The Map Thief (7 page)

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SMILEY’S ENCYCLOPEDIC MEMORY
and enthusiasm for the subject didn’t escape the notice of B. Altman’s regular clients, who increasingly began to seek him out for advice. He recognized certain customers, calling them in advance when a map that might interest them arrived in the store. One client who was particularly captivated by Smiley was
Norman Leventhal, a Boston real estate developer who had turned to map collecting late in life.

The son of Russian and Lithuanian Jews who grew up in the tough Irish neighborhood of Dorchester, Leventhal worked hard enough in his studies to win admission to Massachusetts Institute of Technology at age fifteen. There he earned a degree in civil engineering, eventually working his way into real estate. As with most US cities, Boston’s downtown had been gutted by the 1960s, and most developers had turned their focus toward building housing complexes and office parks in the suburbs. Leventhal was committed to urban redevelopment and designed an ambitious downtown project called Center Plaza, the beginning of what pundits called the “New Boston.” Other projects followed: Post Office Square, Le Méridien (now Langham) hotel, and finally his crowning achievement, the development of Rowes Wharf and the luxury Boston Harbor Hotel.

Leventhal’s contributions to Boston’s future made him naturally interested in the city’s past. He picked up his first antique map of Boston while visiting London with his wife in the late 1970s, as he was nearing
sixty. Bit by bit, he added to his collection. Then one Sunday morning in 1982, he was reading
The New York Times
when he saw an ad for B. Altman and Co. that mentioned its antique map division. The next time he was in town, he visited the eighth floor of the store and was met by a bespectacled clerk with a similar love of New England. Smiley talked with contagious enthusiasm about all he was discovering about the early history of cartography, and he promised to be on the lookout for maps that might fit in with Leventhal’s passions. He called him a short time later with just such a map, which Leventhal bought over the phone—the first of several he purchased from Smiley while he worked at B. Altman.

Even as he did, however, the fortunes of Smiley’s employer were changing. Never able to compete with more fashionable department stores,
B. Altman and Co. struggled financially throughout the 1980s. Finally a change in the tax law in 1984 compelled the owner to sell. The new buyer announced plans to “modernize” by cutting the store’s footprint in half and getting rid of many specialty divisions, including rare books and maps. Suddenly finding himself faced with the prospect of losing his job, Smiley made the decision to go out on his own. He launched his new business as
North American Maps & Autographs by the end of 1984, running it out of his apartment, with his now fiancée, Lisa. (B. Altman finally closed in 1989 with a fire sale of Waterford crystal and Christmas decorations.)

His former boss, Slifer, gave him her blessing—and something far more valuable as well: letters of introduction to some of the most prestigious map dealers in Paris, Amsterdam, and London, where the map trade was then centered. In a handshake business where personal connections were key, those letters were the closest thing that existed to a ticket into the business. Because he started his company before B. Altman officially closed, however, she told him it would be unethical to contact any of his former clients from the store. He would have to wait until they called him. Smiley spent a nerve-wracking week waiting for the phone to ring, until
Leventhal’s call finally came. The two discussed an arrangement wherein Smiley would become Leventhal’s main agent in negotiating the purchase of maps overseas. With that, Smiley entered into the tight-knit but expanding world of map collectors.

A NEW WORLD

FIGURE 4
MARTIN WALDSEEMÜLLER. “UNIVERSALIS COSMOGRAPHIA SECUNDUM PTHOLOMAEI TRADITIONEM ET AMERICI VESPUCII ALIORU[M]QUE LUSTRATIONES.” ST. DIE, 1507.

2300 BC–1670

FLAMES FLICKERED INSIDE
silver heat lamps, and potted palms swayed in the breeze atop Miami’s Mayfair Hotel on the unseasonably cool February evening that kicked off the 2013 Miami International Map Fair. Cartographic enthusiasts—most men, most gray haired, most wearing blue blazers—jostled their way to the bar as Latin techno-music pulsed through the crowd and what looked like S and M footage played on video screens above. One of the few women in the crowd shouted, “I need a seltzer right now!” as a bartender in a lace minidress stared unmoved. “You’re gonna hafta wait, ma’am,” she said.

Miami may seem like the least likely place on the map to host an international cartographic conference, much less the world’s largest. But in 2013, more than a thousand people were expected to attend—more than the similar map fairs in London or Paris. As the collectors mingled beneath wispy clouds, a mix of accents—southern, British, German—filled the night air. The map community is a small one, with maybe a few dozen serious dealers in the United States and fewer than a hundred worldwide. As they sipped cocktails, dealers, collectors, and tagalong spouses renewed friendships going back decades.

