New England. Smith coined the name New England, and the map in Smiley’s pocket was considered the first reasonably precise representation of the Massachusetts and Maine coastlines. Given how infrequently new copies of the map appeared on the market, collectors would bid handsomely for the artifact.

The story of Smiley’s theft and apprehension at Yale opens Michael Blanding’s The Map Thief: the Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps. The book cuts between the story of Smiley’s career—both criminal and otherwise—and the history of the maps he bought, sold, and stole. The result is utterly fascinating: part history of cartography, part portrait of the subculture of map dealers, and part anatomy of a criminal betrayal.

Many early maps are not appreciated for the same reason they were created. The persistent depiction by 17th-century cartographers of California as an island charms collectors precisely because of the inaccuracy its authors were striving to avoid. Precision was usually valued by the creators of maps now prized for their seemingly fanciful flaws.

Maps that were inaccurate by absolute standards could still confer a relative advantage over the competition, which helps explain why some rulers guarded their maps so jealously. The Roman emperor Augustus stored his maps in a locked and protected palace chamber; during the Renaissance, kings of Portugal made the act of copying the country’s charts punishable by death. One wonders how they would have dealt with Smiley.

Jostling for advantage in far-flung colonies, European rulers tended to reward cartographers who drew borders and named landmarks in ways that flattered colonial ambitions. A French map from 1718 that claimed most of North America as “La Louisiane” was more an attempt to create reality than to depict it. The titles of two competing 16th-century world maps nicely capture the tension between reflection and invention. One is entitled “Mirror of the World,” the other is “Theater of the World.” To see where modern preferences lie, just imagine Google Maps rebranding itself as Theater of the World Maps. Of course beauty and utility were not mutually exclusive; exquisite paintings sometimes embroidered maps that reflected the most exact contemporary knowledge of geography.

One of the things that makes Smiley’s story both painful and intriguing is his seemingly sincere love of history and old maps. He worked closely for years with many of the curators and librarians he eventually robbed. It’s hard to credit all the time he spent accumulating knowledge about the history of cartography just to the desire to ingratiate himself with a community so that he could steal from it.

But the world of antiquarian maps presented powerful temptations. Even at wealthy libraries, security in rare books and map collections is often underfunded. The New York City Public Library’s collection houses 350,000 individual maps; Yale owns roughly 250,000. Given these numbers, it’s hard to notice a single missing map. It’s often equally difficult to establish whether a missing map that exists in multiple copies matches a particular map in the possession of a private collector.

Smiley eventually admitted to stealing 97 maps from different collections at Yale, Harvard, New York City, Boston Public Library, and many others. Authorities valued the total set of stolen maps at $3 million. The total number of maps reported missing by the affected institutions, however, was a staggering 256. The disparity has left some dealers convinced that maps Smiley stole now hang on the walls of private collectors around the world.

If Smiley were the cartographer of his own past, he’d definitely belong to the school of mapmakers that depicted a fabricated rather than an actual terrain. Early cartographers presumably didn’t know that California was not an island or that sea monsters did not lurk at the edges of the known world. Smiley, by contrast, knew exactly what mistakes he was making as he committed and concealed them. But with people as with maps, those that present the fantastical as real often make the most interesting subjects.

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By Michael Washburn
The Boston Globe
June 07, 2014

Extravagant crimes don’t always require extravagant tools. With only his tweed blazer, a bit of trust, and an X-Acto blade, E. Forbes Smiley transformed himself from one of the world’s most successful rare- map dealers into one of the world’s most notorious map thieves.

It was easy. After spending decades working alongside librarians at such institutions as Harvard, the Boston Public Library, and Yale, Smiley needed only to request a folder of rare maps or an atlas. His heists were subtle — a moment unobserved and the near silence of a blade through paper. Smiley removed the map, folded it to the size of a credit card, and then walked out the door with hundreds of years of history in his tweed pocket.

Simple and effective, Smiley filched more than $3 million worth of maps during his spree.

“The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps” is journalist Michael Blanding’s chronicle of Smiley’s transformation from legitimate hustler to opportunistic crook. “The Map Thief” presents as true crime, and it is, but Blanding goes far beyond Smiley’s misdeeds.

