tan that that's where it all seemed to come to fruition. >> well, that's where the power was. that's where wall street was. that's where the germans set up their bases and that's where the hamburg american line had their headquarters, and that's where they rented the offices. and as you say, after world war ii, the german agents also went off and worked for other nations, too. and after the fall all these plans fefnefarious plans, it's. ended up with the zimmerman telegram, the germans when it gets intercepted by the british. you know they're trying to convince the mexicans to come in against the united states so they could have, you know -- and it remind me of some of the stuff that you know other powers, including ourselves, have done. some really nitwit things.

where is the mental thing on some of this? you don't want to irritate the -- some of these major powers. where does the mental ideas come? the thinking? >> far be it for me to get in the mind of what makes spy master things to convince mexico to go to war against the united states and it works, but it becomes, as always has taught us, a great deal of arrogance of people in power and they think -- arrogant people think they can do whatever they want. they can change the course of history. and sometimes they do. th thank you very much. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> you've been watching american history tv on c-span3. we want to hear from you. follow us on twitter twitter @cspanhistory. connect with us on facebook at

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in 2006 forbes smiley ii. at the national archivals author michael blanding recounted mr. smiley's career as a dealer and thief. this is about an hour. >> thank you all so much for coming here this afternoon. i'm not particularly pleased to be giving this talk at the national archives wonderful repository of old books and manuscripts and the reporting of this book i became a great lover of archives, going to the institutions that smiley ended up taking rare maps out of. i got to see a lot of these old documents myself. there's nothing like seeing an original document and being able to touch it with your fingers

and see it with your own eyes. it's really a wonderful service that buildings like this provide and providing access to these materials. so i'm going to dive right in here with a reading from the +e i start with the first sentence from the first chapper so there's nothing you need to know going in. then i'm going to talk a little about the strange character forbes smiley who i got to know very well over the past three years and then show you some images of some of the maps that he stole particularly focusing on the virginia and wash d.c. area. let me dive right in here. this is the beginning of my book "the map thief." e. forbes smiley ii couldn't stop coughing. no matter how much he tried to suppress it the tickle in the back of his throat kelp kept breaking out in hacking cough, drawing glances from the patrons around him.

except for the low hum of the air condition sxgt clicking of fingers on keyboards making smiley painfully aware of the noise he was making. at one point he pulled a hank kerchief out of his pocket to muffle the sound. as he d an exacto knife blade wrapped aside fell softly onto the carpet floor. he folded the cloth and put it back in his pocket, oblivious to what had happened. he was in the binke, an annual gathering of hundreds of map collectors to buy, sell and trade antiquated maps. when people thought of forbes smile y as he was known as friends, dealers, clients and libraries, a few words sprang to mind, gra gar yous, jolly larger than life. he spoke to the family of a italian tenor. his voice was full of money.

when he made phone calls he made sure to announce he was calling from the vineyard. his upper crest afek tagss were tempered by charming self-deprecation. reciprocated with entertaining stories or travel ashgd the world or the progress of the new home he was building on martha vineyard. moss of all, people thought of his laugh. for years people revelled in smileys"vd laugh which only increased in volume the longer it went on. it was the kind of laugh that hindered him three tickets from theater producers who sat him in the front row to egg on audience. and excused the pretension when he was on his obsessionings, architect, new england history, the blues and, of course, maps. whether they liked him or not they were seduced by his knowledge. on morning of june 8, 2005, none

of the librarians recognized him. had they known him, they would have been shock add the transformation had undergone. in addition to the cough that had developed overnight, he was suffering from a splitting headache left over from a night of drinking. smiley had been drinking a lot these days. it was the only thing that took his thoughts away from problems that multiplied in his mind when he was sober. he was abysmal of managing the business, no matter how entertaining the story the truth is he was overextended and hemorrhaging money. as studios as he looked he was feeling a fresh sense of desperation. sitting in a coffee shop he turned his actions over in his mind. he could take the train to new york today and fly to london early. or he could abandon the whole plan and head back to the vineyard saving the expense and hoping to find another way out of his financial mess. while he sat pondering his predicament without reaching a k

