Please join us on Wednesday, November 16th at 7 pm in the Library meeting room to hear author Michael Blanding talk about his book, The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer who made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps.
Maps have long exerted a special fascination on viewers—both as beautiful work of art and practical tools to navigate the world. For those that collect them, however, the map trade can be a cutthroat business, inhabited by quirky and in some cases disreputable characters in search of a finite number of extremely rare objects. E. Forbes Smiley III, esteemed and respectable antiquarian map dealer, spent years doubling as a map thief until he was finally arrested while delicately tearing maps out of books in the Yale University Library in 2005. He would later confess to the theft of 97 maps valued at over $3 million total, and serve 3 years in prison for his crimes.
Michael Blanding is a Boston-based investigative journalist whose work has appeared in WIRED, Slate, The Nation, Consumers Digest, The Boston Globe Magazine, and Boston Magazine.
This program is free and open to the public. No registration is necessary.
This program is sponsored by the Friends of the Bedford Free Public Library.