The Map Thief

by Michael Blanding

  Smiley wrote him a check and got back on his train, and Reese didn’t think much about him for the next few days—until his bank informed him the check had bounced. Reese was stunned. Here was the biggest transaction of his career to date—and he was left holding the bag for $25,000. Immediately he got on the phone to Smiley in New York.

  “Oh yeah, I’m sorry about that,” Smiley said when he told him about the check.

  “Sorry isn’t good enough,” Reese sputtered. “I want my money.”

  “Well, I don’t have it right now,” he replied.

  “Then I want my atlas back,” said Reese.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have that either,” said Smiley.

  “Well then, get it back from your customer.”

  “I can’t do that either,” Smiley said. “Technically it doesn’t exist anymore.”

  As Smiley explained, he had taken the atlas apart right on the train up to Boston, selling several charts of Boston Harbor to Leventhal and keeping the rest, hoping to sell them to other clients to recoup the cost.

  Reese was speechless. As a dealer, he knew he had no control over what a buyer did with a book he sold. Still, he couldn’t help but be appalled that Smiley had so cavalierly taken apart a book with less than ten known copies in the world. Smiley promised he’d get him the money in three weeks, which in fact he did. But the experience soured Reese on doing business with Smiley. (He made one other transaction, and again Smiley’s check bounced. After that, he vowed, he’d have nothing to do with him again.)

  Smiley put the incident out of his mind. To him, the numbers added up—he just wasn’t able to complete the deal fast enough. But the truth was, he was overextending himself, chasing too many high-priced maps and atlases before he was able to sell them. He told himself that if he just worked harder, eventually it would pay off with financial success. But the map trade was about to get even more competitive—and some of those competitors were not as understanding.

  Chapter 5

  CATALOG NUMBER ONE

  FIGURE 7 LEWIS EVANS. “A GENERAL MAP OF THE MIDDLE BRITISH COLONIES IN AMERICA.” LONDON, 1755.

  1987–1989

  GRAHAM ARADER WANTED to know if I’d read his blog. By his own account the “most successful map dealer in the world,” Arader had already mentioned it a half-dozen times on the phone before I ever met him. Now, when I met him in person at his Madison Avenue mansion, it was one of the first things out of his mouth. “It’s all in my blog,” he assured me. “Everything about Forbes.” Six-two, with a thick, athletic build, Arader sat at a computer desk with his back turned, wearing a dark-blue polo shirt, khaki pants, and white athletic socks.

  We were in the bedroom of the mansion, which doubles as his office. A laundry basket blocked the entryway, a four-poster bed filled most of the room, and a squash racket sat under an antique desk sporting elaborate scrollwork. The room’s most striking aspect, however, was its walls—every available inch covered in maps, hung so close their frames were touching.

  “Want something to drink?” Arader asked, his back still turned. “Want a Coke? Eric, get him a Coke.” This last order was directed to his assistant, who went to fetch me a soda. After another long pause, during which he continued to type at his computer, Arader added, “Want something to eat?” I sat for ten minutes eating peanuts and sipping Coke before he turned around to ask where I was from. When I said Boston, that sent him into a headlong monologue on that city’s history. “The cool thing about Boston is that after the British got their nipples twisted there, they never went up there again. They realized that messing with the people of Massachusetts was a no-win situation, and you know, they stayed with all the hookers in New York, so the Gage brothers could constantly get laid. I’m sorry, the Howell brothers could get laid. Gage was recalled, I believe in 1776. The Duke of Northumberland, Hugh Percy, said, ‘You just got clobbered.’”

  Arader had been a champion squash player at Yale, and having a conversation with him is a lot like a squash game: a constant attempt to hit back whatever balls he slams against the wall. I was about to say something when he got up from his desk and sat astride an armchair, legs spread wide. “That is what got Forbes caught,” he said casually, pointing to a map in the corner. I got up to inspect it, seeing the portrait of John Smith peering out over the map of New England. “He bid against me for that at Swann,” he continued, referring to the New York auction house. “I got the bid, and then he tried to steal one at Yale. I keep it there as a memento.”

