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HERITAGE
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2015
present the
13TH Annual
Boston Public Library curator of maps Ronald Grim, who helped reclaim a map from 1612 that was stolen from the library, looks at it closely in Boston on Thursday. [PAT GREENHOUSE /THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA AP]
Stolen Champlain map is recovered 1612 document shows Maritimes, East Coast BOB SALSBERG THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BOSTON — A centuries-old map compiled by French explorer Samuel de Champlain and believed to be among dozens stolen more than a decade ago from the Boston Public Library has been recovered, library officials said Friday. The map, compiled in 1612 and named Carte Geographique de Nouvelle France, was found at a New York City arts dealer, where it was on sale for $285,000, the library said. It was identified by Ronald Grim, curator of the library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, who spotted it in an antiques publication over the summer. Grim said he was stunned and delighted to come across the 17-inch-by-30-inch map, which depicts the coast of New England and the Maritime provinces and an area as far west as the Great Lakes, part of a region once known as New France. Champlain made numerous voyages to the region in the early 17th century and included the map in a book published in Paris in 1613. “Champlain was the one of the first Europeans exploring the East Coast, and this is his first published map showing his exploration,” Grim said in an interview. Grim, shortly after joining the staff in 2005, began an inventory of the library’s rare map collection and discovered that 69 were missing from atlases and books. The inventory was prompted by the arrest of E. Forbes Smiley III, an antique map dealer who had been accused of stealing maps from Yale University. Grim said the FBI asked other institutions to find out whether Smiley had visited their facilities, and determine if anything was missing. In 2006, Smiley was sentenced in federal court in New Haven, Connecticut,
“Champlain was the one of the first Europeans exploring the East Coast, and this is his first published map showing his exploration.”
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Ronald Grim, map centre curator
to 3 1/2 years in prison after admitting he stole about 100 maps from several institutions including the New York and Boston public libraries, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Yale and Harvard University libraries and the British Library in London. Authorities said at the time that Smiley helped investigators recover many of the maps, stolen from the institutions over eight years, including 34 that were returned to the Boston library. Federal prosecutors cited his co-operation in proposing a reduced sentence. The Champlain engraving was not among the maps that Smiley admitted taking. The library did not identify the New York antique dealer that was selling the map, but it said the dealer had been retained by a third party to sell it on commission and fully co-operated with the recovery. To confirm the identity of the map, Grim said he compared it with a digital image taken from a previous photograph. The document had distinctive markings, including tears on the left side and a hole just above one tear. The library estimates the still-missing maps to be valued at about $750,000. Only one was photographed, so it would be “quite a task” for the library to prove ownership of any others that resurfaced, Grim said.
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