On MAPS-L, Rob Lopresti reports that he just learned that map thief James Brubaker, who had been sentenced to 30 months’ imprisonment for a series of book and map thefts from more than 100 libraries, but especially Western Washington University,…
Actor Fred Melamed is working on a movie about Forbes Smiley, according to an interview in New York magazine: I’m writing a screenplay now, which I’m trying to direct, and it’s about a man who was a well-known map expert,…
Maps dating back to the early 1800s have been disappearing from the vaults of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, The Times of India reports: Almost nothing remains of the entire set of maps that date back to 1803-04: they depict…
There are reports that Forbes Smiley, who was sentenced to 3½ years in prison in September 2006 after admitting having stolen nearly 100 maps from various libraries, was released from prison on Friday: Geolounge, Philobiblos. Smiley, you may recall, was…
Piotr Stanisław Peron, a 47-year-old Pole with Canadian residency, was sentenced yesterday to five years in prison by a Czech court for stealing two 16th-century maps from an Olomouc library, the České Noviny reports. Peron was also expelled from the…
News of another case of map theft from Spain: an unnamed 47-year-old Hungarian national has been detained in the midst of what appears to be a robbery tour of map collections in Spain, Portugal, France and Italy. Nearly 70 stolen…
Farhad Hakimzadeh, who pled guilty to stealing maps, illustrations and other pages from rare books in the British and Oxford University libraries and was sentenced to two years in prison for it, has had his sentenced cut in half by…
ARCAblog, the blog of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, has a translation of a year-old Spanish news article (the original is here) about map thefts; the article mentions the notorious cases of Cesar Gomez Rivero and Forbes…
The Financial Times article, What drives people to steal precious books, does not spend much time answering the question posed by its title; the article, which references recent map thieves, does talk about how people steal precious books (and maps),…
Crime novelist Linda Fairstein’s latest book, Lethal Legacy, has a distressingly familiar plotline. From, believe it or not, The Courier Mail of Brisbane, Australia: “[Series protagonist Alex] Cooper and regular police associate Mike Chapman delve into the shady world…
Map thefts are a part of a greater whole: the theft of antiquarian books. The Guardian profiles a book thief who has managed to elude capture, William Simon Jacques, “one of a handful of highly intelligent, well-educated criminals who operate…
An update on this story: Farhad Hakimzadeh has been sentenced to two years in prison; he had pleaded guilty to 14 counts of theft for taking maps, illustrations and other pages from rare books in the British and Oxford University…
Last month, an Iranian-born businessman pleaded guilty to 14 counts for the theft of maps, illustrations and other pages from rare books in the British and Oxford University libraries. Farhad Hakimzadeh, 60, is believed to have taken pages from 150…
Tony Campbell made an announcement on MapHist a few days ago: “I have today [Oct. 8] posted on the Thefts pages of Map History an account by the map dealer George Ritzlin of his experiences in dealing with Joshua McCarty….
On the agenda at the Northwest Government Information Network’s fall meeting on November 7, 2008, according to Carlos Diaz’s e-mail announcement: “The featured program will be To Catch a Map Thief: The WWU Story of Purloined Maps. Rob Lopresti and…
Harvard’s experts have concluded that the 1612 Champlain map being offered for auction at Sotheby’s next month is not their missing map. Previously: Harvard’s Missing Map?…
A rare 1612 map of Canada will be auctioned at Sotheby’s next month. Is it the same map that went missing from Harvard University? Harvard discovered that its copy of Samuel de Champlain’s map was missing in 2005, during an…
Also on MapHist, Tony Campbell points to this scorching blog entry by Travis McDade (a library administration professor and author of The Book Thief; see previous entry). Dade is writing about two thefts of rare books from the Rutherford B….