the situation in the reading room changed radically in his absence. smiley may have missed the exacto knife blade that fell from his pocket, but a librarian had not. the lie brains make regular sweeps of the room to make sure materials are handled properly and to suddenly alert patrons they were being watched. she immediately spied the blade on the floor.q:z few objects could be more disturbing to someone who works in a building full of rare books than a tool that can separate the pages of a book from its binding. she picked up the blade in a tissue and walked back out of the room. so, that just gives you a little flavor for how i start the book and also a flavor for this character of forbes smiley who as i say i got to know very well and all of his contradictions. even though that's the beginning of my book it$ipñ was the end of the story for forbes smiley. that day, as the librarians

found the exacto knife blade, they begant620q googling the names of the patrons in the:ccx library and recognized forbes smiley was a dealer in rare maps and this made them even more nervous. so they called the yale police department and as smiley left the library a plains clothes police officer was following close behind. this is a map i made for the book. i say that i made it. i actually thought originally i was going to make my own maps for the book. i thought if i was going to write a book about maps i should have my own maps. it took me ten minutes of drawing on paper to realize that wasn't going to happen. i hired an illustrator from the netherlands, which i was pleased by because the netherlands is where the golden age of© map-making was in 1500s and 1600s. this is a map he drew of the yale university campus. you can see right up here at the top is the library and smiley

walked down the street, past the tower.sf british arts center. it was there that the police officer introduced himself and said he was with the library and asked if smiley had per chance inadvertently taken anything with him. smiley, even though he was under no obligation to cooperate he decided that he would go back with this officer to the bin i can and they began looking through his things. first they looked through his briefcase and found a number of rare map there is but smiley said he had brought those with him. they found no evidence to to find that wasn't true. then they noticed him fidgeting with his blazer pocket and something in his blazer and they asked him to take it out. when they did, he took out this. this is a map of new england by

john smith in 1616. this is yale's copy that was done in 1631. i want to pause for a moment and tell you about this map and explain what makes it so important and what makes it so valuable. we all know of john smith from the virginia colony down the street from here and his role in founding that and study in 1607. he had sort of a second chapter in his life after he was sort of drummed out of virginia for reasons that i won't go into. he started exploring this area that was then just known as north virginia with the idea of founding a new colony there. and he thought that it needed a snappier name so he came up with the name new england and john smith was actually the person who coined that term as a way to claim this territory for his home country and sort of tell the other countries, you know, this is english territory. and he also wanted to claim this territory for himself and make sure that he got credit for discovering it and that he was going to be involved in the

colonization and so he put an enormous portrait of himself up here in the corner. and he was so vain that, actually updated the portrait of the years on different versions of the map. this is a later version of the map. you can see his beard is much bushier than earlier versions and his jacket is much more elaborately decorated. another interesting thing about this map is that you probably can't see it from there, but all up and down the coastline here are names of english towns and cities. london is there. and cambridge and oxford and other places. of course, in 1616 before the pilgrims landed in new england, none of those cities or towns existed. the reason they're there on the map is because after he made the map, he brought it to england and presented it to prince charles at the time and asked him to change the names of all the native american settlements to english towns and cities. it was this breathtaking act of virtual colonization that occurred before a single english

settler had actually set foot in the territory. and interestingly, most of the towns or cities disappeared on the map or aren't in the place he put them inspect one remained in the corner. you can see where he wrote plymouth. that is where the pilgrims when they sailed from plymouth with the copy of smith's map in hand on the mayflower they steered to that location and took the name for the plymouth colony. so, this is a really important map and it's a seminal document in the founding exploration of north america. and it's also a quite rare map. even though it's not a one of a kind, there are only a few copies that exist in variation institutions throughout the country and the world.

and because of, that it's a very valuable map. at auction this map could go easily for $50,000 to a map collector. and so when smiley was found with this map that was both rare and valuable one of the librarians at the time noticed the handwriting at the bottom of the map and recognized it as belonging to a patron of yale who donated a lot of libraries and book it is to library. she immediately cried out, that's our map. they put handcuffs on smiley and led him away to spend the night in jail. so the fbi was called in to investigate this case. immediately they realized that they had a problem. so as i mentioned, there may have only been a few dozen copies of this map. it's not so they're there's only one copy. it's not like a work of art in a museum where there's one copy. if it's missing from the wall, everyone knows it's stolen.

