Previously: Seymour Schwartz’s Hidden Passion.

• Clausen guesses that the forgery was done in the 1940s or 1950s (“The prime forgery suspect is Carl Schweidler, whom Clausen calls ‘probably the best paper restorer of the 20th century.’”);
• The reason why Christie’s was led astray was that one of the reference gores—the Bavarian State Library’s—was also a fake (that latter fact has already come out, but this article doesn’t gloss over its importance); and
• Barry Ruderman, Clausen’s boss, guesses that this is only the tip of the forgery iceberg.

[Tony Campbell]

Still more coverage of the cancelled auction of the Waldseemüller globe gores that were later identified as fakes, this time from the Houston Chronicle, which pursues the local-interest angle by talking to Michal and and Lindsay Peichl, restorers from Clear Lake, Texas (their firm is Paper Restoration Studio) who were brought in to examine the gores along with other experts. Michal says it didn’t take him long to figure it out:

“My first reaction when I saw the picture was, ‘Oh my God, this is a fake,'” said Michal. “You could tell this was a sheet of paper pulled from a book binding board.

“It was printed on a piece of paper that used to be glued on the back of book and that was a red flag to me because as a forger, if you want to make a fake, that’s where you would go to get a clean sheet of paper.”

[WMS]

Previously: How the James Ford Bell Library Fingered the Fake Waldseemüller Globe Gores; Waldseemüller Auction Cancelled After Experts Suspect Fakery; More on the Waldseemüller Globe Gores Auction; Sixth Waldseemüller Globe Gore to Be Auctioned Next Month.

More on the cancelled auction of the Waldseemüller globe gores from Minneapolis-St. Paul TV station KARE, which looks at the work by the James Ford Bell Library that raised questions about the authenticity of the gores that Christie’s was set to auction last week. And a seriously buried lede: another set of Waldseemüller globe gores may not be authentic either: “During this process, experts also discovered that a copy at the Bavarian State Library in Germany may not be authentic, as well. Ragnow said that copy matches closely with the 2017 Christie’s one.” [WMS]

Previously: Waldseemüller Auction Cancelled After Experts Suspect Fakery; More on the Waldseemüller Globe Gores Auction; Sixth Waldseemüller Globe Gore to Be Auctioned Next Month.

This is a bombshell. Christie’s has cancelled its upcoming auction of a (supposedly) newly discovered copy of Waldseemüller’s globe gores. Experts found evidence suggesting that the gores were a carefully faked copy of the gores found in the James Ford Bell Library. In today’s New York Times, Michael Blanding (who wrote a book on the Forbes Smiley affair) has the scoop on how the red flags were raised. The auction was supposed to take place on Wednesday; the gores were expected to fetch between £600,000 and £900,000.

Previously: More on the Waldseemüller Globe Gores Auction; Sixth Waldseemüller Globe Gore to Be Auctioned Next Month.

When the news broke that Christie’s was auctioning a previously unknown copy of Waldseemüller’s globe gores—the sixth known to still exist—I wondered where it came from and how it was found. Christie’s has now posted an article about the globe gores that answers that question.

Waldseemüller’s set of gores was widely reproduced, yet the example to be offered at Christie’s on 13 December was never cut out—which largely explains why it has survived for hundreds of years. If it had been pasted as intended, Wilson says, ‘wear and tear would surely have seen its demise in the intervening centuries.’

Instead of being cut up, this particular map was used as scrap for bookbinding. It ended up among the belongings of the late British paper restorer Arthur Drescher, who died in 1986 and whose family recently came upon the piece.

Here’s the auction listing. The auction will take place on 13 December; the gores are expected to fetch between £600,000 and £900,000.

Previously: Sixth Waldseemüller Globe Gore to Be Auctioned Next Month.

AP reports that Christie’s will be auctioning “a previously unknown copy” of Martin Waldseemüller’s globe gores on 13 December. This would be the sixth known remaining copy of Waldseemüller’s gores, which were designed to form a small globe a few inches across when pasted onto a sphere. They’re a smaller, less-detailed version of Waldseemüller’s famous 1507 world map, and yes, the globe gores have “America” labelled as well.