The book offers a brisk, engaging introduction to the slippery world of rare maps and map stewardship. The book also delivers glimpses into the history of American political and ideological formation — Colonial-era maps, which Smiley specialized in, were as much as anything projections of imperial optimism and aggression, and the “The Map Thief” abounds with mini-histories told through specific maps.

Smiley, a “gregarious, jolly, larger-than-life,” self-taught expert on the maps of early America, spent decades building his career and reputation. As Blanding writes, “The map community is a small one, with maybe a few dozen serious dealers in the United States and fewer than a hundred worldwide.”

By the late 1980s Smiley, a New Hampshire native and Hampshire College graduate, was a well-known presence in that handshake world. His reputation wasn’t sterling — Smiley often overextended himself, bouncing checks for acquisitions — but he was a legitimate dealer to several important collectors.

Serious money troubles beset Smiley in the 1990s when map dealing became more competitive (rare things hanging on living room walls bestow prestige, but there’s only so much art to go around).

Smiley was also financially hobbled by his pet project. He’d invested tremendous capital in a single-handed attempt to resurrect a small, central Maine town called Sebec, buying and operating a post office as well as shops and restaurants. As Smiley struggled in business, he had to maintain payroll and operating fees for a town, as well as fending off legal challenges to his plans for Sebec.

After his 2005 arrest Smiley admitted to stealing 97 maps, but the true number will likely never be known. The libraries Smiley stole from claim that nearly 250 maps are missing. After helping the FBI recover some of them, Smiley served three years in prison. Today he’s working as a landscaper and deeply in debt.

“The Map Thief” adopts the structure of a crime book, but the book doesn’t push you toward the edge of your seat. The most gripping episode in the book comes early, with Smiley’s final, failed attempt to steal from Yale’s Beinecke Library. An attentive librarian noticed a razor blade on the floor, arousing her suspicion.

Library crimes aren’t cinematic, but what “The Map Thief” lacks in suspense it more than makes up for with the details of the strange world of tweed-collar crime. As difficult as it is to catch a map thief, it’s even more difficult to imprison him.

“The difficulty in prosecuting map theft,” Blanding writes, “is that it is so hard to prove provenance. It’s not like dealing with art theft, where each item is a one-of-a-kind work. . . . No one can know with certainty how many copies of a particular map have survived over the centuries.”

If a collector suspects that a map is hot, that wouldn’t necessarily kill a deal. As Blanding observes, “It’s not just the crooked dealers — map collectors, too, are at fault for buying maps at prices too good to be true, knowing the property is stolen.”

But the most striking aspect of “The Map Thief” is less the thief — “Why did I steal?” Smiley tells Blanding, “I stole for the money.” — than the revelations about the lax security at some of our most august institutions.

Smiley was given free rein with rare materials, and most of the libraries he dealt with hadn’t, and haven’t, comprehensively cataloged their map holdings. These libraries couldn’t know what they were missing. And libraries often refuse to admit they’ve been robbed. It’s a slap in the face to their trustees and the public that such rarities are overseen so loosely — better to let something vanish than draw attention to an institution’s failure.

Blanding had limited access to Smiley: After a couple of interviews, Smiley got cold feet and severed contact. No matter, though, as Blanding’s portrait of Smiley retains vitality. Sure he was a thief and a bit of an egomaniac, but Smiley was also exceedingly generous with his friends and the people who worked in his shops. You don’t like Smiley, but he’s vivid and somewhat sympathetic. Blanding doesn’t quite reach the same amplitude when dealing with other players in the story, particularly many of the library administrators, who come across as aloof and self-preserving.

Old maps are beautiful relics — relics of ignorance, ambition, and ingenuity — and their attraction resides in their charming inaccuracy, their once-plausible, now laughable suppositions. Maps project wishful thinking. “The Map Thief” is a masterful cartography of a man who fell victim to such wishful thinking, destroying his life. As a rival dealer said about Smiley, “You’re talking about a person who defiled the institutions that defined his existence.”
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The Inside Story of the $8 Million Heist From the Carnegie Library
Precious maps, books and artworks vanished from the Pittsburgh archive over the course of 25 years
By Travis McDade
Far from a crime just against the library, the theft was a crime against the world's cultural heritage. (Illustration by Heather Vaughan)
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | September 2020

Like nuclear power plants and sensitive computer networks, the safest rare book collections are protected by what is known as “defense in depth”—a series of small, overlapping measures designed to thwart a thief who might be able to overcome a single deterrent. The Oliver Room, home to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s rare books and archives, was something close to the platonic ideal of this concept. Greg Priore, manager of the room starting in 1992, designed it that way.

