Forbes Smiley - Coverage

Coverage

The case was widely covered across the United States and elsewhere. Because Smiley pled guilty, he was never cross-examined. Apart from the details he supplied himself, much of the available information came from journalists. Some suspected that Smiley had taken more maps than he admitted. Each of the affected libraries issued lists of missing maps. Several of the entries matched copies of books, now without their maps, which Smiley had examined. For example, Smiley had admitted stealing from Harvard University an example of the map of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, illustrating a letter from Hernán Cortés (1524), but a prior photograph of the example missing from Yale's Beinecke Library proved instead that it was theirs.

Several questions remain unanswered, in particular about the origin and purpose of high quality facsimiles of early maps, some found on Smiley's person when he was arrested, others in books he examined.