The Map Thief (17 page)

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 for drinks along with Bennett Fischer, and the four raised pints of Guinness and glasses of Jameson to Smiley’s success.

As proud as Smiley was of his accomplishment, however, the perks he expected from the library never came to pass. A year came and went, and no professional catalog for the collection ever emerged. No sale of duplicates was authorized. And no new book about the collection ever appeared. It was with some chagrin, then, that he heard about the publication of a new book based on the other collection he had helped put together—the one for Norman Leventhal.

—

NOW IN HIS EIGHTIES,
Leventhal had begun to seriously think about his legacy, contemplating the best way to preserve the knowledge embedded in his growing collection of maps of Boston and New England. Back in 1990, a conference in Boston organized by John Carter Brown Library head Norman Fiering examined the mapping of New England for the first time. During the event, Fiering proposed a definitive carto-bibliography listing all the known maps of the region and tapped Yale map collection head curator Barbara McCorkle to write it.

Leventhal, however, had a different vision—he was less interested in a scholarly work than he was in a popular book that would appeal to a wide audience interested in Boston’s history. The idea was galvanized by the arrival in 1992 of a new map curator at Harvard University named
David Cobb. Cobb had come from Chicago, which had an active map
society sponsoring cartographic lectures and events, and was struck by the lack of a similar organization in Boston. “What this town needs is a map society!” he told colleagues over a few glasses of wine one day, and they immediately nominated him to start one.

The Boston Map Society began meeting soon afterward, with its official headquarters at Harvard and Leventhal as an enthusiastic patron. By this time, Smiley had stopped working on Leventhal’s collection, so Cobb had few dealings with him. In fact, he met Smiley only twice—in the 1980s at B. Altman and years later when he briefly visited the Harvard collection. He did, however, get to know Norman Leventhal and his curator, Alex Krieger. At the time,
Cobb knew as much about the early mapping of America as anyone in the city, and Leventhal and Krieger began relying on him for advice on buying new maps for their collection.

Eventually, they asked him if he’d like to cowrite a book with Krieger using the collection as the basis to look at the mapping of Boston and New England. Over a series of meetings at Leventhal’s office at the Boston Harbor Hotel, they fleshed out a work that would straddle the line between generalist and specialist, providing scholarly information about the maps interspersed with stories, anecdotes, and photos that would appeal to a coffee table audience.

MIT Press, the university press at Leventhal’s alma mater, agreed to publish the book,
Mapping Boston,
which appeared in August 1999. According to Cobb’s later recollection, the publisher originally set a print run of several thousand copies. Cobb urged more. “This is Boston,” he told them, a city obsessed with its own history. “This is going to fly off the shelves.” He was right. The publisher upped the run to ten thousand, all of which sold out
within a few months of the book’s appearance. The publisher hastily printed another ten thousand. Eventually, the book sold well over twenty-five thousand copies, making it one of the
most popular cartography books ever written.

That October, Krieger and Leventhal commissioned a multivenue
exhibition based on the book at the Boston Public Library, the New England Aquarium, and the Boston Harbor Hotel. The exhibit was the most popular in the library’s history, drawing two hundred thousand visitors in six months.
Smiley brought his friends Scott Slater, Bob von Elgg, and Scott Haas through the exhibit, explaining each map in detail. At one point, Haas remembers Smiley proudly telling hotel staff he was
the one who helped “Mr. Leventhal” put the collection together.
Apart from a thank-you by Leventhal in the foreword of the book, Smiley received no credit for his contribution.

In fact, over the course of a year, Smiley had seen back-to-back exhibitions of much of his life’s work—and yet he’d received little recognition, and no money, for all of his contributions. At the same time, another event later that fall put even more pressure on his career. On November 28, 1999, Smiley’s wife, Lisa, gave birth to
their son, Edward Forbes Smiley IV—Ned for short. Smiley called his friend Slater to brag about how “big, robust, and strapping” a child he was. He’d always been good with kids—he doted on his friends’ children when they came up to Maine, and now he became determined to give Ned as idyllic a childhood as his own. Their home base would be on Martha’s Vineyard, but they’d spend every summer at the house in Sebec, which Smiley now set about turning into even more of a refuge for his family—even to the point of transforming the town itself.