The next morning dawned bright and blue. Bathers had already begun to shed their tops a mile away on South Beach, as collectors filed into the whitewashed stucco building that housed the Museum of HistoryMiami. Inside, several dozen dealers had set up tables in three modest-size rooms, with hundreds of maps displayed on the walls behind them. There were huge maps of tiny stretches of coastline; postcard-size maps of the entire world; colorful eye candy from seventeenth-century Dutch atlases; crude black-and-white woodblocks from fifteenth-century Germany; English sea charts and Italian portolans covered with wind roses and rhumb lines.

Almost all the maps distorted geography in some way—and oftentimes, the more distorted the picture, the higher the price tag affixed to it. California as an island, a surprisingly long-lived fallacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a favorite collector’s item. And—at least here in Miami—maps of the Florida peninsula flattened into a saucepan shape were nearly as popular. While some of the maps were framed, most were simply matted and encased in plastic sheets. Even maps worth tens of thousands of dollars hung on the wall with butterfly clips and pushpins. Anyone who had paid $5 admission could flip through the racks and handle maps up to four hundred or even five hundred years old.

At the back of one dealer’s bin was a plastic-sheathed map with a slice of coastline in the corner labeled “terra incognita”—Latin for “unknown land.” The sliver is the earliest depiction of the American continent a collector could hope to buy. A sticker on the back of the plastic listed the price as $120,000. It’s hard to imagine a piece of jewelry worth that much displayed so openly. Yet the map trade is still very much a handshake business. Some dealers don't take credit cards; if a buyer doesn’t have
a check or sufficient cash on hand, it’s not uncommon for him to walk out with a map in exchange for an IOU.

Most collectors follow a familiar pattern—they start with one map of their town, city, or state, follow it up with a few more, and then, before they know it, are dropping thousands on geographies halfway around the world. “It’s like drugs or alcohol.” Collector Neil Outlaw sighed of his habit when we sat down over a brown-bag lunch in the courtyard. “It can make you spend a lot more money than you want to,” he continued. “I’m always buying them and not selling them. My wife says that’s my problem.”

A fifty-one-year-old Alabama peanut farmer, Outlaw started coming to the Miami map fair ten years ago, focusing on buying maps of his area of southern Alabama. “I try to pick maps that have where I’m at on them,” he drawled. Over the years, the definition of “where I’m at” had been expanding—from the State of Alabama, to the southeastern United States, to the country, to the world. His most expensive purchase to date was a map of North and South America he bought for $135,000 from the Old Print Shop in New York. “I love the history of it. When I see a map, I like to try and guess when it was made, and whether it was a French map or an English map or a Spanish map—because they all drew the borderlines to their advantage.” His neighbors in the farming business, he chuckled, draw their boundaries the same way.

Perhaps the appeal of collecting is seeing the familiar outlines of human nature writ large, and your own little corner of the world participating on the global stage. Arriving at the fair, I vowed to buy my first antique map, and I found it in a map of Boston Harbor that appeared in an English magazine in 1775—three months before the start of the Revolutionary War. By then, it was already clear something major was about to go down in Boston, and the magazine printed the map as a guide for Londoners wanting to follow the action.

I recall similar maps in the newspapers during my own lifetime, remembering how names like Kuwait, Sarajevo, and Fallujah took on sudden geographical significance when conflicts broke out there. I looked for my own hometown of Brookline on the map and found the Muddy River, which still flows a few dozen yards from my house, thinking with a new sense of immediacy about the historic events that took place down the street. The map was listed for $500, which the dealer marked down
to $425 with barely a haggle. I left with the map rolled into a cardboard tube, promising to send a check.

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MAP COLLECTING IS
a recent hobby, emerging only in the past few hundred years. For centuries before that, maps—no matter how beautifully rendered—were tools to settle property disputes or get from point A to point B. That’s why, incredibly, we have only a handful of
maps from all of ancient civilization. The Babylonians left behind barely enough to count on two hands. The oldest, etched into a clay tablet around 2300 BC, seems to show the estate of a man named Azala as it stood during the reign of Sargon the Great. The first “world” map dates from around 500 BC—glued together from cracked tablets, it looks like a first grader’s art project, lines and circles representing the Euphrates River and several neighboring city-states, along with a bridge to the heavenly realm.

The rest of the ancient world fares little better. From Egypt, we have a few maps drawn on scraps of papyrus showing flood stages of the Nile and some Nubian gold mines. From Greece, not a single original map survives. From Rome, only one map of any substance exists, and that is a copy of a copy of a copy made in the eleventh or twelfth century by a South German monk. Called the Peutinger Table, it’s a twenty-two-foot-long scroll showing all the roads leading to Rome, mapped out in the style of a AAA strip map, down to the mileages between towns recorded in Roman numerals.