74-year-old map thief James Brubaker was sentenced to 30 months in prison yesterday, the Calgary Herald reports; he had pleaded guilty to two counts in June. (Why the Calgary Herald? Because the Montana-based Brubaker apparently hit both the Universities of…
For the latest developments in the case of César Gómez Rivero, who is facing charges related to the theft of maps from Spain’s National Library, see this July article from El Pais and this more recent article from the Uruguayan…
An electrician has been given a suspended sentence for stealing approximately £89,000 worth of maps, books and documents from Birmingham University’s library, the Birmingham Post reports. Richard Delaney, 37, was caught after failing to return a van that had been…
More on the Brubaker case: a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Montana outlines the federal case against James L. Brubaker, who pleaded guilty last month to charges of possession and interstate transportation of stolen…
A follow-up to this story: James Brubaker has pleaded guilty in federal court; he had been charged with stealing rare books — or pages torn from them — and selling them on eBay. Though he was largely busted for thefts…
Map thief Peter Bellwood was sentenced by a British court to four and a half years in prison in 2004; now Denmark has had its crack at him: he was sentenced last Wednesday to a year in prison, plus a…
The Missing and Stolen Maps Database has been announced. In early February 2008, the International Antiquarian Mapsellers Association (IAMA) voted to provide funding for the development and maintenance of a missing and stolen map database. The database is the result…
Two years ago, I reported that a number of government documents in a Western Washington University library had been vandalized; at least 648 maps and coloured plates had been torn from at least 108 volumes in the United States…
A note from the British Library’s Security Co-ordinator, Judith Barnes, that appeared on Shelf:Life and has been reprinted at PhiloBiblos: I very much regret to report that we have discovered the theft of 74 maps from Description de l’Univers, contenant…
A map stolen from a copy of the 1482 Cosmographia held by Spain’s National Library that turned up in a Sydney gallery has been returned by the Australian government. Previously: Of 19 Stolen Maps, 11 Have Been Recovered; Map Thief…
Last October, the Rare Books and Manuscript Section (RBMS) and the Map and Geography Roundtable (MAGERT) of the American Library Association passed a resolution commending booksellers, auction houses and map dealers for their assistance in recovering stolen maps. “Their efforts…
The denouement of the Forbes Smiley affair, at least as far as the Boston Public Library is concerned, is covered in today’s Boston Globe: “More than 30 rare, antique maps stolen from the Boston Public Library by a Martha’s Vineyard…
The FBI has recovered two more maps stolen from the Spanish National Library, Reuters reports; out of a total of 19 stolen maps, that makes 11 that have since been recovered. Via Map the Universe. Previously: Map Thief Surrenders; Some…
Forbes Smiley’s impact may still be felt at Harvard, where students endure long lines on their way out of the library for security checks, and where Harvard College’s Houghton Library has posted a list of three maps associated with the…
The Times reports that the man suspected of stealing 19 maps from Spain’s national library has given himself up in Argentina. César Gómez Rivero, a Uruguyan-born Spanish national residing in Buenos Aires, tried to negotiate a deal with an Argentine…
More on the case of the maps stolen from the Spanish national library, courtesy of El País: the total number of maps stolen is now listed as 19 (on 12 leaves), but the missing maps are beginning to be recovered,…
More news about the maps stolen from a 1482 edition of the Cosmographia held in Spain’s national library: Spanish authorities have named a suspect, a 60-year-old Spanish citizen of Uruguayan origin currently residing in Argentina; and the missing maps have…
Libraries aren’t the only targets of map thieves. “Please be advised that on 20 August an atlas was stolen from a private premises in Normandy in France,” Béatrice Loeb-Larocque wrote to Map the Universe. “The atlas contains 48 maps by…
We now have English-language media coverage of the recent map theft from the Spanish National Library: see The Times and The Independent. And we have some more information. The suspect is apparently an Argentine researcher who apparently was authorized by…
A 1482 edition of the Cosmographia held by Spain’s National Library has been vandalized, El Mundo reports. Two maps were removed despite the Library’s security measures: the volumes are kept in a room accessible only by cardholders. There are…
Draft guidelines for map collection security (PDF) are now available from MAGERT’s Task Force on Library Security for Cartographic Resources; they’re seeking comment by September 15. See also the conference report (PDF) from the ALA meeting. Via MAPS-L….
