Map dealer Edward Forbes Smiley III took one year to admit to charges of larceny in the theft of 97 maps from rare book collections in Boston, Chicago, London and at the New York Public Library. The total value of the maps was more than $3 million, and if you’ll recall, he was discovered last June by a dropped exacto knife blade in the Yale Beinecke Library. Boston Public Library suffered the loss of 34 maps; Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library lost 11 maps; Beinecke lost 9; the Houghton Library at Harvard University lost 8; Chicago’s Newberry Library lost 2, and the British Library in London lost one.
At one point, Judge Janet Bond Arterton asked Assistant United States Attorney Christopher W. Schmeisser to detail the evidence the government was prepared to bring had it tried Mr. Smiley. The prosecutor said he had experts to testify that wormholes in the maps found on Mr. Smiley lined up with wormholes in the books on Yale’s shelves that contained the maps. “That’s an interesting forensic piece of evidence, isn’t it?” the judge said.
More from the New York Times.
Happened Before
This type of incident has happened before as shown by this book. The Island of Lost Maps : A True Story of Cartographic Crime Libraries need to be more vigilant when they are dealing with items that have this much value.