Week 32: How do you steal books?
this is not a how-to guide.
First of all, don’t. It doesn’t end well. Most people get caught, or they don’t make much money, or they don’t make much money and they get caught. Stealing books is bad business. Rare books are not fungible. The really pricey ones are especially difficult to sell, because book people have very good records of where those books came from and who had them last and how many copies exist. Ever seen the film American Animals? A bunch of college kids steal a set of Audubon’s Birds of America and then bring it to Christie’s. Christie’s! The auction house! And they used their actual email address as their contact info. How did they think it was going to turn out? Not well, I’ll tell you. Not well.1
Florida State University announced this week that nearly 5,000 of their Marvel and DC Comics had been stolen over the course of the pandemic closure this past year. This is a devastating loss, and the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America posted a list of all 5,000 missing comics so that bookdealers can cross-check materials they may encounter to prevent further circulation of those stolen materials.
Bookdealers and librarians have a responsibility to interrogate the provenance (previous ownership) of the materials they buy, and the ABAA’s list is one of the ways we avoid perpetuating book thefts like those that have occurred in the last few decades. You got this book from your grandmother’s attic, you say? Please show me her attic, and also provide the years she lived in this house, and who lived there before her, and their name and forwarding addresses as well.
Anyways, this issue is about book theft, fraud, and forgeries, because the student group I am inexplicably the president of, the Society for Rare Books and Manuscripts, had our first reading group about this very topic two weeks ago and read some of my favorite (i.e. most upsetting) stories about book theft, fraud, and forgery.
Though I recommend you read the stories yourself, because they’re all tales of varying degrees of tragedy, I’ll provide a summary here:
An organized crime mob executed a Mission Impossible-style heist and stole trunk-loads of books from two Italian dealers in London;
A con-man fabricated a “proof” copy of Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius, fooling dozens of book experts and dealers (all while selling off the most valuable pieces of the library he directed in Italy);
A French Ponzi-scheme artist convinced unsuspecting buyers to “invest” in copies of books that he claimed would appreciate considerably and return on their investments (which we know is not true), costing them millions of dollars;
A librarian at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh stole $8 million worth of materials over 25 years, gutting hundreds of books and fencing them through a local and highly respected book dealer.
The only story that ended well is the mob-heist, by the way, in which the detectives recovered all but four of the stolen volumes in a safehouse in Romania. The Galileo con-man is serving out his house arrest and hopes to be hired by institutions as a Catch-Me-If-You-Can-style fraud consultant (I’m not kidding); the Ponzi-scheme artist drained the life savings of a lot of eldery French people and is now in prison; and the Carnegie Library’s collection will never fully recover, even as items slowly trickle back.2
Phew. Among the striking elements of these stories is how reputation and respectability of the rare book world obscure laypeople from being able to sus out misdeeds. In the Carnegie Library theft, the bookdealer who fenced the books stamped “withdrawn” over the library marks in the books, and the dealers’s good standing with the ABAA dissuaded people from thinking anything of the fact that the Carnegie library was deaccessioning highly valuable items. In the case of the Galileo forgery, a well-respected New York dealer shopped around the “proof copy” of Galileo’s seminal work to colleagues and had book experts of all niches (papermaking, ink making, typesetting and type casting, binding) examine the object to authenticate it. His stamp of approval dissuaded colleagues from questioning it. Those who did were ridiculed by their peers for rejecting this fantastic discovery.
On the flip side, one of the reasons the mob heist ultimately failed is because it’s very difficult to sell stolen books. If you don’t know how to forge provenance documentation or have a colluding bookdealer who is willing to wave questions away, highly valuable books will simply sit underneath your safe-house floorboards. We know, for the most part, how many copies of highly valuable books exist and where they live. The older and more valuable books are, the more we know about them. So walking in off the street to Christie’s to sell copies of early, important texts does not go over well.
To that end, the author of The New Yorker article about the Galileo forgery points out that forging an old book takes incredible time, knowledge, and skill. It’s far simpler and more profitable to run an art forgery racket (don’t do that either), so people who forge books tend to do so with “good” (i.e. strange and egotistical) reasons. Book forgeries have to pass muster across many dimensions. Consider every element of the book: the paper, ink, binding (material, strings), typeface, typesetting, stamps, illustrations…each one of these sustains an entire subfield. No one person could make such convincing books (notably, the most infamous paper-based forgers worked with manuscript materials), and our Galileo forger didn’t: he commissioned at least three people, unnamed in the article, to complete the project. And, he deliberately included two errors—clues for the most skilled of book people to discover as a “joke” (a direct quotation here)—because he wanted to pull one over on the book experts from whom he had never been able to gain respect.
But other kinds of knowledge operate in these thefts and frauds as well: in the Carnegie library, ins and outs of the security system allowed the librarian to circumvent any suspicious gaze. On the other end, the victims of the Ponzi scheme found themselves at a loss due to their lack of knowledge of how much books are worth (very rarely millions of dollars).
These stories represent a spectrum of the kinds of book thieves: highly knowledgeable and with lots of access (the Carnegie librarian); admiring and a bit jealous of the book world (the Galileo forger); and the blundering and unsuspecting (the heisters). While a Mission Impossible-style heist implies high attention to detail and thieving acumen, the most deleterious kinds of theft, however, are most often committed by the knowledgeable. This begs the question of how and why libraries police their patrons or treat them with suspicion, when they might be most suspicious of their own staff.
To that end, many libraries revisited their security policies after the Carnegie Library theft, and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association is currently revising their security guidelines. In addition to reducing policing and hostile surveillance of patrons, many libraries have implemented multi-step authorization systems, e.g. no one person can oversee the physical maintenance of a single area or collection.
It’s also worth noting why people steal: in the case of the Carnegie theft, which I would argue is one of the more tragic stories, the librarian was not stealing in order to make money. He simply wanted to “stay afloat” (again, a direct quotation) with his rent and tuition payments for his four children. This suggests to me how libraries may safeguard against their employees setting aside their ethics and principles for misdeeds by paying them a living wage. In this case, security is not just the physical safety of materials, but securing the health and wellness of employees. The latter contributes to the former.
Housekeeping and birdseeking
house
What I read this week: my own pandemic diary. I am digitizing entries for my Digital Libraries Final Project and so revisited my own writing from March 2020-March 2021.
What I’m currently reading: Mostly Dead Things, still.
As I was editing this newsletter, I got an email about another theft, this time committed by a lecturer at University of Oxford who allegedly sold materials stolen from the collection he oversaw to Hobby Lobby. An example of a third avenue to pawn off stolen materials that I didn’t address here: sell them to people who might not know or care about their origins (though some of these books were routed through auction houses, another wrench in the affair). In conclusion, don’t steal books.
bird
Not a bird, but kill this bug.
The movie is based on a true story, and the kids who committed the crime are featured as extras. I don’t believe in prisons, so I don’t think they should have spent more time in prison, and in their interviews since then, they’ve shown a lot of remorse for their crime (in which they also violently incapacitated a library worker). I think in these scenarios, people who have caused cultural and physical harm should have to learn why what they did was damaging. Another moment for advocacy.
Correction: I originally wrote that both the librarian and dealer went to prison for the Carnegie affair. That was not the case! But the librarian was fired and the dealer is now out of business. So there were consequences, even though nothing will repair the damage.