The Map Thief

by Michael Blanding

  Eventually the rumors about Smiley subsided—and even started seeming foolish. Announcements came back to back that the two great collections Smiley had helped assemble were finding permanent homes. Rather than taking maps out of libraries, he was helping put maps into them.

  Chapter 8

  THE BATTLE OF SEBEC

  FIGURE 11 ANDREW ELLICOTT. “PLAN OF THE CITY OF WASHINGTON IN THE TERRITORY OF COLUMBIA.” PHILADELPHIA, 1792.

  1996–2002

  WHEN LARRY SLAUGHTER became sick with lung cancer and passed away on June 2, 1996, even his own family was astounded by the map collection he’d left behind. In the end, Smiley and Slaughter had together assembled some six hundred maps, one hundred atlases, and fifty books. They included four of the earliest editions of The English Pilot, The Fourth Book—from 1689, 1706, 1713, and 1732; four copies of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia; one of only a handful copies of Ellicott’s original map of Washington, DC (Figure 11); two rare wooden globes that were the oldest English globes in the country; and countless other rarities. Twenty-three maps in the collection were unique, with no other known copies in the world.

  But the collection was much more than the sum of its parts—like Leventhal’s collection of New England, Slaughter’s assemblage of maps of the mid-Atlantic states was as close to a complete chronicle of the region as it was possible to make. “This collection was built as a study collection so that the materials as a whole could be examined for comparative purposes and aid scholars in various historical fields,” Smiley explained to a Westchester County newspaper at the time.

  Smiley and Slaughter had had many conversations about the value of keeping the collection together. After Slaughter’s death, his wife, Susan, agreed to donate the collection to an institution where it could honor his memory. The obvious repository was the New York Public Library, where Slaughter had served as a devoted member of the Mercator Society. But the Library of Congress would be equally fitting given the collection’s heavy emphasis on Washington and the surrounding area.

  Together Smiley and Susan Slaughter decided to tell both libraries of the potential donation and have them both make their case. Alice Hudson was thrilled to learn the news. “That suits us perfectly!” she wrote Smiley in a letter. “This gift would be extraordinarily exciting for the Library.” Hudson arranged a meeting with Smiley and the New York Public Library’s president, Paul LeClerc, to show that the library was serious. LeClerc told him the library was in the process of renovating its reading rooms, including Room 117, and starting a new scholar-in-residence program. This collection would be a perfect contender for more study.

  He layered on other perks as well, including a major exhibition and a professional catalog of the collection. Smiley told him he would personally love to see the collection go to New York, but the library would have to show Slaughter’s widow that it could protect it and make it accessible to future generations. In a follow-up letter, Hudson assured him the library would do that, writing that “we are committed to protecting the collections” and that it would be “made secure in locked cases, away from the reading room, in our own adjacent air conditioned, locked, non-public stack area.”

  Of course, that would take money, and Smiley pointed out that the donation wouldn’t come with an endowment. That wouldn’t be a problem, LeClerc assured him, since in addition to contributions from the library’s general fund, it would conduct a separate fund drive around the gift. That would be terrific, Smiley told them, but would they consider another idea: selling off maps in their collection that overlapped with Slaughter’s? If so, he’d be happy to facilitate the process—in exchange for his standard commission, of course.

  A few days later, Smiley was impressed to receive a letter from LeClerc reiterating many of Hudson’s points, and adding a few new ones including the one he’d suggested. “To provide financial support for the maintenance of the Collection, the library will consider the sale of duplicates from the Map Division collections which are in poorer condition than the Collection’s equivalents,” LeClerc wrote. He added more personally: “Perhaps you and the donor would have tea with me one afternoon so that we can review the steps that must be taken to bring this great collection to the New York Public Library.”

  —

  SMILEY WAS THRILLED. Just fifteen years earlier, he was sitting in the map room struggling to learn the names and dates of the major mapmakers. Now he would be sipping tea with library’s president, discussing how to enshrine a decade of work. Though the collection would have Slaughter’s name on it, it would be covered with Smiley’s fingerprints. This was his legacy—and how fitting to think it might permanently displayed in the very temple where he’d first fallen in love with maps. Then there was the fact that he could personally profit from the deal by earning a commission on the sale of the duplicates—no small consideration given the precarious state of his finances.

  In addition to meeting with Hudson and LeClerc, he traveled to the Library of Congress and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown to hear them make their cases. In February 1997, Smiley met again with Hudson and LeClerc as well as the director of the NYPL’s research libraries, Bill Walker, who promised in another letter to catalog the collection within twelve months and dedicating “in excess of $100K” to make it happen. Eventually, Brown dropped out of the running, and it was down to the two libraries. Smiley produced an “analysis of need,” detailing the number of duplicate maps, atlases, and books in each of the collections, to show which library could benefit more.

  New York’s collection overlapped with seven out of the forty-nine atlases in Slaughter’s collection, while the Library of Congress’s overlapped with twenty-two. As far as loose maps, New York had duplicates of 63 percent of Slaughter’s maps, while the Library of Congress had 74 percent. Clearly, Smiley concluded, the New York Public Library would benefit most from the collection. By March 14, 1997, the decision had been made. Smiley wrote Hudson a letter on his letterhead informing her that Slaughter’s heirs had decided the collection would go to New York.