The room has a single point of entry, and only a few people had keys to it. When anyone, employee or patron, entered the collection, Priore wanted to know. The room had limited daytime hours, and all guests were required to sign in and leave personal items, like jackets and bags, in a locker outside. Activity in the room was under constant camera surveillance.

In addition, the Oliver Room had Priore himself. His desk sat at a spot that commanded the room and the table where patrons worked. When a patron returned a book, he checked that it was still intact. Security for special collections simply does not get much better than that of the Oliver Room.

In the spring of 2017, then, the library’s administration was surprised to find out that many of the room’s holdings were gone. It wasn’t just that a few items were missing. It was the most extensive theft from an American library in at least a century, the value of the stolen objects estimated to be $8 million.

* * *

There are two types of people who frequent special collections that are open to the public: scholars who want to study something in particular, and others who just want to see something interesting. Both groups are often drawn to incunables. Books printed at the dawn of European movable type, between 1450 and 1500, incunables are old, rare and historically important. In short, an incunable is so valued and usually such a prominent holding that any thief who wanted to avoid detection would not steal one. The Oliver Room thief stole ten.

Visitors and researchers alike love old maps, and few are more impressive than those in Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, commonly known as the Blaeu Atlas. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s version, printed in 1644, originally comprised three volumes containing 276 hand-colored lithographs that mapped the known world in the age of European exploration. All 276 maps were missing.

Many of the library’s holdings had been donated over the years by the founder, Andrew Carnegie, and his friends. But in one notable instance, the library allotted money specifically to purchase 40 volumes of photogravure prints of Native Americans created by Edward Curtis in the first decades of the 20th century. The images were beautiful, historically valuable and extremely rare. Only 272 sets were created; in 2012, Christie’s sold one set for $2.8 million. The Carnegie Library’s set held some 1,500 photogravure “plates”—illustrations made apart from a book and inserted into it. They had all been cut and removed from their bindings, “except a few scattered throughout of unremarkable subjects,” a book expert later noted.
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This article is a selection from the September 2020 issue of Smithsonian magazine
Andrew Carnegie The industrialist Andrew Carnegie, seen in 1913, founded libraries around the globe. Some of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s rarest holdings were donated by him. (Library of Congress)

And this was just the beginning. The person who worked over the Oliver Room stole nearly everything of significant monetary value, sparing no country or century or subject. He took the oldest book in the collection, a collection of sermons printed in 1473, and also the most recognizable book, a first edition of Isaac Newton’s 98. He stole a first edition of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, a letter written by William Jennings Bryan and a rare copy of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1898 memoir, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897. He stole a first edition of a book written by the nation’s second president, John Adams, as well as a book signed by the third, Thomas Jefferson. He stole the first English edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, printed in London in 1620, and the first edition of George Eliot’s Silas Marner, printed in the same city 241 years later. From John James Audubon’s 1851-54 Quadrupeds of North America, he stole 108 of the 155 hand-colored lithographs.

In short, he took nearly everything he could get his hands on. And he did it with impunity for close to 25 years.

* * *

When a library finds that it has been the victim of a major theft, it can take a long time to determine what is missing; an inspection of each shelved item and its pages is a laborious process. But the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s rare and antiquarian collection had already been well documented, ever since the administration moved to establish an archive of the institution’s rarest holdings. Greg Priore, who had graduated with an M.A. in European history a few years earlier from nearby Duquesne University, was then working in the library’s Pennsylvania Room, a space dedicated to local history and genealogy. He was also pursuing a library science degree at the University of Pittsburgh, with an emphasis on archives management. Both on paper and in person, he seemed like the perfect candidate to run the new archive, and was hired in 1991 to oversee what became the Oliver Room collection in 1992.