In the July 2007 issue of the Library Student Journal, an article by Joel Kovarsky discusses security and theft-prevention measures in library special collections, and the challenges of keeping rare materials both safe and available. As you might expect, Joel…
When Forbes Smiley was caught red-handed three years ago, it was at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but it was the map collection at the nearby Sterling Memorial Library — and the state of disrepair of its catalogue…
The Journal News has more on the recovery of the 1823 Tanner Atlas. The atlas was taken from the Rockland Historical Society last month; the suspect is a former society employee. A Philadelphia bookseller who had been tipped off to…
The copy of the Tanner Atlas that was reported stolen earlier this month has been recovered, according to a post on Exlibris, which announced that the atlas “has been recovered in Pennsylvania by a bookseller who was aware of the…
Last September, in addition to his 3½-year prison sentence, map thief E. Forbes Smiley III was ordered to pay restitution to his victims; at the time, the amount was tentatively set at $1.9 million (see previous entry). Today the final…
Via MapHist, a report on the Ex-Libris mailing list that a copy of Tanner’s 1823 New American Atlas was stolen from a downstate New York library between April 20 and 22. (The David Rumsey site has numerous examples from this…
Kim Martineau is the Hartfort Courant reporter whose first-rate coverage of the Forbes Smiley map theft case was the subject of many of my posts; since Smiley’s sentencing last fall, she’s been speaking about her experiences covering the case…
You didn’t think we were done with the map thievery just because Forbes Smiley is in the big house, did you? Antique Trade Mark reports that 50 antique maps went missing from a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania rare book store some time…
If you had thought you’d heard the last about Forbes Smiley — who is currently serving a three-and-a-half-year federal sentence after having admitted to stealing nearly 100 maps from various libraries — then you were mistaken. The Hartford Courant’s Kim…
Yale University is considering a series of new library security measures following three (!) reviews set into motion by the Forbes Smiley case, Yale Daily News reports (not Safari-compatible). Among other things, reading rooms will be videotaped and cataloguing and…
The Boston Public Library has released a list of maps classified as missing from the Leventhal Map Center. According to yesterday’s press release, the list has been released now that Forbes Smiley has been sentenced. [T]he Boston Public Library is…
Kim Martineau, the Hartfort Courant reporter who filed many excellent stories about the Forbes Smiley map theft case, will be a guest speaker at the November 16th meeting of the Washington Map Society; she’ll also be speaking to the New…
The Hartford Courant: “A state judge sentenced E. Forbes Smiley III, the Martha’s Vineyard map thief, to the maximum five years in prison Friday, a move that was largely symbolic and unlikely to add time to the 3½-year sentence Smiley…
A Hartford Courant editorial adds to the chorus fulminating against the sentence handed to Forbes Smiley last week: Should a judge forgive a car thief because he returned the vehicle? Should a mass murderer get a lighter sentence because he…
Antiques and the Arts Online’s article on Forbes Smiley’s sentencing contains some information not seen in other coverage. It doesn’t hurt that it lacks the gosh-wow factor inherent in so much mainstream coverage, where reporters stand in awe of the…
Following previous lists issued by Harvard and Yale libraries, the New York Public Library has issued a list of missing antiquarian maps and a list of rare books from which maps have been taken. Via Maps-L. I don’t have any…
Connecticut Public Radio (WNPR)’s program, Where We Live, had a long segment dedicated to the Forbes Smiley sentence on last Thursday’s program. Featured, a long interview with map dealer William Reese (see previous entry), who shared his thoughts on the…
The Associated Press: A renowned dealer who admitted stealing nearly 100 rare antique maps was sentenced Wednesday to 3½ years in prison after one librarian described him as a “thief who assaulted history.” E. Forbes Smiley III, a 50-year-old resident…
Attorneys for the British Library and Forbes Smiley have made their submissions regarding Smiley’s upcoming sentencing; now it’s the prosecution’s turn. In their sentencing brief today, prosecutors explained Smiley’s motives for stealing nearly 100 maps, the Associated Press’s John Christoffersen…
The 39-page sentencing memorandum written by Forbes Smiley’s defence attorney, Richard Reeve, is available online (PDF) from the Hartford Courant (see also the attached exhibits). The document responds to the memorandum submitted last week by the British Library, partially on…
Forbes Smiley’s sentencing has been postponed until October 13. No reasons as yet for the delay; the hearing had already been pushed back to accomodate libraries’ sentencing memoranda. Update, Sept. 27: This applies only to Smiley’s sentencing in state court…
In the wake of the British Library’s submission calling for a stiffer sentence than called for by the guidelines, Forbes Smiley’s attorney is asking for leniency, the Associated Press reports. Specifically, he’s asking for three years, rather than the five…
News coverage of the British Library’s submission regarding Forbes Smiley’s upcoming sentencing continues to trickle in: here are stories from the Library Journal, the Vineyard Gazette and the Yale Daily News — the last covering libraries’ stepped-up security following Smiley’s…
The Guardian adds to the coverage of the British Library’s brief asking for a harsher penalty for Forbes Smiley (see previous entry). I must confess to some misgivings about the ferociousness of the libraries’ response to Mr. Smiley. He’s already…
The British Library has unleashed its hired gun (see previous entry). In a court filing yesterday, the Library’s attorney, Robert Goldman, asks that Smiley be sentenced to up to eight years, rather than the five to six years agreed to…
Travis McDade writes, “I have a book coming out in October about a man who stole books and maps from Columbia University some years ago. The book deals a little with his theft and capture but largely with the…
Rare book and map dealer William Reese is donating $100,000 to Yale University — a donation that the university will match and add to with a fundraising campaign. The money will go towards digitizing and cataloguing Yale’s maps: the eventual…
The British Library has hired Robert Goldman, an attorney who specializes in art thefts, to represent it in hopes of tracking down the missing maps that Forbes Smiley has not confessed to taking. The Hartford Courant’s Kim Martineau has a…
The results of Monday’s meeting between libraries from whom Forbes Smiley stole maps will be kept private, the Harvard Crimson reports, though the article suggests that no actions have been ruled out, including private investigators and a civil suit. Via…
Today’s Vinyard Gazette story about the Forbes Smiley case refers to Monday’s meeting of libraries from whom Smiley stole (see previous entry) but adds little new information; it’s mostly a recap, but does emphasize the penalties Smiley faces next month….