an fbi agent came in and said, i understand smiley had a copy of this map, that you are missing a copy of this map but how do i know the copy you're missing is the copy that smiley took? and they actually got lucky very early on in the case with another map smiley had on him that day. it's this one. this is a map by gerard deyoe, a dutch map maker was talking about from the 1500s. this is the world map from his atlas, which is even more rare than the smith map. it was only produced in the first edition of his atlas, which never sold very well and sle few copies of this map survived. probably worth $150,000 at least at auction. and so it wasn't what was on the front of this map that interested investigators, though. it is what was on the back of this map. so, you can see that on the back of the map there were these four little worm holes that had been made by these parasitic pests,

probably hundreds of years ago as it was sitting on the dusty shelf of a library. the four holes on the map lined up exactly where four holes in the atlas that was in yale's collection that smiley was looking at that day. this was as good as a fingerprint to investigators. it was sort of this cartographicic csi they were able to catch him red-handed and say he took this map, yes, it was from the volume belonging to yale. because it was worth over $150,000 they could charge him with theft of a heritage which carries a hefty sentence. the fbi knew smiley had stolen at least two maps maybe more. the fbi agent began to further investigate the case. even though he knew nothing about rare maps when he started working on the case, he did know a lot about thieves. and he knew that when a thief is caught red-handed, it's usually

not the first time they've committed a theft. so, he began calling around and sending e-mails out to other rare book and manuscript libraries around the country. he asked them two questions. have forbes smiley been in your collection lately? and, are you missing any rare maps? and six institutions answered yes to both of those questions. yale university both the sterling and the beinecke boston public library, new york public library, missing from two divisions, the rare book and map division, the hoeten lie enen enen houghton library and newberry library in chicago. investigator hs to determine what maps were missing from the libraries, what books smiley looked at, which maps he may have taken and where those maps may have ended up. and it became quite an ordeal. the library hs to go back in

many cases through hundreds of call slips dating back several years to find which items smiley had looked at and then compare them to their catalogs. for those books acquired over 100 years ago they were not accurately cataloged as to what maps they contain. some might just say map or maps. some may list some maps but not others. some may have said they had a map but they're missing it long before smiley got there. it was really this difficult enterprise they had to go in to figure out the extent of his crimes. lucky for them, he did come forward when he heard there were federal charges pending against him. smiley did come forward and he offered to cooperate. as david said, he eventually admitted stealing 97 maps but the libraries to this day accuse him of stealing more than he admitted. i'll get to that in a moment and

show you some examples of that. the maps that he stole were worth over $3 million in total. so, they were -- the cream de la cream of antique maps. most expensive most valuable maps that he stole. and so all this happened in 2005-2006. this was all -- had been reported in newspapers. pretty well known by the time that i started on this trail in 2011. i remember reading about this case in "new yorker" and other places it happened. i was a map lover myself and i was intrigued by these rare obs and the fact that people were willing to pay thousands and tense of thousands of dollars for them. it made me curious to know more about why that was the case. but i also wanted to know more about smiley. he had never talked to the press before. he had given an interview. he had never explained why he started taking these maps especially given the fact that

he was himself a rare map dealer. by all accounts loved these maps and celebrated them. what was it that caused him to go to the dark side as it were and start actually taking these maps out of libraries? so that is the task i set for myself. originally i was going to write an article for boston magazine and update the case, tell it start to finish. through a friend of smiley he agreed to talk to me. i sat across the picnic table at martha vineyard and bit end of that four hours i was completely convinced this was not a magazine article, this was a book. that he was such a complex character in this world of map dealers and map collectors was so interesting. final lishgs the stories of the map makers themselves many times were just as interesting as smiley's story f not more so. i'm going to share about what i learned about smiley and some of these maps that he stole. this is another map i had made