Priore comes across as professional but easygoing, the sort of guy who knows a lot but wears his knowledge lightly. Just under six feet tall, with a resonant voice and a prominent mustache, he was the son of a local obstetrician and spent the bulk of his life within walking distance of the Carnegie Library. An important job at a prestigious institution in his home city was something like a dream.
Greg Priore examines a book
Greg Priore examines a book in the library’s Oliver Room in 1999. (Sammy Dallal / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP)

After getting the job, he worked alongside a preservation specialist to assess the Carnegie Library’s rare and antiquarian books. In addition, two rare book experts hired to offer conservation advice found that the library had given little thought to preserving its oldest books. So the staff blocked off windows to get control of the climate, substituted metal shelves for the old ones made of wood, which can leach acid into books, and upgraded the security system. In 1992, the room was officially renamed for William R. Oliver, a longtime benefactor. For years it served as the jewel of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Docents took patrons on tours, and C-SPAN said it was one of western Pennsylvania’s cultural high points. Scholars and journalists plumbed its archives.

In the fall of 2016, library officials decided it was time to audit the collection again, and hired the Pall Mall Art Advisors to do the appraisal. Kerry-Lee Jeffrey and Christiana Scavuzzo began their audit on April 3, 2017, a Monday, using the 1991 inventory as a guide. Within an hour, there was trouble. Jeffrey was looking for Thomas McKenney and James Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America. This landmark work included 120 hand-colored lithographs, the result of a project that began in 1821 with McKenney’s attempt to document in full color the dress and spiritual practices of Native Americans who had visited Washington, D.C. to arrange treaties with the government. The three-volume set of folios, produced between 1836 and 1844, is large and gorgeous and would be a highlight in any collection. But the Carnegie Library’s version had been hidden on a top shelf at the end of a row. When Jeffrey discovered why, her stomach dropped. “Once a plump book filled with plates,” she would recall, “the sides had caved in on themselves.” All those stunning illustrations had been cut from the binding.

The best-known book stolen from the Oliver Room was a first edition of Isaac Newton’s revolutionary mathematical treatise of 1687. (University of Strasbourg)First edition of Isaac Newton’s revolutionary mathematical treatise of 1687.

The appraisers discovered that many of the invaluable books with illustrations or maps had been ransacked. John Ogilby’s America—one of the greatest illustrated English works about the New World, printed in London in 1671—had contained 51 plates and maps. They were gone. A copy of Ptolemy’s groundbreaking La Geographia, printed in 1548, had survived intact for over 400 years, but now all of its maps were missing. Of an 18-volume set of Giovanni Piranesi’s extremely rare etchings, printed between 1748 and 1807, the assessors noted dryly, “The only part of this asset located during on-site inspection was its bindings. The contents have evidently been removed from the bindings and the appraiser is taking the extraordinary assumption that they have been removed from the premises.” The replacement value for the Piranesis alone was $600,000.

Everywhere they looked, the auditors found a staggering degree of destruction and looting. They showed their results to the head of the Preservation Department, Jacalyn Mignogna. She, too, felt sick. After seeing historic volume after historic volume reduced to stubs, she went back to her office and wept. On April 7, only five days after the appraisers had begun their inquiry, Jeffrey and Scavuzzo met with the library’s director, Mary Frances Cooper, and two other administrators, and detailed what they had already found—or, rather, not found. The next phase of their analysis would have a more pessimistic focus: Now they would try to determine just how far the collection’s value had fallen. On April 11, a Tuesday, Cooper had the lock to the Oliver Room changed. Greg Priore was not given a key.

* * *

Just about the only thing that keeps an insider from stealing from special collections is conscience. Security measures may thwart outside thieves, but if someone wants to steal from the collection he stewards, there is little to stop him. Getting books and maps and lithographs out the door is not much harder than simply taking them from the shelves.

While other cultural heritage thieves have gone to great lengths to avoid calling attention to their acts—stealing items of low value, destroying card catalog entries, ripping out bookplates, bleaching library stamps from pages—Priore took the best stuff he could find, and brazenly left the library stamps in, as the library would see when it began to regather the books. Despite this cavalier approach, he was astonishingly successful, more successful than any insider book thief in memory.

Priore and his wife, who worked as a children’s librarian, hardly had an opulent lifestyle; the couple lived in a modest apartment crowded with books. But they had four children, who attended private schools: St. Edmund’s Academy, the Ellis School and Duquesne University.

