Authors: Michael Blanding
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.
In the summers, he stayed at a client’s cottage in Harpswell on the southern Maine coast, inviting Scott Slater and other Hampshire friends to join him. During one visit in 1988, he was
flipping through a real estate circular and came across an ad for an old New England farmhouse. The property was located in Sebec, a fleabite of a town in almost the exact center of the Maine—an hour north of Bangor and eight hours’ drive from New York City. The asking price, Slater later recalled, was just $89,000.
When
Smiley flew up to take a look along with his father and old friend Paul Statt, it quickly became clear to Statt why it was so cheap. The house was picturesquely situated on a small hill overlooking Sebec Lake—but it was a dump. The floor was full of holes, the bathroom was nonexistent, and there was only a frame where the kitchen should be. He flatly counseled his friend to save his money. To Smiley’s father, however, the house reminded him of his own house in Bedford, and with only three hundred people, Sebec reminded him of what Bedford used to be.
Smiley was excited with the potential of both the house and the town. Here at last was the vllage he’d always dreamed about. After years of studying maps, he knew how small settlements could grow over time. The trick, he told Statt excitedly, was to find place before it had become gentrified and suburbanized, and play a role in its development to keep those elements in check. He bought the house in cash, paying close to the asking price—even though he later always told friends that he paid $
50,000. Slater and other old pals came up with a term for this phenomenon: “Forbes dollars,” a personal accounting system in which Smiley always spent less than he had and was always owed more than he was.
He used the same calculus in business. Whenever he saw a map he knew his clients should have, he snapped it up, worrying later how he’d pay for it. At auctions in London he’d walk out with maps, promising to have the money wired, figuring out how to come up with the cash once he got back to New York. He began falling further and further behind
in his payments. In 1988, New York State issued
warrants for two years of back taxes totaling more than $8,000. He began defaulting on payments to other dealers as well.
In one instance, Smiley walked into the Old Print Shop to see a six-part map of Virginia made in 1807 by James Madison, a first cousin of the president. Harry Newman had spent a fortune to restore it—and when Smiley saw it on the table, he pled with his younger colleague to let him buy it. He wrote a check for $12,000, immediately heading uptown to sell the map to a client. As with the incident with Bill Reese and the Clark atlas, the check bounced a few days later. It took Smiley years to cover what he owed, finally coming in with a check for $15,000 to cover the map plus interest. Newman forgave him and resumed doing business with him, but
other dealers, like Reese, stopped, handicapping Smiley’s ability to sell.
No one criticized him more than Graham Arader, the reigning king of the map world, who lost no opportunity to disparage his rival. The two were similar in many ways—both projected an air of upscale refinement, down to the “III” at the end of their names; dealt in top-of-the-line material; and touted their superior knowledge as the key to their success. But in many other ways, they were polar opposites. While he could be gregarious in social situations, Smiley retained enough Yankee humility to deflect conversations away from himself. Arader, by contrast, shot from the hip in a stream-of-consciousness patter. He was his favorite topic of conversation.
In one area, he couldn’t compete with Smiley. Despite his accumulation of knowledge, he was
not the natural scholar Smiley was. Arader never wrote articles in booksellers’ magazines about the history of cartography. He’d much rather spend his time on the phone, wheeling and dealing, with three conversations going on at once, than sitting in a library for hours on end taking notes on a sheet of paper. But that’s exactly the kind of thing that drove Smiley, as he traveled to library map collections throughout the northeast.
—
AS HE EXAMINED THEIR MAPS,
Smiley began to
unravel a complicated web of mapmakers who emerged in London in the late 1600s and early 1700s. This was a time of rampant colonial expansion, in which the
newly restored king Charles II pushed colonization as a way to fill England’s depleted coffers and hold off encroachment by the French. Like their French rivals, English mapmakers began using modern survey methods to claim the borders of their new territories.
In order to secure the outlays of capital to conduct massive surveys, mapmakers had to please the aristocratic shareholders of the companies that controlled the colonies themselves. One early figure, a Scotsman named John
Ogilby, created the first large-scale map of Carolina in 1673, based on a manuscript map provided to him by the wealthy proprietors of the colony. According to their wishes, he attached the names of these investors to rivers, capes, and counties, which still bear them today.
In repayment of a debt, Charles II awarded a no-man’s-land between New York and Virginia to William Penn; the only trouble was, the area had already been settled by Swedes and Dutch fur traders. Penn commissioned a map by an Irish surveyor, Thomas
Holme, who created “A Map of Ye Improved Part of Pennsylvania” in 1681, cementing the area’s ownership by the English lord.
Eventually, mapmakers in London coalesced into a group called the Thames School, a dynasty nearly as influential as the Dutch mapmakers of the previous century. “
These, then, were the men who established England’s place in the art and business of practical cartography,” Smiley wrote in
AB Bookman’s Weekly.
“A role in which the English would dominate the world during most of the 18th century.” Smiley traced their lineages, as they passed knowledge from master to apprentice, creating maps that not only reflected the New World, but also helped shape it.
By the early eighteenth century, the
action in North America had shifted inland. The eclipse of the Netherlands and Spain as colonial powers on the continent left only two countries in the running for control—England and France. While England had a firm grip on the coasts, the French flanked them down from Canada to the west. The stage was set for a brawl over the continent, with the Ohio River—the key passage from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi—as its flashpoint.
Long before the conflict erupted in force of arms, it was fought through maps. The first salvo was fired by Thames School protégé Herman Moll, in “A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on Ye Continent of North America” in 1715 (
Figure J
) The map is better known as the “Beaver Map,” for its inset of beavers chewing
through a forest with Niagara Falls in the background. Beaver hats were the rage in London at the time, and Moll was sending a not-so-subtle reminder of the valuable fur trade at stake in America. That was only the beginning of the propaganda contained in the map, which breathtakingly declares nearly all of North America as belonging to England. The land to the west of the St. Lawrence previously known as New France, Moll calls “Part of Canada,” granting France only the land north of the river.
Three years later, the French cartographic master Guillaume
De L’Isle countered with his own map of North America, in 1718, which splashed “La Louisiane” in a giant font across the entire middle of the continent (
Figure K
). As outraged as the English were over the cartographical appropriation, they had to concede that the accuracy far outstripped anything England had produced at the time. While England might claim the Ohio, it was clear that France held it. Moll countered in 1720 with a new map of North America that rather brilliantly showed not the boundaries claimed by England, but the boundaries claimed by France, as a way to incite his countrymen to outrage.
For years, the British were forced to use De L’Isle’s as the basis for their claim against his countrymen. A 1733 map by Henry
Popple used it for his topography, even as he showed the boundaries of Virginia and Carolina stretching west past the Mississippi. Even so, that wasn’t good enough for England’s powerful Lord Commissioners of Trade, who denounced Popple for conceding the strategically important Niagara Falls to their enemies. His career foundered, and he never made another map.
After the
French and Indian War broke out in 1754, the commissioners sent out a call for more accurate maps, and in 1755
John Mitchell delivered with a large-scale map that went beyond Popple’s boundaries to claim the Ohio and all of the Great Lakes for England. The same year,
Lewis Evans produced “A General Map of the Middle British Colonies,” a smaller map that drew from new English sources, including personal expeditions he took to survey up the Ohio. Finally, the British had a map nearly as accurate as the French (
Figure 7
). In another essay for
AB Bookman’s Weekly
on early American mapmakers, Smiley calls it out for special mention, naming it the “
greatest effort of American cartography in the 18th century” and an accurate map of the “final theater of war in the English and French struggle.”