e. forbes smiley iii couldn't stop coughing. no matter how he tried to suppress it it broke out into a hacking cough drawing glances from the pate trons sitting around him. the glass fish bowl at the library at yale university was quiet, except for the low mum of the air conditioning and the clicking of fingers on key boards, making smiley painfully aware of the noise he was making. at one point he pulled a hanker chief out of his pocket to uffle the size, and an blade fell onto the floor. he folded the cloth and put it back in his pocket, oblivious to hat had just happened. when people thought of forbes smiley, as he was universally known by friends, dealers, lie brarnse and clients, a few words sprang to mind. gregarious, jolly, larger than life. he spoke with a resonance of an italian tenor mangled by. his voice, was full of money. when he made phone calls he made sure to announce he was calling from the vine yard. his upper crust were tempered by a charming self deppry cation. he ingratiated himself with many librarians by i

calling around and sending e-mails out to other rare book and manuscript library's around the country. them two questions. has forbes smiley been in your collection lately and are you missing any maps? these two universities answered yes. both were missing maps. the new york library was missing maps from two divisions. the library at harvard and the british library in london and the newberry library in chicago. now it became this sort of treasure hunt where investigators had to determine what maps were missing from the library's, what books smiley look at, which maps he might have taken and where those might have ended up it became quite an ordeal. backibraries had to go through hundreds of call slips dating back several years to find out which items smiley had looked at and compare them to their catalog for those items. as you can imagine with these rare books acquired over 100 years ago, they were not adequately catalog in terms of what maps they contained. some might just say map or maps. some may list some but not others. some may have been missing them long before smiley got there. it was a difficult enterprise they h