The Harvard Crimson reports on the growing concern that Forbes Smiley may have stolen more maps than he admitted to, and on a meeting of affected map libraries this Monday: “But at least four of those libraries, including the Houghton…
Yale University issued the following statement on August 1: Several recent news stories have mischaracterized Yale University’s views regarding the federal investigation of map thefts by E. Forbes Smiley. Yale is confident that the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office…
Last month Yale issued a list of missing maps; today Harvard has done the same: I have a copy of their list (two pages, 25 KB, PDF file). See previous entries: Stolen Harvard Maps to Be Returned in September; Forbes…
Kim Martineau’s latest article (see previous entry) has been picked up by the wire services, but the Boston Globe has a new article on the matter of whether Forbes Smiley took more maps than he’s confessed to, with, as you…
More from the Hartford Courant on the libraries’ growing belief that Forbes Smiley may not have fessed up to all the maps he stole from them. In a nutshell (and as covered previously here), the libraries’ post-arrest inventories turned up…
From today’s Boston Globe: “Eight maps purloined from the Houghton Library at Harvard University will be returned to the institution in September, when E. Forbes Smiley III is sentenced for their thefts, according to a US Justice Department spokesman.” See…
After Forbes Smiley was caught in the act of stealing maps from Yale’s Beinecke Library last year, the university began an inventory of its map holdings to discover, comprehensively, what was missing. Precluded by federal authorities from making the list…
Much discussion about Forbes Smiley’s purported cooperation and the appropriateness of his upcoming sentence on MapHist, where Tony Campbell, referring to the news stories that maps from Harvard and the British Library are still missing, is starting to notice a…
The Harvard Crimson’s coverage of Forbes Smiley’s guilty plea naturally focuses on the maps taken from Harvard’s Houghton Library. When last we heard, Harvard was conducting an inventory; according to the article, “Houghton Library discovered that 13 maps were missing…
Forbes Smiley might not be out of the woods yet. Three maps that went missing from the British Library last year (and reported here last September) are still missing. They were not among the maps that Smiley confessed to taking…
E. Forbes Smiley III is based in Martha’s Vineyard; local coverage of his case — of his court appearance and guilty plea last week and the case in general — appeared in yesterday’s Martha’s Vineyard Times and today’s Vineyard Gazette….
The National Post’s coverage of the Forbes Smiley affair focuses on the nine early maps of Canada that were recovered after Smiley’s arrest. See previous entries: Breaking News: Forbes Smiley Pleads Guilty; Forbes Smiley Case: Court Documents; Hartford Courant: “For…
An excellent story about the denouement of the Forbes Smiley affair by Kim Martineau appeared in yesterday’s Hartford Courant — which, again, has provided the leading coverage on this case. Martineau’s article goes into more detail about the missing maps,…
Thanks to Tony Campbell, I’ve acquired copies of the following court documents related to Forbes Smiley’s guilty plea last Thursday (see previous entry): The single-count indictment to which Smiley pled guilty (two pages, 28 KB); The full text of the…
The Associated Press: E. Forbes Smiley III, 50, of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., pleaded guilty to one count of theft of major artwork in connection with the theft of a map from Yale University. He admitted taking a total of 97…
A reminder that Forbes Smiley — the map dealer caught cutting rare maps from books in a Yale University library last year — is due in court tomorrow. From an AP story in the Boston Globe: “Smiley, who pleaded not…
The Hartford Courant, which has done most of the front-line reporting on the Forbes Smiley map theft case (see many previous posts in the Map Thefts category), fulminates against the man in an editorial this morning: “To cultural guardians, this…
The Hartford Courant: “E. Forbes Smiley III, 50, who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, is due to appear in U.S. District Court in New Haven on June 22 to accept responsibility for a staggering number of thefts, bringing a yearlong FBI…
A developing story on the MAPS-L mailing list. Last month, a librarian at Western Washington University reported that a number of government documents had been vandalized. The plates had been removed with a razor (the modus operandi of map thieves)….
