Project Manager
Rare book thievery has been with
us as long as there have been books—it has haunted the rare book and manuscript
world literally for centuries. For example,
during the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe, churches and libraries would
actually tether bindings to bookshelves with chains in an attempt to prevent
theft.
Book thievery can include the
theft, mutilation or forgery of antiquarian materials.
For example, in 1997, James Gilreath,
historian at the Library of Congress, stole and attempted to sell approximately
$30,000 worth of books from the library’s collection to a Boston rare book dealer
by whom I was employed at the time. Gilreath, who entered an Alford plea, was sentenced
to, among other penalties, one year of home detention and a $20,000 fine.
In 1996, José Torres-Carbonnel,
a Spanish national married to a Harvard graduate student, was arrested for stealing
about $750,000 worth of rare books from Harvard University’s Widener and Fine Arts
Libraries—many having been mutilated by the crude extraction of illustrated plates,
which he sold to various dealers. He was convicted of 16 counts of larceny and sentenced
to between three and four years in prison as well as deportation and ten years
probation.
In a particularly shocking case
from 1985, Mark Hofmann, a Salt Lake City con man who, in addition to forging and
selling numerous bogus historical documents to unsuspecting members of the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also killed two people with homemade bombs
“to
keep from being exposed as a fraud”. Ironically, in the case
of one dubious document that Hofmann had forged and was seeking to have
authenticated—the Oath of a Freeman, claimed by Hoffman to be the only extant copy
of the first example of printing in America—the aforementioned James Gilreath was
called in to perform an exhaustive, and ultimately inconclusive, evaluation of the
document. Hofmann pleaded guilty and was convicted of the murders in 1988.
More recently, in 2005 Edward
Forbes Smiley III, one the most
notorious map thieves of recent decades, who, in the course of his career, stole
nearly 100 maps worth around $2.3 million in the United States and Great Britain,
was arrested after suspicions were confirmed that he removed maps from
books in Yale’s Beinecke Library. He spent two-and-a-half years in a federal prison
and six months in a work-release program, both of which were in Smiley’s home
state of Massachusetts.
In 2012, Marino
Massimo De Caro, director of the Girolamini Library in Naples, Italy, was arrested
for conspiring with four accomplices to steal what has been estimated to be in the
tens of millions of euros worth of rare books from the Girolamini’s collection.
De Caro was sentenced
to seven years under house arrest. Though many of the library’s books have been
recovered, others continue to elude authorities as their library stamps and other
identifying markings had been removed.
Understandably, in such thefts,
money is the primary motivator. Hofmann and Smiley were both reportedly in serious
debt. Hofmann, in addition to forgery, was also very much involved in counterfeiting,
and Smiley overextended himself by purchasing a second home in Maine and by buying
and restoring several other nearby buildings in an unsuccessful attempt to establish
an artist colony in the community.
Though the lure of illicit financial
gain will always be present in the rare book field, librarians and dealers continue
to fight back—both proactively and reactively. For example, universities such as
Harvard have had electronic
security measures in place since the mid-1970s. Both the Northeast Document
Conservation Center (NEDCC) and the American Library Association (ALA) have web
pages with security guidelines. The NEDCC’s
guidelines cover disaster preparedness in general for library collections
and archives, while the ALA provides
suggestions for special collections librarians, scholars and dealers through
their Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) division and Rare Book
and Manuscript Section (RBMS). The RBMS also maintains a security site that lists, an addition to other
helpful information, thefts dating from 1987 to the present. Furthermore, the International
League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) hosts its own site, stolen-book.org, and its US branch, the
Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA), maintains a blog where the group’s security
committee reports about stolen items.
In a business shadowed by secrecy
and theft, any measure taken may help to safeguard the treasures that so many libraries,
museums and private owners hold dear. It is thus imperative that members of the
rare book trade work in concert with institutions, individuals, and law
enforcement to uncover and report suspected theft at every opportunity. Not
only because one’s reputation depends on it, but because scholarship itself is
at stake.
Did You Know?
What is widely considered the
largest theft of rare books in American history was committed by Stephen Carrie Blumberg
of Ottumwa, Iowa. When he was apprehended in 1990, Blumberg had amassed a collection
of nearly 19,000 volumes valued at a total of $5.3 million. The FBI hired a 40-foot
tractor-trailer to remove the 19 tons of books, which had been stolen from 327 libraries
in the United States and Canada. Restoring the books to their rightful owners was
extraordinarily difficult and at times impossible, as most had their library markings
removed. In fact, the FBI allowed about 11,500 of the books to be returned to
Blumberg under the care of his father, because, as explained by Philip Weiss in
Harper’s Magazine, there was “no hard
evidence that they had been stolen. Only about 3,000 could be returned to
libraries."
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