X-Acto blade outs Map Thief

Rare maps stolen by Edward Forbes Smiley III

The FBI Art Theft Program successfully prosecuted Edward Forbes Smiley III who stole over $3 million worth of rare maps.¹

“These maps aren’t vehicles with identification numbers stamped on them,” said FBI Special Agent Stephen J. Kelleher, who led the case out of the FBI New Haven office. “And in most cases, they were trimmed so they didn’t even look like they came from books.” Complicating the issue was the fact that some of the maps had different titles—many in Latin—and could have come from several known copies of the same book.

Smiley was finally caught in June 2005, after he left an X-Acto blade in the Beinecke Library at Yale.

Smiley, a graduate of Hampshire College, moved to New York and apprenticed in the rare-book and map division at B. Altman. He admitted to stealing 98 rare maps from seven repositories in the United States and England. Smiley was sentenced in Connecticut superior court to five years in prison on three counts of felony larceny stemming from the theft of three rare documents from Yale University. He served the time concurrently with the 42-month federal sentence and also was ordered to pay $1.9 million in restitution to antiquarian booksellers and collectors he defrauded.

"serial thief on an industrial scale."

Clive Field, the British Library's director of scholarship and collections, expressed his disappointment in the lenient sentence:

"It will go down in criminal and library history as one of the largest, most prolonged, premeditated, and systematic of all thefts from libraries, and with no mitigating circumstances." Smiley's cooperation has "not been as full as one would wish" and that he is a "serial thief on an industrial scale."

In a legal brief filed September 13 by Philadelphia-area attorney Robert E. Goldman, the British Library had called for a stiffer sentence of eight years. The request was prompted by Smiley's admitted theft from the library of a world map--one of the first to show America as a distinct continent--by the 16th-century German cartographer Peter Apian (Petrus Apianus).² Goldman's brief said that Smiley's actions "ripped at the heart of our public institutions which stored, protected, and made available to the public over centuries maps which provided a bridge between past and future generations." The map has been recovered and returned to the library.³

In his book based on the case, The Map Thief,⁴ Michael Blanding intersperses the tale of Smiley's theft of nearly 100 maps between 2002 and 2005 with the histories of mapmaking and of the pioneering works that Smiley pilfered.⁵

The Map Thief is the story of an infamous crime, a revered map dealer with an unsavory secret, and the ruthless subculture that consumed him. To those who collect maps 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. Blanding is the first reporter to explore the story in full. 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. Blanding’s book is an astonishing tale of destruction and redemption. The Map Thief interweaves Smiley's escapades with the stories of the explorers and mapmakers. ⁶

1. "Stolen Treasures: The Case of the Missing Maps". FBI "Stories". 28 September 2006.

2. For a sample of the work of Petrus Apianus see: Astronomicum Caesareum, Ingolstadt 1540. The “Emperor’s Astronomy” is one of the great masterpieces of sixteenth-century printing. In this large folio volume the paper instrument found its supreme realisation in a series of intricate volvelles, all hand-colored in the astronomer’s Ingolstadt printing shop.

3. Eberhart, George M..“Map Thief Gets Three-and-a-Half years.(E. Forbes Smiley III ).” American Libraries 37, no. 10 (2006): 12

4. Blanding, Michael (2015). The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps. 2015.

5. Maxwell Carter. “Book Review: The Map Thief by Michael Blanding; After Stealing Some 100 Rare Maps over Three Years, E. Forbes Smiley III Was Caught When He Left an X-Acto Knife Behind at Yale.” Wall Street Journal (Online). New York, N.Y: Dow Jones & Company Inc, 2014.

6. WorldCat. The map thief : the gripping story of an esteemed rare-map dealer who made millions stealing priceless maps.