All indications suggest that he was perpetrating his crimes not to get rich but rather, as he told police, merely to stay “afloat.” For example, in the fall of 2015, Priore wrote an email to the Ellis School asking for an extension on tuition payments. “I am trying to juggle tuition payments for 4 kids,” he wrote. A few weeks later, he asked Duquesne officials to lift a hold on accounts assigned to two of his children, since he had made overdue tuition payments. In February 2016, Priore asked his landlord for an extension, falsely claiming his wife had missed work because of a heart attack. The rent was four months past due.

* * *

Priore lived close enough to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh that he could walk to work in 15 minutes. One route took him past the famous blue edifice of the Caliban Book Shop, one of the city’s best-known cultural spots. The store was founded in 1991 by a Pittsburgher named John Schulman, who is 5 feet 7 inches tall and stocky, with close-trimmed, thinning gray hair and, often, a graying goatee blending into a few days’ growth of beard.
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh opened in 1895 as one of the first of over 1,600 libraries the industrialist erected in the United States.
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh opened in 1895 as one of the first of over 1,600 libraries the industrialist erected in the United States. (Alamy)

Schulman started his bookselling business in the 1980s, working out of a Pittsburgh apartment. Gregarious and diligent, he acquired the sort of status that comes from years of reputable work in the profession. He was a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA), serving on its board of governors for the Mid-Atlantic chapter. He was also an appraiser for regional institutions, including the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Penn State. After decades selling rare books, he was familiar to most in the business and even somewhat well known outside of it: Thanks to appearances on “Antiques Roadshow,” he was PBS-famous.

For the most part, Schulman treated the books, maps or prints that Priore brought him exactly as he would process the rare and antiquarian materials he got from any source. He would describe an individual book in ways people in the market would understand and, depending on the quality of an item, list it on his website. But with the items Priore brought, there was an added step.
A 1615 Bible, stolen by Priore from the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh in the 1990s and sold to the American Pilgrim Museum in the Netherlands.
A 1615 Bible, stolen by Priore from the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh in the 1990s and sold to the American Pilgrim Museum in the Netherlands. (AP Photo / Keith Srakocic)

When a book of value or importance is acquired by a library, the institution marks it using one of several different kinds of stamp: ink, emboss or perforation. These marks, which state the name of the library, are meant to do two things: identify the rightful owner and destroy the value of the book for resale. Most major special collections, like the Oliver Room, also adhere a bookplate to the inside front cover.

To sell such a heavily marked book, a typical thief would have to tear, cut and bleach away this evidence; if he was not careful, he would destroy in the process much of what made the book valuable in the first place. Schulman found another way to ready a stolen book for sale. Using materials he kept at his store, whenever he got a Carnegie book from Priore, he or one of his employees pressed a small red stamp, bright as lipstick, on the bottom of the bookplate. It pronounced the book “Withdrawn from Library.” That mark was to counteract the others.

While there is a tradition of librarians and archivists stealing from collections they are meant to steward, not since the 1930s had a dealer as highly reputed as Schulman been implicated. In the 1970s and ’80s, a flamboyant Texas bookman and one-time president of the ABAA named John Jenkins made money selling stolen and forged items to libraries and collectors. But most of his malfeasance was confined to Texas—and no one who knew Jenkins would have been surprised to discover he was an outlaw. He was an indebted gambler who had burned his own store for insurance money, and his life ended in 1989 with a gunshot to the head (authorities differ over whether it was a homicide or a suicide).

Caliban book shop in Pittsburgh A Pittsburgh literary landmark co-owned by John Schulman, who admitted to receiving goods stolen from the city’s Carnegie Library. (Darrell Sapp / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP)

Schulman, a constant presence at the major book fairs, seemed as rock-solid as any bookseller in the business—all of which made him the perfect fence for Priore. The librarian could not risk approaching dealers or collectors directly with the types of books he was selling, and the internet would have exposed him the first time he tried to sell an incunable. Priore simply could not have operated without Schulman’s help and good name—and Schulman could not have gained access to the Oliver Room’s big-ticket items without Priore.