No word yet on the provenance of this newly discovered sixth gore; the histories of the previous five are well known. The gores are expected to fetch between £600,000 and £900,000. [Tony Campbell]

Previously: Waldseemüller Globe Gore Found; More About Waldseemüller.

A rare copy of James Palmatary’s 1857 map of Chicago is being auctioned next week, Crain’s reports. Only four copies are known to exist of the map, a bird’s-eye view that depicts the city as it was before the Great Fire; this is the only one in private hands. The remaining surviving copies are held by the Chicago Historical Society, the Library of Congress and the Newberry Library. The map is expected to fetch $20,000 to $30,000. [Tony Campbell]

Joan Blaeu’s Archipelagus Orientalis is to Australia what Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map is to America: a case where a first appearance on a map is referred to as a country’s birth certificate. The 17th-century map included data from Tasman’s voyages and named New Holland (Australia) and New Zealand for the first time. The National Library of Australia is working on conserving its 1663 copy, but an earlier, unrestored version dating from around 1659 recently turned up in an Italian home; earlier this month it was auctioned at Sotheby’s and sold for nearly £250,000. [Tony Campbell]

Meanwhile, at a somewhat more modest scale, an 1884 hand-drawn map of what would later become the tony Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano by colourful local Sam Greer went for C$24,200—five times its estimated price.

On a recent episode of the PBS version of the Antiques Roadshow, Chris Lane appraised a copy of the 1833 Churchman Eagle Map of the United States at $25,000. On the Antiques Print Blog Lane explains how he arrived at that number, which some have thought was a bit on the high side. [WMS]

Previously: Schwartz Collection Exhibition Opens Monday; Schwartz Donates Maps to University of Rochester.

Previously: China at the Center.

A 16th-century portolan chart is being auctioned later this month at TEFAF New York. “The map, which was created by a Genoese cartographer named Vesconte Maggiolo in 1531, is one of the first depictions of America’s eastern seaboard. It’s also the first (extant) map, ever, to show New York harbor,” Bloomberg’s James Tarmy writes. The asking price is $10 million—which would tie it with the Library of Congress’s copy of the Waldseemüller map as the most expensive map ever. The seller, Daniel Crouch Rare Books, has produced a detailed, lavishly illustrated 56-page booklet befitting a map with an eight-figure asking price. [WMS]

The Symposium coincides with the fourth annual Chicago International Map Fair, which runs from the 28th to the 30th at the Chicago Cultural Center. Free admission with a suggested donation of $5-10. [WMS]

1. The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky: “A rare 18th-century wall map depicting frontier Kentucky that was put up for auction Thursday in New York has sold for $37,500—more than twice its high estimated value.” (See the Library of Congress’s copy of the map above.) [WMS]
2. “Two large maps and six sketches of military defenses hand drawn by French military engineers in 1781 and used during the American War of Independence, the last such documents in private hands, will be auctioned off at a chateau in France next month,” Bloomberg reports. “Salvaged in 2007, the maps—that only barely escaped becoming mouse food—show British defenses along the East Coast, including fortifications near New York. They are being sold by the eighth-generation descendants of Marshall de Rochambeau, the commander of the French expeditionary force sent by King Louis XVI to aid the American rebels.” [WMS]

Last month the Wall Street Journal’s Ralph Gardner, Jr. reported on his visit to the Arader Galleries; it’s very much a first-time-experience kind of narrative that is noteworthy for the complete absence of Graham Arader (except in the comments), whose presence usually looms quite large in stories about map collecting. [via]

A copy of an 1853 map of Texas by Jacob de Cordova found in a $10 box of ragtime sheet music sold at auction last weekend for $10,000. The map, once owned by surveyor James M. Manning, who died in 1872, was bought, along with a related letter, by Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi, whose library houses the Manning papers. [via]

With The Map Thief, Michael Blanding presents a book-length exploration of the Forbes Smiley affair, which stunned map collectors and map libraries alike in 2005. Its publication, coming nine years after Smiley’s arrest and four years after his release from prison, is something of an anticlimax, especially for those of us who followed the case so closely as it unfolded (I blogged about it more than 60 times, myself).