  Two months later, on May 28, 1997, the agreement was signed. About half the collection was donated as an outright gift, while the other half was given as an indefinite loan (a common way for donors to spread out their tax liability). The agreement included a passage stating that as an “inducement to the donor” LeClerc and Walker had “made certain commitments,” attaching the letters from the administrators with their promises of swift cataloging and an exhibition to be funded in part by the sale of duplicates from the collection.

  As promised, LeClerc invited Smiley and Susan Slaughter, along with Walker and Hudson, to tea in the president’s office to celebrate the acquisition. Soon after the acquisition, the library publicized the gift with a front-page article on the library’s newsletter, mailed to the library’s many supporters. “The items that Mr. Slaughter assembled in this collection cannot be found together in any other repository in the world,” Hudson said. Smiley added what he had realized years ago in private moments with Leventhal and Slaughter. “A scholar can line up ten maps on one table and suddenly see a new connection,” Smiley said; “literally 100 new stories that have never been told will be told here.”

  When the celebrations subsided, Hudson turned to the gargantuan task of cataloging and conserving the materials in time for an exhibition the following year. The maps needed to be sorted into two groups—those donated directly and those on loan—before they could be cataloged for the collection. She drew up a plan estimating the cost at $88,422, including $43,638 for the cataloger. Nothing was included for Smiley, despite the fact that he was the only one with the knowledge necessary to sort through Slaughter’s sixty ring-bound notebooks in order to identify the hundreds of maps that needed to be cataloged.

  —

  SMILEY SAID NOTHING to protest the arrangement, even as he spent the fall organizing the notes from Slaughter’s binders and matching them to
maps in the collection. He set up materials at the long table farthest from the reference desk, coming in day after day to perform the work. Sometimes, Hudson and Smiley were the only ones left at the end of the day after all the patrons had left. They chatted about the various maps as they worked and shared frustrations over having to figure out which of the hundreds of maps belonged in the gift and which belonged in the loan.

  Over time, Hudson began thinking of him less as a patron and more as a professional colleague—one who had done more in her tenure to improve the quality of the map collections than anyone else. She watched him diligently work to tease out discrepancies between the maps listed in the donation and those actually present in the collection. In some cases, maps were mistakenly listed twice, but in other cases, they were just entirely absent from where they were supposed to be. At one point, Slaughter’s widow, Susan, called Hudson to privately express her frustration over several dozen missing maps that didn’t seem to be present with others. “So where are they?” Hudson remembers her complaining. “I want this all to be in order.”

  For Smiley, business was finally looking up after a decade of trouble. In January 1997, he had paid off a federal tax lien for more than $25,000, and in February a state tax warrant for more than $6,700. Now he and Lisa began scoping out real estate outside the city. They had lived in New York for nearly two decades and had lately begun to tire of the fast pace of life there. Practically speaking, Smiley could work anywhere with a post office and a phone, and Lisa could practice interior decorating anywhere there were people rich and stylish enough to hire her. Recently, they had also been considering having a child and didn’t want to raise one in the city.

  For a time, they considered settling in the Boston area, close to research libraries and plenty of educated clients. But Boston seemed like a defeat to Smiley, looking as if he wasn’t able to play the game in New York. After exploring the Connecticut coast and Cape Cod, they finally settled on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the south coast of Massachusetts that came alive every summer with vacationing celebrities. It was the perfect combination for the two of them—with enough history and New England charm to satisfy Forbes, and enough style and cachet to please his wife.

  It would also be a perfect place to raise a child, with a small-town vibe Smiley had experienced in his own childhood. Moreover, no one could see this as a defeat for Smiley. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Dozens of wealthy businessmen and celebrities had homes there—including actors Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, newsmen Mike Wallace and Walter Cronkite, singers James Taylor and Carly Simon, and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. For the past several years, even President Bill Clinton himself had chosen the Vineyard for his annual summer vacations.

  Yet, the prevailing attitude of islanders toward all the fame in their midst was a collective shrug. Locals were so used to running into faces they’d seen on TV while picking up butter at the local market that they seemed to barely notice. That sensibility fit perfectly with Smiley’s own peculiar mix of New York flash and New England reserve. The Smileys rented the summer home of Scott Slater’s sister Wendy for two weeks in October before finding a home on the quieter, western side of the island—“up island” as the locals call it. The location on a road wooded with scrub oak was away from the summer tourists who crowded the population centers of Vineyard Haven and Edgartown.

  The house itself wasn’t anything special—an ugly, oval-shaped cabin they nicknamed the “spaceship.” But the price was cheap for the Vineyard, and with the demand from summer visitors they could rent it out during summers while they lived in Sebec, and then in a few years tear it down to build a new home. In December 1997, Smiley signed the purchase agreement for $265,000, putting 20 percent down as he and Lisa made preparations to move in the following summer.