for the book in new england showing key stories and locations. smiley grew up in this small town in new hampshire called bedford. despite his high flute ant name, e forbes smiley ii. he was always fascinateded with history. even as a young boy, he would read about history and studied history of the area, particularly the history of new england. and he went to college in -- hampshire college in massachusetts and he made history a special. history and religion. he was known for all sorts of eccentric things like reciting the iliad in the middle of campus and telling his friends about every church steeple they passed and the architecture of that church. after college he settled in new york. it was there he entered the map

trade. he started at this department store, b. altman's department store, which no longer exists but had a small division that sold rare maps and atlases. it was conveniently located just a dozen blocks from new york public library. that's where his real education in maps began. and he became so fascinated by looking at the different maps and comparing them to each other and realizing which map maker copied from whom. and he just couldn't get enough of this topic and became incredibly knowledgeable in a short period of time. as he went on as a map dealer, he was successful. the late 1980s was a very good time to become a map dealer because the prices of maps were suddenly increasing exponentially. and, you know, people -- well, even wealthy people were no longer able to afford a lot of fine art. the prices for that had become untakenable. so maps became a new way of

collecting for folks who were wealth y not billionaires. doctors, lawyers, wall street executives. who would buy these rare maps, put them on their walls and have if not a one-of-a-kind item, a very rare item that was beautiful to look at and also had this historical story behind. -t. they became very popular. maps that went for a couple thousand dollars went for tens of thousands of dollars and eventually approaching hundreds of thousands of dollars. he put together a collection of maps in the new york and mid-atlantic region for a man named larry slaughter which was donated to new york public library as slaughter collection. he also put together a collection of maps in boston and new england for a man named

norman lebanthol. ironic given later events and given he was taking maps out of those very libraries he was stealing ing putting them into. he also had several flaws that were his undoing. he was a terrible business person. from the beginning he was chasing maps he couldn't afford and buying one map in order to pay for another one. he became notorious for bouncing checks to his fellow dealers and some stopped doing business with him and hurt his client base. in addition, he -- as maps became more valuable in the 1980s there was a lot more competition that ensued. so, a number of new map dealers came in and they really looked

at it as a business and we may think of map dealing and collecting as this rarefied pursuit of people, you know, stud yously studying in libraries. it's quite a business in some ways a cut-throat business of people bidding against each other at auctions for a very small number of var sxrair valuable items. a number of these map dealers didn't like smiley very much either because he bounced checks to them or because they just thought him arrogant and sort of a know it all and so they would bid against him in auction and sometimes drive the price up on him. sometimes they would bid together against him. lastly smiley was just never a team player. always had this secretive, go it alone attitude that you know he was just going to make it on his own two feet and he didn't need anyone else's help. again, that contributed to his financial problems because it

was really necessary sometimes for different dealers to sort of ban together in bidding on certain items they would split up. so he became even less able to compete because of that. eventually, as he told me he was too proud to admit he failed in this pursuit and he told me that he was looking at the map of sterling memorial library on the table in front of him, realizing he could fold it down to the size of a credit card, walk out with it in his pocket and sell it the next day for $30,000. that was the moment when temptation got the better of him. he sold that first map and may have told himself it was just this one-time thing he was going to do and get out of his financial duress. of course, that started a slippery slope and he began stealing more and more maps and selling them for more and more money and became map thief that i write about in my book. i'm going to talk about a few of the maps he stole just to give

you an idea of the kind of items he took and why they're valuable and what he did with them when he took them. this is another map by john smith. it's actually a map he made a few years before his map of new england and a map of the virginia colony. it's a particularly striking map because john smith had rudimentary survey materials. he went up and down chesapeake bay in the rivers in a very small boat and just took sights on different landmarks. from that he was able to create this very accurate map of the region that was in use as a map for 200 years after he created it. on this map he did not put a picture of himself. he put a picture as the native american chief in the corner and this picture of another native

american here. there's little crosses at some areas along the rivers he put there and scholars today think that was the limits of the area he actually individually surveyed himself. point past that was the area he actually relied upon the knowledge of the natives of the area to mapt rest of the area. you can see how accurate that is, as well. it's particularly successful and really quite amazing he was able to do the job on this. smiley had stole -- there were two copies of this map missing from the boston public library. when smiley admitted the maps he had taken, he only admitted to stealing one. and interestingly enough, the librarian afterwards did not give up on this. he was sure smiley had taken the other one as well and he began scanning dealers' catalogs and actually saw a copy of this map