* * *

Apparently Greg Priore knew he was about to get caught six months before it happened. In the fall of 2016, when the library administration was discussing the possibility of an appraisal of the Oliver Room—which would necessarily uncover missing assets—he argued against it. But his colleagues chalked it up to his general obstinacy against having others in his domain, an obstinacy that one librarian noted had grown increasingly pronounced as the years ticked by. Still, with or without Priore’s approval, the administration decided to go ahead with the assessment.

Priore talked to Schulman about it, and the bookseller tried to help his supplier by emailing a number of possible explanations for why many items were missing. Some items might be out for repair or loan, Schulman offered, urging Priore to create documents attesting to this. He also suggested saying the library’s former director, now dead, had talked about selling off some of the Oliver Room’s better books, and that he might have done so while Priore was away on leave. And Schulman proposed emphasizing “that the Oliver Room is fairly porous and accessible...[and] that there have no doubt been multiple opportunities for many different staff and visitors to enter the rooms without proper protocol.”

For his part, Priore suggested that the room’s defenses weren’t perfect. When library administrators interviewed him on April 18, 2017, he told Cooper, the director, that he did leave catalogers, interns and volunteers to work by themselves in the room. He added that maintenance workers—in particular, some men who had done repairs to the roof—had access to the room.

In the end, though, there was no way to hide his decades of crimes. Thousands of plates, maps and photographs were missing; clearly, this was not the work of a patron or workman who had enjoyed a few minutes’ unfettered access. Even if someone else had been stealing from the library, it would have been impossible for Priore not to notice so much was missing. In April he was suspended from his job and in June he was fired.

Pittsburgh police began a formal investigation in June, and on August 24 executed search warrants at Priore’s home, the Caliban Book Shop and a Caliban warehouse. Police questioned Priore the same day. It didn’t take long for him to come clean.

When police went to the Caliban warehouse, they brought along Christiana Scavuzzo of Pall Mall Art Advisors. She found, among other items, 91 of the Edward Curtis prints and seven maps from the Blaeu Atlas. Police also found the stamp that Schulman used to indicate that the books he sold had been deaccessioned from the library.

* * *

Bill Claspy is twice a graduate of Case Western Reserve University, with a B.A. and an M.A. in English literature, and today serves as head of special collections for the university’s main library. Despite his love for the humanities, he knows it is the sciences that keep the lights on at Case Western. That’s why he was especially sad to surrender an important book of scientific history.

In August 2018, he received an email from Lyle Graber, a detective in the Allegheny County District Attorney’s office in Pennsylvania, about a recently purchased book of early modern astronomy. “While reviewing evidence in this case,” Graber wrote, “it appears that in 2016 you purchased Quaestiones in Theoricas in Georgii Purbachii from...Caliban Books. Unfortunately, it is very possible that this book is among those having been stolen from the Carnegie Library and sold to unsuspecting buyers such as yourself.”

Schulman’s catalog description noted the book’s condition was “very good with minor ex-library marks.” Claspy retrieved the book from its shelf and saw what Schulman meant by “ex-library marks”: The first two pages had several stamps and an ash-blue rectangular bookplate from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Below the bookplate was a small set of red letters pronouncing the book “Withdrawn from Library.” Claspy carefully wrapped the book and sent it back to Pennsylvania.
bible being held by blue-gloved hand
At a news conference in Pittsburgh in 2019, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala, center, discusses the recovery of a 1615 Bible stolen from the Oliver Room. (AP Photo / Keith Srakocic)

Around the same time, a private collector named Michael Kiesel also received an alarming letter. Kiesel had purchased one of the incunables that Priore had stolen and Schulman had sold to a reputable dealer in England. That dealer asked Kiesel to return the book to Detective Graber, which Kiesel did.

Dozens of people—private collectors, librarians and rare book dealers—received similar letters that August. They sent the books and documents to Allegheny County, where they have become part of a small but extremely valuable library under the supervision of the district attorney.

* * *

This past January in an Allegheny County court, Priore pleaded guilty to theft and receiving stolen property, while Schulman pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property, theft by deception and forgery. The guidelines for such crimes recommend a standard sentence of nine to 16 months’ incarceration but include two other possibilities: an aggravated range of up to 25 months’ incarceration, and a mitigated range that could include probation.

Much of what governs sentencing in property crimes comes down to the numbers. The Pall Mall Art Advisors spent months determining the replacement value for each item Priore had destroyed or stolen outright. The total, they concluded, was more than $8 million. But even this number, they said, was inadequate, since many items were irreplaceable—not available for purchase anywhere at any price.