Roger Baskes, president of the International Map Collectors’ Society, responds to the Forbes Smiley business (covered here at great length) with an article on what collectors can do to deter map thieves. In the article, which first appeared in the…
The Hartford Courant’s Kim Martineau has been on the Forbes Smiley case for months, and has generally led the reporting on the story (see the Map Thefts category archive for earlier coverage). In today’s edition, she has a story that…
As an experiment, a lot of new links at once: A new Google Earth blog with a rather unwieldy title: Using Google Earth for Earth Science and Remote Sensing (via Ogle Earth). The Prejudice Map is built by querying Google…
Alan Bisbort, writing in the Hartford Advocate, pokes at the class implications of the Forbes Smiley case brought out, in part, by William Finnegan’s New Yorker article (see previous entry): Smiley was one of the elite in the antiquarian trade….
William Finnegan’s long article in the Oct. 17 issue of The New Yorker, which I mentioned in an earlier entry, wasn’t online, but it was very good — an excellent summary of what was known to date with some additional…
The Daily Princetonian covers the Forbes Smiley case in like manner to the University of Chicago Maroon (see previous entry), by using the case to focus on concerns about rare-book and special-collection security in libraries. Meanwhile, through MapHist I learn…
For the sake of completeness, here is a short article from the Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago’s student newspaper, about this Forbes Smiley business (abundantly documented in the Map Thefts category archives); of interest is the description of the…
Controversial map dealer Graham Arader stirs the pot again in the New York Times (free registration required): “‘I’ve been telling everybody that Forbes is a crook for 20 years, and everybody says to me, “You just think the only good…
Tomorrow’s edition of the London Times (or today’s, depending on where in the world you are at the moment), has an article on the Forbes Smiley case that adds some new information from the FBI. Despite Smiley’s plea of not…
The Yale Daily News covers Forbes Smiley’s pre-trial conference, which took place yesterday. The International Herald Tribune reprinted yesterday’s New York Times story (see previous entry), in case an alternate URL is needed. The Toronto Star also reprinted the story….
Forbes Smiley is scheduled to appear in court today; coincidentally, the New York Times covers the case in today’s edition (free registration required). The article, which sums up what is known to date, notes a couple of things I didn’t…
E. Forbes Smiley III has not talked to the media since the news of his arrest on map theft charges broke in July. The Hartford Courant, however, has interviewed friends, neighbours, colleagues and detractors to piece together a portrait of…
More coverage of the recent theft of three maps from the British Library from the Hampstead and Highgate Express; the article seems particularly clueless, and tries to draw in other missing items that are as likely to be misplaced as…
The Montreal Gazette also covers the news that three maps were stolen from the British Library (see previous entry). The Gazette article focuses on a map of particular significance to Canadian history — a 1578 map of Martin Frobisher’s discoveries…
Three early maps — two 17th-century maps of North America and a 16th-century world map — have been taken from the British Library, The Independent reports in today’s edition. The maps were taken earlier this year, in March and June;…
Today’s Los Angeles Times has a story about the Forbes Smiley case that focuses on the security measures adopted by rare book libraries. (If the site asks that you register, clear your latimes.com cookies.)…
An op-ed in today’s LA Times by Rachel Shteir uses the Forbes Smiley case to argue that we are now living in a culture of stealing: “Before Smiley’s arrest, he was, to all appearances, a respectable map dealer with a…
What is to be done? Much discussion over on MapHist about what the Forbes Smiley arrest can teach us about map security, with suggestions about how to tighten security in map collections, such as CCTV, limiting what can be taken…
The Boston Globe reports that 10 rare maps are missing from the Boston Public Library. The library began to check its collection after Forbes Smiley, a frequent visitor to the library, was arrested last month. See also this Boston Globe…
Tony Campbell is keeping tabs on news coverage of the Forbes Smiley court case here, and has asked to be informed of other reporting on this story. For the sake of completeness, here are some earlier news stories on the…
E. Forbes Smiley III, who was charged with stealing maps from a university library (see previous entry), was in court yesterday: he pleaded not guilty; his next court appearance is scheduled for October 3. More on the arrest from the…
When you read The Island of Lost Maps, a book about map theft by Miles Harvey, you get the clear impression that neither map librarians nor map dealers were comfortable admitting that map thieves existed in their midst — that…
(I was going through my e-mail and stumbled across a link that Huw had submitted in late December and that, probably because of the holidays-induced chaos, I simply forgot to post. Anyway, here it is now.) Last December, the BBC…