  To hear him tell it, Arader was on to Smiley’s thefts before anyone else. “I have been telling people about him for twenty years,” he says. Then again, to hear him tell it, everyone in the map-selling business is a thief. He referred to one well-respected map dealer as “the biggest fence in New York.” Another, he said, “was stealing from Italian libraries for years. . . . There’s me and everyone else. Everyone else is out of morals; they’ll do anything to make a buck.”

  It’s not just the crooked dealers—map collectors, too, are at fault for buying maps at prices too good to be true, knowing the property is stolen. “You go into a massage parlor and you give the girl at the door two hundred dollars, do you think they knew they were going to get a jerk-off?” he asked. “These guys feel like the day they were born, God came down and put a star over their heads, and they could walk around the planet, and they were going to buy maps for thirty-five percent off what I had to pay at auction,” he continues.

  “These are your clients you are talking about?” I tried to break in.

  “Yeah, stars over their heads.”

  —

  W. GRAHAM ARADER III got into the business back in 1972 while he was still a student at Yale. His father, a management consultant and commerce secretary for the State of Pennsylvania, was also an amateur map collector. When his son spent a gap year in England after high school, he used to send him to map dealer Mick Tooley with orders for maps by Blaeu and Speed. Arader picked up more than a few maps himself—eventually amassing $8,000 in debt for his collection. His father refused to bail him out, telling him he’d have to sell off some of his wares. Sell he did, operating a minigallery out of his dorm room and advertising to the Yale medical faculty—the only people he could think of who would be willing to pay for rare maps. Upon Arader’s graduation in 1974, his father advanced him $150,000 to start his own business, and Arader went from antiques show to antiques show buying and selling maps.

  He had a threefold strategy: obtain the best material he could, learn as much as he could about it, and then sell the hell out of it. Figuring that when you are dealing with rich people, an expensive map was more desirable than a cheap one, he began marking up prices exponentially. A map he bought for $1,000, he sold for $5,000. “There was inflation, and then there was Graham Arader,” a London map dealer once remarked. Suddenly, the map trade was thrown into chaos as Arader started asking, and getting, prices that genteel European dealers never would have imagined.

  He was a shameless self-promoter, telling the Associated Press as far back as 1979, “I am the best in the world at what I do.” One of his competitors told The Wall Street Journal in 1980 that he was the “Muhammad Ali of the map world”—not meant as a compliment. By then, Arader was already the most successful dealer in the United States, making $2.5 million a year. He was thirty years old. Arader used his profits to buy a mansion outside Philadelphia called Ballygomingo for his headquarters, and another mansion on Madison Avenue for his showroom. He worked fourteen-hour days, switching between making phone calls to Europe and barking orders at assistants. His sales tactics were Machiavellian. While people like Tooley invented the concept of “book breaking,” Arader began doing it on an industrial scale; on one occasion, Bill Reese remembers, Arader started ripping up a first edition of John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia right at the delivery counter at Sotheby’s.

  In a fifty-column profile in
The New Yorker in 1987, one collector tells a story about selling Arader a copy of Samuel de Champlain’s 1613 map of New France for $6,500 after Arader told him he wanted it so badly he’d “sleep beneath it the rest of my life.” The next morning, Arader called him on the phone to tell him he’d resold it for $27,500. Another collector who called himself a “former friend” was blunt about Arader’s tactics. “His most overriding concern in any facet of life is winning,” he says. “He’s obsessed with the idea of winning, and not being beaten.”

  He didn’t let anyone stand in his way—least of all, other dealers. “He sees competitors as adversaries,” Henry Taliaferro, then head of Arader’s map department, said in 1987. “He inspires them to jealousy.” As much as other dealers might have privately fumed at his brash style, however, they raised their own prices along with his. After an initial run-up in prices in the late 1970s, prices for maps leveled out during the recession of the early 1980s. Now they were poised for resurgence, and once again, it was Arader leading the way.