It was the Greeks who put cartography on the map—or rather it was the Hellenized inhabitants of
Alexandria, the Egyptian capital that had inherited Greek culture at a time when Rome was still a dirty backwater on the Tiber. Founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, it had already become the richest city in the world seventy years later—a city of wide avenues and enormous stone temples sprawling around a harbor bustling with sailors from all over the Mediterranean. With them came scholars who gathered around the Royal Library of Alexandria, then the largest library in the world. Pharaoh Ptolemy III decreed that every traveler entering the city be searched and any manuscripts on his person confiscated and transcribed. A new copy was gifted to its owner, while the original was added to the library’s collection. As a result, the library
amassed the greatest body of knowledge in the ancient world—the equivalent of a hundred thousand books.

At its head was Eratosthenes, a polymath equally adept at philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics who became the head librarian in 240 BC. His greatest contribution was in geography. From at least Aristotle’s time, Greeks had known that the earth was round—otherwise, why would ships’ hulls disappear before their masts when sailing out to sea? But they had no idea how large it was. Eratosthenes concocted a formula to measure the circumference by ingeniously noting the angle of the sun simultaneously in two different spots and mathematically extracting the total distance of about twenty-five thousand miles—remarkably close to the actual figure of 24,900.

Eratosthenes and other Greeks of his time made other contributions as well, for example, adding consistent scale and lines of latitude to maps. But it was Eratosthenes’s successor at the library a few centuries later, Claudius Ptolemaeus—known to history as simply
Ptolemy—who made the greatest strides. Born around AD 100, Ptolemy’s fame rests on two books. In the first, the
Almagest,
he famously rejected the popular theory that the earth circled the sun in favor of an earth-centered universe. The Ptolemaic view survived infamously for centuries—until it was finally challenged by the likes of Copernicus and Galileo some fourteen hundred years later.

Despite that cosmic blunder, his second book, the
Geographia,
had a more positive lasting influence. Before Ptolemy, no one had systematically gathered all geographic knowledge in one place. Ptolemy combined historical books by the likes of Herodotus, original observations, and travelers’ tales to produce twenty-seven maps showing the entire known world. Just as important, he included a list of some eight thousand place names, each with its presumed latitude and longitude. Theoretically, someone could take that list and faithfully re-create Ptolemy’s maps with parchment and a ruler.

That is exactly what happened. Though all of Ptolemy’s maps were lost in the fall of Rome, the tables were preserved in Byzantium and the Arab world. After a dreary thousand years of flat-earth religious maps about as useful to navigation as a cartoon, a Greek monk named Maximus Planudes came upon a copy of the
Geographia
in Constantinople and translated it into Latin. In 1397, a Turkish diplomat and scholar named
Manuel Chrysoloras brought a copy to Florence, where the Renaissance was just kicking off.

Just as Alexandria had been the cultural center of the ancient world, Florence was the cultural center of fifteenth-century Europe, attracting “humanist” scholars to debate the great philosophical and scientific questions, looking back to Greece and Rome for inspiration. They seized upon the
Geographia
as a true vision of the world passed down from the ancients—using Ptolemy’s tables to faithfully reconstruct his maps. Compared to everything that had come before them, the maps were a revelation. Suddenly the contours of the Mediterranean world emerged in stunning detail, filled with continents and cities only vaguely imagined before (
Figure B
).

Not surprisingly, Ptolemy’s maps contained some errors. He rejected Eratosthenes’s calculations of the earth’s circumference in favor of those of another Greek mathematician, who wrongly pegged it at just eighteen thousand miles. He also joined a rather indistinct Africa to a huge southern continent, and he vastly extended Asia, shrinking the distance between it and Europe to a mere twenty-five hundred miles. Those errors had profound implications later when Christopher Columbus set off from Spain with a map from the
Geographia
in hand.

Despite them, however, it’s difficult to overstate the influence of the
Geographia,
which boldly proposed that the visible world was accessible to the human mind through mathematical precision—a heretical notion in the Middle Ages. As one Florentine described it at the time, the
Geographia
“
raises us above the limits of an earth obscured by clouds,” demonstrating “how, with true discipline, we can leap up within ourselves, without the aid of wings.”

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ALTHOUGH PTOLEMY FIRST REENTERED
Western Europe in Florence, he didn’t stay there long.
Scholars meeting at church conferences traded and copied manuscripts, bringing the
Geographia
home to France, Germany, and the Low Countries of Belgium and Holland. At first, they looked at his maps as a way to understand the ancient world—but soon they realized they could use Ptolemy’s template to construct their own maps as well.