and went down to new york with the book that the map was missing from and was able to match that map against the book by a little impression that was made in the page on the -- that was facing where the map was missing. so that's at last one map smiley did not admit to that was eventually recovered by the $ library. on the smith map you can see north is actually to the right. then on this map north is at the top. you can see the chesapeake bay. the appalachian mountains here. this map was sort of the definitive map of the 18th century washington area. it was all done from original surveys by joshua frye and peter jefferson. if you're wondering if that

jefferson has any relation to thomas jefferson he was actually his father. and after peter jefferson died he bequooeted his surveying equipment to thomas jefferson who created some maps of his own, including one map of virginia. in map was made between the growing tension between french and english. as colonists move inward into the mountains, they move against the french who were coming down from canada. eventually, that would erupt in french and indian war. but for almost 100 years before war actually broke out, there was sort of this cartoftgraphic war between french and indian for them to draw competing maps of the ohio valley and into virginia. so, this map is;.j+l actually commissioned in order to survey this area here where these

competing claims were taking place. and was, you know leaps ahead of any maps for the time and was the most accurate map into the revolutionary war. as i said, this was thomas jefferson's father and thomas jefferson used this map as well to create his own maps. this was taken from the boston public library. an atlas of maps made in 1875, one around the american revolution. this is one smiley took out of that atlas. i want to show you a few maps of washington, d.c. as well since we are -- since that's where we are today. this is a map made in 1792. it was the first printed map of washington, d.c. it was made by andrea elocott,

who was assistant to londfont plaza. he designed washington, d.c. and designed it on a model of paris and grand boulevards that would go through the center of the city and, unfortunately, he put the boulevard through the property of one of the main land owners at the time and he wasn't that thrilled about it and complained to washington and jefferson, who were in charge of plans for the capital and londfont was dismissed so it fell to. elocott to continue his plans and actually put them into practice. he finished the surveying and produced a series of maps of washington, d.c. and the first published map was don done in june of 1792.

there were two pirated versions that appeared in magazines before the official map was ever: printed. this map you're looking at was actually in a magazine that was printed in boston. the boston map is incredibly rare. after smiley's thefts were discovered, harvard and boston public library were both missing their copy of the elocott map from the edition of that magazine. of course, smiley only admitted stealing it from -- admitted stealing one copy of this map. so, after the maps were recovered, a number of the libraries all went down to new haven and -- to look at the maps and determine whose was whose. they had a little bit of a fight over some of these maps. being librarians, it was a quiet fight, but there was a lot of

maps that changed hands and that went to different institutions who were able to prove through different marks on the map or different impressions whosezb" ÷ was whose. this was actually proven to be harvard's copy of this map. so the boston public library is still missing their edition. this is the last map i want to show you. this is also by elocott and also of washington, d.c. you can see it's a very different looking map. and it was meant to be displayed in this diamond shaped like this. and as you can see it's all of the topography of washington, d.c. sort of stripped of the landmarks and the street names. and this one is also quite rare. after smiley's thefts were revealed, yale university, the sterling library there realized they were missing their copy. and smiley actually listed a

copy of this map on his website. in that listing mentioned that he knew of no versions of this map that had come up for auction since 1991 when he had actually helped purchase it for the slaughter collection, which ended up at new york public library. but as i said, yale was missing their copy of this map. right around the time it was on smiley's website the map also appeared in the catalog of a dealer smiley was known to do business with. smiley never admitted to stealing this one. yale didn't have any defining marks that would show this is actually their map. they didn't have a digital image of it. they didn't have any other kinds of evidence and so because of that, the fbi decided that it wasn't a map that smiley had stolen and it was never returned and never recovered back to yale.