  —

  BEFORE THEY DID, however, Smiley was in for a disappointment. When he presented Hudson with his list of duplicates the library could sell, she passed it up the chain to Walker, who dismissed it out of hand. These weren’t duplicates, he argued—differences in condition, color, paper, and a dozen other attributes made every one of Slaughter’s maps unique. Hudson contacted Smiley apologetically to tell him the news, but she had to agree with her boss. In fact, she was embarrassed she hadn’t seen the obvious differences herself.

  It took a few more conversations before it became clear to him what she was saying: The library wouldn’t be selling any maps from its collection. Hurt, and then angry, he called Hudson in early March 1998 to express what she later called “deep concern” about the decision. Hadn’t LeClerc told him in person that they would consider it, and hadn’t he included it in a letter that had become part of the offical agreement? He ended the conversation brusquely, demanding that Walker send him a letter clarifying the library’s position.

  Hudson felt caught in the middle, wanting to keep Smiley happy, but also not wanting to create problems with her superiors. In a long memo to Walker, she suggested sending Smiley a letter expressing “our immediate inability to deal with the issue of duplicates, and our long term desire to live up to our multifaceted agreement.” Only after the whole collection had been cataloged could any question of duplicates be considered. “We have not forgotten the issue of duplicates, but we must accomplish the exhibit, the scanning, the cataloging, in order to meet our highest priority, which is to make the [Slaughter] collection as accessible as possible to scholars and researchers,” she concluded. Smiley calmed down enough to continue his work cataloging the collection and helping to prepare for the exhibition that fall, and the topic of selling duplicates was tabled for the time being.

  In early March, patrons of the library who had donated $250 or more to the Map Division filed in to Room 117 to be among the first to view the maps from Slaughter’s collection, laid out on the long table where Smiley had worked. A few weeks later, several dozen donors and library administrators gathered at the Williams Club for a dinner to celebrate the acquisition of the collection. Susan Slaughter, who had suffered a recent heart attack, did not attend, but eight members of Slaughter’s family did. Smiley got up to address them, offering kind words about Slaughter’s vision in putting the collection together.

  By this time, however, Smiley was dealing with his own health problems. Inclined to be overweight since childhood, he also had dealt with years of high cholesterol. Now, at age forty-three, he was informed by his doctor that his arteries were occluded and he would need to have open heart surgery to unblock them or he would almost certainly have a heart attack. Smiley took the news like a bullet. “I was told if I didn’t have bypass surgery, I would drop dead,” he told me. “When you are grandiose and in your forties, you just don’t think that way. And then to be told you are not only mortal but you’ve got a problem, you are sick, changes the way you look at things, and I did not deal with that very well.”

  What was worse, the doctor told him he wouldn’t be able to fly for a time, keeping him away from map fairs and auctions in London, Amsterdam, and other European destinations where he searched for material for his clients. Shortly after moving to the Vineyard permanently in the summer of 1998, he traveled to Boston for the quadruple bypass surgery. He spent the fall recuperating, gradually gaining back his strength, all the while barely pausing in his work cataloging the Slaughter collection in preparation for display.

  On October 24, 1998, the New York Public Library opened the exhibit, In Thy Map Securely Saile, coinciding with the one hundredth anniversary of the Map Division and sponsored by Condé Nast Traveler and Jaguar. For the title, Hudson had chosen a line written by English poet Robert Herrick in 1610—just after John Smith had published his map of Virginia and before he published his map of New England. It was a time when the inhabitants of Great Britain were beginning to see new colonies appear on paper that most of them would never see in person. As a New York Times article said about the exhibit: “Envy, Conquest, Revenge: It’s All in the Maps.
” Smiley helped Hudson choose one hundred examples from Slaughter’s collection that traced the rise to dominance of the English over the North American continent. They put similar maps side by side—for example, the same maps from The English Pilot by John Seller, John Thornton, and Mount and Page—so viewers could compare them and see the progression of colonization and conquest, with lands being discovered, cities being founded and changing hands, and coastlines and boundaries swimming into focus with increasingly sharper detail.

  In the accompanying brochure, Hudson devoted a paragraph to Smiley, whose “advice and counsel were instrumental in the Map Division’s acquisition of the Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection and whose research is found between the lines of much of the exhibition text.” The following March, Paul Statt and Scott Slater drove down from Massachusetts to see the work their friend had put together. They arrived in the afternoon, walking through Central Park and down Fifth Avenue to meet Smiley in the library. “He took us, after much embracing and too-loud-for-the-library enthusing, to the gallery where the Slaugther exhibition was,” Slater later wrote in his journal. Among friends, Smiley rarely talked about his work—now, Slater and Statt listened raptly as he held forth about the significance of the maps he’d collected. For the first time, Slater saw how Smiley had turned his love of history, and his love of New England, into a successful career.

  It was “extremely illuminating as to what Forbes actually does in life,” wrote Slater. “The insights we gathered were as much about him as about cartography or history.” Afterward, Smiley met them at Dublin House for drinks along with Bennett Fischer, and the four raised pints of Guinness and glasses of Jameson to Smiley’s success.