  —

  FOR CENTURIES, THERE has been one surefire way to let everyone know you have a lot of money—buy some high-priced art and stick it on your wall. In the 1980s, however, that formula started breaking down. As the stock market soared, so did fine-art prices. Suddenly paintings by Monet and Picasso were selling in the millions, and works by even lesser-known American artists were going for hundreds of thousands. Those getting rich on Wall Street—but not rich enough to buy into the art market—needed something else to broadcast their success.

  The early 1980s saw a boomlet in the bird and animal prints of Audubon and the botanical prints of Pierre-Joseph Redouté. As prices even on those began to climb, however, some New York interior designers began selling their clients on maps, which fit right into the English country aesthetic currently in vogue. For a few thousand dollars, a Wall Street broker or well-off doctor or lawyer could pick up an original piece hundreds of years old that was every bit as much of a conversation starter as a Degas or Monet.

  Smiley’s wife, Lisa, who had an interior decorating business on the side, alerted him to the trend and urged him to open a public store where buyers could browse without an appointment. In 1987, the Parisian antiques market Place des Antiquaires announced it was opening a New York branch in a $20 million subterranean shopping mall on East Fifty-Seventh Street. Smiley became one of the few American vendors amid French furniture, housewares, and jewelry stores. More than twelve hundred guests came out for the opening gala that November, featuring New York mayor Ed Koch and French ambassador Emmanuel de Margerie popping the cork on a bottle of Taittinger champagne, while waiters circulated through the crowd pouring glasses under towering topiaries of roses and narcissus.

  Maps had suddenly become big business. That fall, Smiley published a list in The Map Collector of twenty-four maps for sale, with an average asking price of $2,500. Capitalizing on the burgeoning interest, he took out a full-page ad in the March 1988 issue of House & Garden—an upscale home décor magazine edited by Vogue’s Anna Wintour—and appeared in a feature article for the same magazine that June. “Maps have a history similar to botanical prints,” he told the interviewer. “They were designed, engraved, and colored to impress the eye.”

  In just a few years, Smiley had succeeded in entering the highest levels of the New York map trade (Figure 8). On his trips to London and Paris, he was now spending tens of thousands of dollars for his clients. Within the map business, different dealers had different business models—some specializing in selling high volumes of inexpensive maps, others selling only to other dealers. Smiley focused on the highest-quality, priciest material, preferring to work one-on-one with clients over time to help build their collections.

  FIGURE 8 SMILEY’S MANHATTAN.

  He projected the air of a jet-setter, casually telling other bidders at auctions that he’d flown in from Europe the night before. But it was his knowledge of maps and powers of persuasion that truly impressed clients. One collector who bought several items from Smiley later said, “He’d talk about the beauty of the design, and if your interest was flagging, he’d talk about the historical importance of it, then if that didn’t spark your interest, he’d talk about how it fit into the history of English cartography. He’d find your hot button.”

  “He was a wonderful salesman,” said Paul Cohen, then an up-and-coming dealer with New York dealer Richard Arkway. “He was able to have a lockhold on certain clients who would work exclusively with him. I would often ask him, how do you get these guys? He would look at me and say, you just look them in the eye and blah, blah, blah; he had a very convincing manner.” Smiley spoke their language, addressing them with a deferent charm and using his knowledge to explain why certain maps just had to be in their collection.

  Some dealers found his superiority arrogant, even as they jealously watched him sew up desirable clients. Graham Arader says he watched him steal away one client—Chicago machine-company magnate Barry MacLean, whom he described as “one of my dearest friends.” After Smiley began courting him, Arader says, “he never spoke to me again.” Arader’s competitive streak came out, and he vowed to win against Smiley next time.