i just wanted to close with a few words about what smiley did with the money he gained from stealing these maps because in some ways i find this to be one of the more compelling aspects of the story and one of the things that convinced me there was a book here. this is a map of a small town in maine called ;ófjusebeck, a flea bite of a town. can you barely find to a map in far northern maine. smiley purchased a farmhouse here in the late 1980s, right up here. and given his life of history and love of new england, he restored this farmhouse lovingly to his ideal of a perfect new england farmhouse. he didn't stop there. he began buying up property including the post office and a restaurant, a general store. he renovated this children's park with gazebo. half the people in town looked at him as this robin hood coming

in to save the economic prospects. he employed carpenters, laborers, people that worked in his shops and stores. all in all spent about $1 million on this project of renovating this town. of course, the other half of the town wasn't all that pleased about some new yorker coming up to maine and telling them what to do with their town and their property. a number of residents of the town got into a feud with him. particularly the folks across the street from him on the lake= qq r(t&háhp &hc% was a family known as the -- named the moriartys. they had a different version of the town they would like to see and it involved an ice cream shop and speed boat marina, sort of this pleasure boating center. and the two of them really came at odds and started this feud that really divide the whole town in half so half of the people would eat at smiley's

restaurant and mail letters if his post office. the other half of the town would eat there, mail letters there and eat at the restaurant in that town. it eventually grew into this legal battle that ended up costing smiley even more money in legal bills on top of the money he was already spending on this renovation project and all the people he was employing and the deaths that he had had in the first place. and it caused him to rapidly increase the pace of his

time off for the cooperation that he provided to the fbi. he currently lives on martha's vineyard where last i knew he was working as a lands escaper for $12 an hour. he has nothing to do with rare maps anymore. in prison he did pick up a new hobby of water color painting. this is a picture of a water color on display at an art show at martha's vineyard i attended. just goes to show you how talented a person he is that just in a few short years was able to produce a water color of this caliber. as you can see on the label, there's one change since his map dealing days. he no longer goes by the name e. forbes smiley iii. now he goes by edward and sometimes ed. thank you for coming. i'm happy to answer some

questions. there are microphones in the aisles. if you have a question, please come up to the mike. >> thank you very much. informational and then more general. the boulevard in d.c. and the landowner and then a more general -- realize this isn't necessarily your area of authority, but how well are institutions doing these days, in your opinion, of protecting their goods? >> so your question is -- >> what was the boulevard and who was the property owner? >> that i can't tell you. i once knew that during my research, but there are so many maps and so many details. >> comment on how institutions in your opinion are doing these days in terms of protecting their materials? >> that i can't comment because i look quite a bit into that. particularly, the libraries that

smiley target have had done a lot to change their security practices. they've installed new cameras. they have, in some cases, installed new policies for how maps are delivered to patrons for example, yale has a bar code affixed to every single map and it's scanned in and out of the vault every time someone wants to look at it op other libraries have instituted digital images so if, god forbid, a map has gone missing they can identify it and tell that it's their map. on the other hand, you know, as you know you know, libraries are chronically short-staffed and underfunded and so there's a real variation between libraries and what they've -- what they've done and what they've been able to do. you know there wasn't a single curator who i spoke to who said this couldn't happen again somewhere. as long as we're providing access to these materials, unless we want to lock them all up and provide digital images to people, which would be a real

shame, you'll assume some measure of risk and the question is, how much risk are you able to minimize. >> i have a question over here. i got a sense of reading your book at the end, a number of libraries weren't forthcoming in the maps they were missing. and i was kind of -- wanted to get your feel for why you felt -- they felt that way? >> yeah. there was a real -- there was a real variety of the amount of transparency that libraries were able to show. and in some cases that's understandable. you can imagine that if you are looking for donations of material from people, you know, you don't want to be necessarily advertising the fact that have had items stolen from your institution. unfortunately, that also, you know plays into some of these

thefts by smiley and other people and allows them to continue because of the fact that these thefts aren't widely disseminated. it sometimes can allow them to go on a lot longer than they otherwise would have. there's a real tension that exists there. you know to their credit, i think libraries have gotten better about that and become more transparent since the smiley affair. i was impressed how transparent the libraries were and opened up their files and were incredibly open and the information they gave me. there still is that secrecy that exists in terms of these deaths that can help aid and abet thieves. >> i think there must be a commonality between the market for these maps and old books or