Claspy argued that the value of rare books, maps and archival documents cannot be measured by money alone. “This crime was not just a crime against my library, or the Carnegie Library, it was a cultural heritage crime against us all,” he wrote to the judge. The director of the University of Pittsburgh Libraries, Kornelia Tancheva, wrote that a rare book theft, “especially from a public library, is an egregious crime against the integrity of the cultural record and against the public good.”

Further, the Pall Mall Art advisers wondered what books might have been donated to the library in the future, benefiting the people of Pittsburgh, if Greg Priore had not devastated the library’s reputation as well as its holdings. The chilling effect on donors is one reason that many libraries, upon discovering losses from their collections, keep the matter quiet.

More than two dozen people wrote letters asking the judge, Alexander Bicket, to impose strict sentences—not always a certainty in crimes involving thefts from a library. At an in-person sentencing on June 18, where Priore apologized for his thefts (“I am deeply sorry for what I have done,” he said), several spoke about the terrible effects of these crimes. “We do not want an apology,” Cooper told the judge. “Any apology from these thieves would be meaningless. They are only sorry that we discovered what they did.” Still, Judge Bicket was not swayed. He sentenced Greg Priore to three years’ house arrest and 12 years’ probation. Schulman received four years’ house arrest and 12 years’ probation. Both Schulman and Priore, through representatives, declined to speak to Smithsonian.

John Schulman leaves after his arraignment
Schulman after his preliminary arraignment at Pittsburgh Municipal Court in July 2018. (Darrell Sapp / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP)

After the sentences were made public, Carole Kamin, a member of the board of the Carnegie Natural History Museum, wrote to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that supporters of local nonprofits “were appalled at the unbelievably light sentences.”

Numerous booksellers have told me that they believe in Schulman’s innocence, saying he was duped—a view the bookseller himself encouraged in an email to colleagues before the sentencing, in which he insisted he pleaded guilty only to save legal costs and put the matter behind him.

Others in the rare book world, though, say the evidence gathered by police was convincing. For instance, Schulman did engage in legitimate business with the Carnegie Library over the years, and on those occasions when he purchased a book through proper channels, he wrote checks payable to the library. But when he bought books from Priore, he made the checks payable to Priore—or paid cash.

It was Schulman’s responsibility, as one bookseller told me, to notice there was something odd about the treasures Priore was handing over. The ethics code of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America states that members “shall make all reasonable efforts to ascertain that materials offered to him or her are the property of the seller,” and members “shall make every effort to prevent the theft or distribution of stolen antiquarian books and related materials.” Schulman was not only a member of the ABAA. He had served on its ethics and standards committee.

Quite interesting. Prose was kind of bland. Was glad author focussed on the maps and the art of dealing and stealing rather than Smiley.½

The Map Thief by Michael Blanding is a very highly recommended nonfiction account of a map dealer who stole hundreds of antique maps from collections, as well as a history lesson about some of the maps he stole.

You don't have to love old maps to fully appreciate The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps by Michael Blanding, but it helps if you at least appreciate them and enjoy reading about the history behind the creation of some of the maps.

E. Forbes Smiley III was an antiquarian map dealer who was also a thief. He stole an unknown quantity of maps, perhaps over 200, from libraries and collections, and then sold these public treasures in order to finance his lifestyle. Since the number of actual rare maps Smiley stole is unknown (although a list of known stolen maps from around the world is included), it is difficult to put a total price on what he stole but it was certainly in the millions.

Blanding interviewed Smiley at the beginning of the book, but later Smiley tried to distance himself from the publishing of this book. At that point Blanding had already been talking to "a wider circle of people, investigating a paper trail of court documents, and spending hours sifting through library archives and volumes of old maps." With or without Smiley's further cooperation, Blandings began to piece together "an answer to my biggest question: Why did a respected map dealer at the height of his profession betray those closest to him—and deface the artifacts he spent his life preserving? The more I researched his story, however, the more questions I uncovered—to the point where I began to suspect that his reasons for cutting off our correspondence had less to do with the advice of his advisor or the impact on his family, and more to do with his own fears of exposing secrets he has never revealed."

