Narrative essay on stealing a book from a library for 7th grade.
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Answer:
Library, ... gave maps a push,” Smiley told the _Times, in a 1990 story about the ...
Answer:
man walked into a library. It was a Wednesday morning in June. The man was E. Forbes Smiley III, a rare-map dealer, forty-nine years old, tall and stocky. The library was the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale University. Smiley entered at the mezzanine level, where a Gutenberg Bible lay open in a glass case. He descended a staircase, registered at a desk, and submitted requests for books. The books included a world atlas, compiled by Gerard de Jode and published in Antwerp in 1578, called “Speculum Orbis Terrarum” (“Mirror of the World”); Richard Hakluyt’s “Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation,” published in London in 1589; Captain John Smith’s “Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New-England, or Anywhere,” published in London in 1631; and Captain Luke Foxe’s “North-West Fox,” published in London in 1635.
Smiley settled down with the books in the reading room, a spacious, glass-walled enclosure where scholars work at long tables, and oil portraits of eminent Yale librarians hang on the walls. The reading room looks out on a sunken sculpture court. The court contains a set of big geometric pieces by Isamu Noguchi, including a cube standing on one point which, according to Noguchi, signifies chance.
The Beinecke, completed in 1963, is a box within a box. The outer box is five stories of thin white marble plates set in frames of gray Vermont granite. When sunlight strikes the building, it penetrates the marble in veined golden sheets—a modernist version of ecclesiastical light. The inner box is a huge glass tube, filled with the library’s closed stacks of half a million rare books and several million manuscripts, kept at a temperature and a humidity calculated to prevent decay. The visual warmth of all that vellum and leather counterposes the abstract rigor of the Beinecke’s architecture.
Smiley is a denizen of great research libraries and museums. Like many rare-map dealers, but perhaps more so, he is a scholar—deeply versed in history, cartography, languages, art—as much as he is a businessman. He specializes in the Age of Discovery and Colonial New England. He is known within the trade for having exceptionally fine judgment about maps and their value, and for making subtle and arcane discoveries; he once demonstrated, for example, that Johann Ruysch’s landmark “Universalior Cogniti Orbis Tabula” (“Universal Chart of the Known World”), which was published in Rome in 1507, was based not on Portuguese sources, as others believed, but on Spanish ones, including, in particular, Columbus’s account of his fourth voyage.
The books he took into the Beinecke reading room all contained important maps. The “Advertisements” holds an elegant folded map, adorned with a portrait of Captain Smith himself, that was the first to name New England. De Jode’s atlas is extremely rare; only a dozen copies are known to exist. It contains ninety ornate maps, and Yale’s copy includes original hand color. Captain Luke Foxe was the first European to circumnavigate Hudson Bay, and the map in his book, titled “Part of America, Part of China,” which used a circumpolar projection, reflects the confusion, among seekers of a Northwest Passage to Asia, about just what they were finding. Hakluyt’s books about English voyages of discovery, which were extremely popular, provided material for Shakespeare’s plays, notably “The Tempest”; this one had in it a stunning world map, known as “Typus Orbis Terrarum” (“Image of the World”), drawn by the great Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius. It had big, undulant clouds in the corner, and a framed quotation from Cicero in the bottom cartouche.