Map thieves fascinate us, even if they themselves are not that fascinating (see, for example, the essential blandness of Gilbert Bland, the subject of a previous book about map thefts, Miles Harvey’s Island of Lost Maps), because of what they steal. As stolen goods, antique maps are a curiosity: like art, but more stealable, because there are few copies, not just one.

Unlike Bland, who was an interloper whose catalogues suddenly filled up with suspiciously good items, Smiley was very much an insider in the world of map collecting. With his posh name and pedigreed affect, he looked like old money, though his origins were a bit more modest. E. Forbes Smiley III had privileged access that Ed Smiley (the name he goes by now, incidentally) could never dream of. He filled the role of the “gentleman thief,” an epithet that has since been applied to two other book thieves, William Simon Jacques and Farhad Hakimzadeh—as though the Thomas Crowns of the world suddenly got a taste for old maps.

So I knew that there would be a book about Forbes Smiley some day. Though to be honest I always thought it would come from Kim Martineau, whose reporting for the Hartford Courant provided so much of the bedrock material of the news coverage of this case. But Michael Blanding, an investigative journalist based in Boston, has taken up the task, thanks in large part to Smiley’s temporary willingness to be interviewed. While Smiley changed his mind and backed away, those interviews were sufficient, along with a good deal of journalistic legwork, to transform Blanding’s project from the originally intended article to the book we have here, which provides a view, albeit partial and incomplete by necessity, of someone who has until now been rather inscrutable.

Because Smiley cut the interviews short, we are missing much about the thefts themselves. The key events are largely narrated from the public record, as are the viewpoints of the libraries and other key figures, and the issues around library inventory and security. As someone who followed the case very closely, I found myself reminded, rather than enlightened: the story unfolded much as I remembered. (As I said, I did post an awful lot about the case; I am not exactly the typical reader.)

Had Blanding limited himself to recapitulating the known facts this would have made for a slight volume in every sense. The value Blanding adds to the reportage is the context he wraps around the Smiley case, context that helps us understand the how and why of the case. There are three aspects to that context:

One, by detailing Smiley’s work in map collecting and with map libraries, we get a detailed look at his history with the trade, his expertise, and his relationships with some very serious names in the field. There is a reason, in other words, why Smiley’s arrest sent shock waves throughout the map collecting community: he was known, he was respected, and moreover he had elite access. Stealing maps is all too easy, and it’s even easier with insider knowledge.

Two, by interspersing his narrative with segues into the history of cartography, so that we better understand the importance of the artifacts that Smiley stole, and why libraries complained so bitterly when Smiley’s sentence was, they thought, so light.

And three, by building a portrait of Smiley himself, the person beyond the map dealer: his tendency to act like a personable, benign dictator that came out in his social life and in his conflicts with the residents of Sebec, Maine, where he ran several businesses; his money troubles, exacerbated by financial mismanagement and the cost of keeping up appearances; his grievances against institutions and individuals in the map community.

In the end we get a sense of Smiley’s motives, but the hard question remains: are all the maps he stole accounted for? There are missing maps that the libraries believe Smiley stole, but cannot prove it. And there are still maps recovered from Smiley that as of last year still have not been claimed. There was always a sense during the proceedings that Smiley was holding something back; at this point we may never know whether he still is. Map thieves are usually enigmatic, and Smiley is no exception.

The Map Thief comes out today from Gotham Books.

I received electronic and hardcover review copies from the publisher.

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I knew there would have to be a book on the Smiley case at some point, and one is coming out next month: The Map Thief, whose author, Michael Blanding, has managed to interview Smiley himself, and promises new information about the case. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well Blanding has managed to tell this particular tale, which consumed so much of my attention seven or eight years ago.