Since Blanding also has a love of old and rare maps he is a good author to tell this story which involves the history of the maps themselves and the intrigue of Smiley's prolonged theft of so many maps over several years. Blanding writes, "I read about him in The New Yorker in October 2005 with fascination—first, for the maps themselves, these historical documents that were at once beautiful and flawed, and second, for this strange character at the center of the crime, so mysterious in his decision to despoil the world he loved."

After the news of Smiley's arrest for stealing maps broke and the word was out to curators, "One by one, they began to call with panicked reports of maps missing from books in their collections as well. As they did, more questions began to reverberate through the insular world of map libraries, collectors, and dealers: Why had a respected and successful antiquarian dealer turned against those who trusted him and stolen the things he loved most? And how long had he been getting away with it?"

This fascinating book not only covers the deeply flawed and contradictory personality of Smiley and his lifestyle, it also does an excellent job explaining the history, provenance, and importance of various maps and precisely why they are so valuable. He talks to other map dealers, clients, and curators. The book includes an 8 page color insert and black and white photos throughout, chapter notes, and an index. As mentioned, there is a list of all the maps that are known to be missing from libraries and public collections worldwide.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Gotham Books for review purposes.

There is a reason why "Red" is the color of this purveyor of sugared water. I simply could not believe that there are 6 teaspoons of sugar in a 12oz can of Coke.

There is a reason why "Red" is the color of this purveyor of sugared water. I simply could not believe that there are 6 teaspoons of sugar in a 12oz can of Coke.

Fascinating! Amazing that someone could get away with this for so long. I was torn between liking Smiley and being horrified by what he'd done. Very well written!

The story line was very uneven, the result perhaps of a dearth of details. Regardless, it was a bit hard to get into this book though the subject matter of cartography is a lifelong passion. Surprisingly, I was familiar with more of the maps than I thought I would be, but I suppose that is the point. The book was more about the maps than the thief, possibly because he had limited interview time with the subject. Probably would have been best at that point to change the direction of the book.½

Though he was once part of an elite circle of antiquarian map dealers, E. Forbes Smiley’s career came to an abrupt end when he was caught stealing maps from the Yale University library. In The Map Thief, Michael Blanding details not only Smiley’s elusive career and eventual downfall, but digs deep into the fascinating world of rare maps.

The Map Thief catches readers from the start as it begins with Smiley’s end. With detail that rivals the best heist films, Blanding describes the steps Smiley took on the day he was caught and the glaring mistake he made that set the library staff, and eventually the police, on his trail. From there, the book takes makes a perfect parallel into the world of antiquarian maps while also becoming somewhat of a history of Smiley’s life. As Blanding discusses the paths that led Smiley toward map dealing, he details the oldest and rarest maps the man was aching to find.

While history buffs will certainly find themselves in a world of joy here, the style and pace of The Map Thief has much to offer for those just dipping their toes into non-fiction.

A fascinating look at the world of antiquarian map collecting, cartographic crimes, and one of its most infamous perpetrators.

The audio version, read by Sean Runnette, was terrific. I knew absolutely nothing about the subject and to think how that was such a major piece of news so recently ---and I didn't even notice it at the time! Having so much map history interwoven into the story of E. Smiley Forbes was a wonderful part of the complete picture of this map business. I'm not sure I could have sat and read all of the history but listening to it as it was read made it just plain fascinating. Forbes really was/is a remarkable human being in so many ways as one reads/hears about all of the things he was able to accomplish, especially if you ignore all of the thefts!

To many E. Forbes Smiley III was a charismatic, respected rare map dealer. In truth, he was a thief. He charmed librarians in America and England while stealing the maps they were charged with protecting. Although he started small, eventually his thefts funded a luxurious lifestyle. He stole for at least 4 years before being caught in 2005 outside Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Blanding reveals the worlds of rare map dealers, buyers, and rare manuscript libraries as well as the history behind the creation of some of these treasures. This modern day tale of true crime shows both sides of the coin: the suspense and intrigue of catching an art thief with the vicarious thrills as well as the allure of making a quick buck of being the thief.

An excellent read-alike for The Island of Lost Maps: A true story of cartographic crime, by Miles Harvey and The Book Thief: The true crimes of Daniel Spiegelman, by Travis McDade.