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Paper Trail
Close-ups—and some recent history
of Sterling’s rare maps
July/August 2007
by Kathrin Day Lassila ’81
Kathrin Day Lassila ’81 is the editor of the Yale
Alumni Magazine.
After the map dealer E. Forbes Smiley III
accidentally dropped an X-Acto blade on the floor of the Beinecke Library in
June 2005, and was arrested by New Haven police with five of Yale’s rare maps
hidden in his briefcase and suit pocket, the Yale libraries began an emergency
map inventory.
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Librarians quickly identified more than a dozen missing maps. |
In July 2005, University Librarian Alice Prochaska
called in an outside auditor on the project—Bill Reese '77, head of one of
the largest U.S. dealerships in rare books and manuscripts. Checking the
Beinecke was relatively straightforward, says Reese. It has an up-to-date
electronic catalog and keeps records of every item ever viewed by every patron.
Reese’s staff and librarians inspected the books Smiley had looked at and
quickly identified more than a dozen missing maps he had probably stolen.
(Smiley later admitted to taking all but one of them. All but three were
recovered.)
But the Sterling Map Collection was different. No
lists of its patrons' requests had been kept. Only a quarter of its 11,000 rare
and antique maps had been entered into Orbis, Sterling’s electronic catalog.
The card catalog proved strangely unreliable. So, in late July, as the FBI was
pressing libraries everywhere to find out whether they were missing any maps,
Reese came up with a shortcut. “I sat down and I said to myself, ‘If I was
Forbes Smiley, what would I steal?’”
Smiley had dealt principally in the rarest and most
expensive antique American maps. Reese put together a list of about a hundred
likely targets. To find out which of them had once been in the collection but
had disappeared, staff assistant Margit Kaye tracked down old acquisitions
records, and the staff pored over microfiche of the card catalog as it existed
in 1978. All this research was necessary because, disturbingly, the cards for
many of the missing maps were themselves missing from the catalog.
Using Reese’s list as a guide, by August the
investigation had identified 50 valuable American maps that were missing. In
his plea bargain, however, Smiley admitted to 97 thefts, only 11 of them from
Sterling; those 11 were recovered.
As it became clear that the FBI investigation would
take many months, and, Reese says, as he and Prochaska began to understand
“the depth of what had gone on,” they decided to do a complete
inventory—the first comprehensive inventory of the Sterling Map Collection
since 1978. The record-keeping marathon lasted until February and identified
another 50 missing maps. Many lay far outside Smiley’s geographic territory and
far below his preferred price range. Ultimately, Fred Musto, the Map Collection
curator for a decade, was fired for gross mismanagement. (Yale administrators
don’t discuss personnel matters, but the Hartford Courant reported the dismissal in January
2006, and several library staff have confirmed it.)
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Sterling’s collection of rare maps had fallen upon dark days. |
And so Smiley’s sentence of five years, handed down
in June 2006, and the FBI’s recovery of dozens of maps he had stolen from
institutions in the United States and Britain, were bittersweet victories for
Yale. A Yale employee had exposed Smiley’s thefts. But his arrest exposed the
fact that Sterling’s collection of rare maps, a small but brilliant historical
gem, had fallen upon dark days.
The Map Collection was founded in 1946 by Alexander
O. Vietor '36, son of a wealthy New York City family, who served until 1978 as
the collection’s first curator. Vietor was a discerning scholar and active
collector in the post-Depression and post-World War II period, when a great
deal of cartographic material was coming onto the market. Often, if the library
couldn’t afford a map Vietor wanted, he'd buy it himself and donate it.
“Many of the finer examples” of the Sterling Map Collection, map
dealer W. Graham Arader III '73 has written, “were discovered and
purchased by him personally, while the collection as a whole grew prodigiously,
both in size and importance, during his tenure as its curator.”
Since Vietor’s era, the collector’s market in rare
maps has exploded, and the quality of his choices has been made obvious by the
price tags now attached to comparable items on the market. Yale has a print of
a 1507 map by Johann Ruysch (page 47), one of the first printed maps known to
include the New World; another print, privately owned, was advertised for sale
a few years ago at $325,000. A few of Vietor’s acquisitions for Yale, like the
bound volume containing George Washington’s personal collection of maps (page
49), can hardly be priced at all.
But the opening of the Beinecke in 1963 and the
Center for British Art in 1977, with their sumptuous new buildings and the
world-class map collections donated by their founders, marked a shift.
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By the early ’90s, Sterling was having trouble just keeping the rain out. |
The Beinecke especially, as a prominent showcase for
rare books and papers, drew attention from the many rarities collections in
Sterling. And the Beinecke had money. It was equipped from the beginning with sophisticated temperature- and
humidity-control systems, but by the early 1990s Sterling, badly in need of a
renovation, was having trouble just keeping the rain out. The building was so
short on space that by 1999, up to a quarter of the Map Collection was shelved
in dysfunctional places. The collection’s staff—until 2001, just one
curator, one assistant, and a part-time cataloger—was too small for
cataloging an inventory of some 200,000 sheet maps and 3,000 atlases. (It can
take up to two hours to catalog a single map, according to interim curator
Abraham Kaleo Parrish.) And while the Beinecke has also suffered thefts in
recent years—it struggles, like Sterling and like all libraries, to balance
free access for scholars and students with security for the collections—it
does have video surveillance of its reading room and an up-to-date, secure
catalog.
Today, Sterling and its storage space have been
renovated. No one sees any of Sterling’s rare maps without first signing a form
and listing the map requested. Patrons can see only one item at a time, and
only while they themselves are under constant surveillance by two video
cameras. Two full-time catalogers are now at work in the collection, and the
11,000 rarities are their main charge.
All this modernizing fits the larger scope of the Map
Collection today. The maps most used now are those that can be mined for
land-use analyses: a collection of 7,000 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for
Connecticut cities is so popular that the staff has put them all online.
Another much-used set is the U.S. Geological Survey topographical collection --
80,000 topos in all, covering the entire United States and going back to the
1940s.
The Map Collection has also opened a successful line
in digital cartography. Parrish was originally hired in 2001 as a GIS
(Geographic Information Systems) specialist. He and GIS assistant Stacey
Maples, hired in 2005, provide GIS consultation, give tutorials year-round, and
take on six to eight complex computer mapping projects every year. Over the
past several months, Maples has been charting Boswell’s 1764 travels through
German and Swiss territory for a forthcoming volume of the Yale Boswell
Editions. By superimposing scans of eighteenth-century German postal route maps
on modern latitude and longitude coordinates, and then stretching and squeezing
the digital fabric of the old maps to bring their towns and features into
alignment with the modern data, Maples was able to deliver eighteenth-century
historical information with twenty-first-century geographic accuracy.
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“The Forbes Smiley thing was a wake-up call.” |
Eventually, Prochaska hopes to combine the
collection’s strengths—the very old and the very new—by scanning all of
the 11,000 rare maps and putting them online for research. The old maps aren’t
widely known, Parrish admits. The Internet will help.
“If you look at the silver lining to the cloud,
the Forbes Smiley thing was a wake-up call,” says Reese. Since the thefts
were discovered, he says, Yale has taken “huge strides” to protect
the collection and make it more accessible.
Smiley’s thefts are also a reminder to appreciate
what’s left. Great universities and libraries are important partly because they
preserve cultural treasures and make them available to all. In that spirit, we offer a sampling of the rarities on Sterling’s seventh
floor.  |
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