—

SMILEY’S VISION FOR SEBEC
went beyond his restored farmhouse. In fact, slowly but surely he began to construct the Small Hope of his college imagination, despite some objections from his neighbors. I arrived in Sebec in 2013 for the Fourth of July parade, the annual highlight of the town calendar. A hot July sun shone down on more than a hundred people lining both sides of the bridge crossing the narrow outlet where Sebec Lake turns into the Sebec River. They were all dressed in red, white, and blue, waving American flags as shiny muscle cars and fire engines drove past. Children scrambled for Blow Pops thrown from cars, while older folks in lawn chairs held their hands over their ears when a zealous logging-truck driver laid on the air horn.

Across the lake, Smiley’s old farmhouse sat at the top of the hill, the perfect backdrop for the occasion, complete with a red barn topped by a white cupola. When I mentioned Smiley’s name to the locals, however, it garnered an immediate negative reaction. “
He came in here and divided the town,” said Louisa Finnemore, taking a pause from swinging a hammer on last-minute repairs. “He came in with all these rules. But they were all his rules.”

“
Yeah, rules ‘from away,’” chimed in another woman sitting in a
folding chair nearby. That phrase, “from away,” conveys special meaning to Mainers. On its face, it means anyone from out of state, but more broadly, it refers to anyone who doesn’t “get” the Maine way of life. Flatlanders from New York and Boston have been coming up here since the nineteenth century telling people what to do and putting strictures on traditional pursuits like hunting, fishing, and lumbering. Tensions continue between those trying to save the land and those trying to use it.

But northern Maine isn’t easy to stereotype. For every beer-drinking redneck, there’s a hippie back-to-the-lander. They might not agree on politics or land use, but generally they agree to stay out of each other’s way, united by the cardinal rule of “live and let live.” That’s the rule some locals accuse Smiley of breaking. “He just
thought he was better than everyone else,” said one old-timer, sitting down to an after-parade chicken barbecue plate. “
He had a lot of ideas, and some of them were good ideas,” said another, “but he went about them the wrong way.”

In October 1997, a gregarious computer programmer named
Glen Fariel moved with his family into the house next door to the Smileys and soon became a frequent guest. Fariel wasted little time getting involved in town politics, soon being elected one of the town’s three selectmen as well as president of the Big Bear Snowmobile Club—an essential institution during the long Maine winters. Smiley donated money to the group and helped with trail maintenance, but Fariel urged him to do more for the town. Along with the local historical society president, David Mallett, he encouraged Smiley to buy a piece of land across the lake from his home and to help restore it. The land was then choked with smoke bush, a fast-growing shrub that grows a feathery top to give it a “smoky” appearance.
Smiley purchased it in October 2001 and donated it to the historical society to be used as a park.

Mallett—a local folk singer nationally famous for writing “Garden Song” (“Inch by inch . . . ”)—spearheaded fund-raising to clear the property, build an octagonal gazebo, and plant rosebushes. Sebec Community Park opened in time for the July Fourth celebration the following year, with a ceremony dedicating it to the children of the village. Smiley paid to help sponsor kids’ crafts in the park to coincide with the annual parade. But that was only a small part of the plans he and his friends had for the village.

Smiley also purchased land across from the park that was home to
the old Sebec post office, now a rotted shell of a building with an old goat pen and chicken coop out back. Smiley announced plans to restore it as a new centerpiece of the village. Other crumbling mill towns throughout New England had leveraged their natural beauty and charm to become tourist meccas, sprouting artist studios and restaurants serving local food. Why couldn’t Sebec do the same? It was just the kind of grandiose plan that excited Smiley.