Forbes Smiley

Edward Forbes Smiley III (born April 13, 1956) is an American former rare map dealer and convicted art thief.

He turned to stealing maps from libraries and rare book collections and then reselling them to unsuspecting buyers to make ends meet.

[2] On June 8, 2005, the discovery of an X-Acto blade on the floor of the reading room in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University led to Smiley's arrest.

[10] She looked through the sign-in register and did a search of his name on the internet, found he was a rare maps dealer, and called security.

[14] It was a rare map advertised in that New York antiques dealer's summer catalog, and had been created by explorer Samuel de Champlain in 1612.

)[13][18] Reported losses by a handful of leading dealers who had unwittingly sold stolen maps acquired from Smiley ran to more than US$400,000 each in three cases;[citation needed] no details have been given about any reimbursement.

For example, Smiley had admitted stealing from Harvard University an example of the map of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, illustrating a letter from Hernán Cortés (1524),[1] but a prior photograph of the example missing from Yale's Beinecke Library proved instead that it was theirs.

[citation needed] Several questions remain unanswered, in particular about the origin and purpose of high quality facsimiles of early maps, some found on Smiley's person when he was arrested, and others in books he examined.

[12] As a result of Smiley's thefts, research libraries are now more aware of the vulnerability of maps illustrating volumes in their rare book collections, and are improving their documentation and security procedures.