  —

  OTHER DEALERS, HOWEVER, became trusted colleagues and even friends. One of those was Paul Cohen’s boss, Dick Arkway, who had been in business fifteen years before Smiley started and was impressed with the knowledge he’d acquired in a short time. Another was Harry Newman, who was just starting out in the business himself and looked up to Smiley as a mentor. Along with his brother Robert, Newman had inherited the Old Print Shop, a rare-book store bought by his grandfather in 1926.

  Newman loved maps as a kid—he remembered staring in fascination at a giant sea chart by British cartographer J.F.W. Des Barres on the wall of his grandmother’s house—but he was initially scared of dealing in them. There was too much a person could get wrong in a description, and errors could cost thousands. Impressed with Smiley’s knowledge, Newman approached him, asking if he’d be willing to write catalog descriptions for him. “How about you let me sell you a few things instead,” Smiley replied. That was the beginning of a twenty-year friendship, in which Smiley unstintingly shared what he knew. One time during an auction, Smiley passed him notes on the background of a particular sea chart Newman wanted to buy. On another occasion, he took Newman to the rare-books room at the New York Public Library to show him a copy of a rare sea atlas owned by George Washington.

  At the same time, Smiley continued to find top-rate material for his clients. In late 1986 or early 1987, he acquired a rare “proof state” of John Seller’s map of New England—sold with a blank coat of arms as an enticement for someone to fund the map’s printing (it was later filled in with the arms of Seller’s patron Robert Thomson). In an advertisement in The Map Collector, he proudly noted that this was “one of only two known copies”—the other being at Yale’s Sterling Library. He sold it for $25,000 to Leventhal, who was fast assembling a near-complete record of cartography for New England.

  Smiley joked to Leventhal that if he didn’t expand his focus, Smiley soon wouldn’t have anything left to sell him. The next time they met, he spread out a 1507 world map by Dutch cartographer Johann Ruysch, only the third printed map showing the New World. Unlike Waldseemüller’s map printed the same year, Ruysch hedged his bets on whether America was its own continent or part of Asia, covering the west side with a scroll that left it up to the viewer’s interpretation. Smiley sketched out a new plan for Leventhal’s collection—instead of starting with the discovery of New England, he could backtrack to the discovery of America, gradually focusing in on Boston. Leventhal bought both the map and the project.

  Larry Slaughter, meanwhile, became fascinated with The English Pilot of John Seller, John Thornton, and Mount and Page. An avid sailor, he became determined to collect as many rare volumes of The English Pilot as he could, and with Smiley’s help he began amassing
a collection of the book to rival that of most libraries. In addition, Smiley helped him focus his collection more closely on the Washington, DC, area, especially its first cartographer, Andrew Ellicott. Congress had passed a law establishing a new capital in 1790. Thomas Jefferson oversaw the work, employing French architect and engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who proposed a grand vision, including fifteen Parisian-style avenues. His imperious attitude, however, alienated the founding fathers—especially when he ran one of his beloved avenues through the property of one of the district’s most influential landowners.

  L’Enfant was dismissed in 1792, and his assistant, Andrew Ellicott, continued his plan and completed the first survey of the new capital. Before he could print his map, however, two pirated versions appeared in the spring of 1792 in magazines published in Philadelphia and Boston. The official version, engraved by Thackara and Vallance, appeared that June. The public snatched up copies, and more than a dozen more versions were printed over the next decade. The resulting sequence was a map collector’s dream, with multiple versions showing subtle variations on the subject. Smiley originally acquired versions of both the rare Boston and the Philadelphia versions of Ellicott’s map for Norman Leventhal but persuaded him to sell them to Slaughter and then continued to track down a dozen more editions.

  —

  AS SMILEY SPENT more time with clients, appearances began to matter more to him. He started dressing in designer suits by the likes of Karl Lagerfeld and Paul Smith, took taxis everywhere he went, and insisted on picking up the check when he took friends out to expensive restaurants. But underneath the suits and new money was still the same old Forbes, who loved history and once dreamed of buying a New England village with his college friends. Whenever he could, he went back to Bedford to visit his parents and twin sister, Susan, and go on hikes in the surrounding hills.