antic we tik antiquities, in that there's almost a black market that people ignore from where those maps come from. how it would be possible for people to buy these things when they come from yale or whatever. and i'm just wondering if you could talk a little more about that black market and how things can be sold so easily when they're so -- while they have been stolen. do you not have to say what the precedent is and where they got them? obviously, the answer is no. >> it's interesting as i began to research this issue ask how maps are bought and sold. people asked me, is there a black market where they're selling these things, and then it's ending up in, you know,

this private collection in japan or something. it's actually unlike art theft thefts of rare maps and books can be done quite out in the open because there are multiple copies of these things. smiley would go primarily from three dealers he worked with for a number of years and he would say that he was selling off maps that were in the collection of an old boston dealer -- old boston collector and he was going to be coming to them with very rare material over the next few months. those dealers bought that story, they believed him and they bought these maps and then sold them on to other collectors and they put them on their wall in fool display. there's definitely some criticism of whether those dealers should have asked more questions and if they should have accepted smiley's story at face value. at the same time it's difficult in some cases to prove the provenance of these maps.

once you go back a couple of decades, it can be sometimes hard. even if you know it was sold at action in the 1990s then you can ask, where was it sold before that going back two or three deaths is hard. i think there has been a lot more effort on the part of dealers to look at provenance and not just take the dealer's word at face value but i think that is one of the -- one of the issues inherent in the field that sort of aids and abets the thieves. >> there's no shame either. it's wanting to acquire it overcomes the possibility that perhaps, it was taken from yale library. it just astounding me, but, i mean -- >> i certainly think that's the case. there's this willful ignorance that you don't ask too many questions because you don't want to know the answers to them. i don't think that represents

everyone in the field but certainly some of that does go on. >> i just wanted to answer the question the gentleman raised a few moments ago about the location. it was torn down by daniel carroll, relation to charles carroll, carrollton so far, the mansion was located at the intersection of what is now new jersey avenue and independence avenue, basically in the front yard of the capitol building. and fontnue knew what land was his to play with and what was still private land. he knew that was still his lands, carroll ignored him. to prove his point, he went in in the dead of night and tore that building down just to prove it was his. that's what helped to contribute. >> thank you so much for telling that story. just goes to show you the story behind these maps, you know, politics was alive and well in

d.c. even before the city of d.c. was actually created here. >> i'm wondering how much is water color sell for? is there possibly a further for him in that field? >> i don't know. that art show was part of a grant that the island cultural commission gave to different artists to display their work. i think he -- maybe he he made like $2,000 or something. you know, certainly i don't know if it has occurred to him that he could sell e. forbes smiley originals and profit just from the name alone. to my knowledge, he hasn't gone and actually sold any of his work. >> thanks for the engaging talk. two quick questions. if there were a movie on the ed smiley story, who do you see playing mr. smiley, since you know him that well? secondly sitting with the archivalists of the united

states sitting right in front of you, if you could procure any map in any way without punishment in the world, what would that be? >> got to be careful what i say here. in terms of the movie, you know, i sort of see william h. macy as the smiley character. that immediately springs to mind. maybe brad pitt as the investigative reporter telling his story. >> casting is being done as you speak. >> in terms of the map that i would take, if i -- if i could, it would probably be a map from yale that i uncovered during my research. it was by this gentleman by the name of john seller and there's only three copies in the world and it was a very early map of new england and it shows the --

the area of new england around the time of king phillips' war. it's this very interesting map where there are all these pictures of sort of colonists and native americans fipting each other and this glimpse in time to this area. of course, being from new england, it's really particularly interesting to me. and the interesting thing about that map is that it's actually been stolen twice from yale. it was stolen back in the '70s and was by another map thief who sold it and it was recovered. and then smiley came in and stole it again. and actually put a copy on his website. he actually colored the map, which was particularly devastating given the fact there's only three of these things. he actually colored it. he put it on his website. in his description of the map said there was a version at yale that was uncolored but that this was a different version. which was just really you know the height of