As the Vineyard Gazette reports this morning, representatives from the libraries hit by map thief E. Forbes Smiley met behind closed doors in New Haven yesterday with the FBI, to examine the recovered items and to express concerns that Smiley was involved in more thefts than he's admitted.
The British Library has now admitted that four historic maps are missing from its collections: Peter Apian's 1520 world map, another world map by George Best (1578) and two copies (1624 and 1625) of Sir William Alexander's chart of New England and the Maritime Provinces. Clive Field, the BL's director of scholarship and collections, said library records indicate that Smiley is the only patron to have examined all four of those maps since 1997.
Smiley refused comment when reached at home by the Gazette reporter.
