• Potter & Potter Auctions
    How History Unfolds on Paper:
    Choice Selections from the Eric C. Caren Collection
    Part IX
    April 18, 2024
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: [RUTH, George Herman “Babe” (1895-1948)]. Signed photograph. Circa 1930s. 191 x 248 mm. $1,500 to $2,500.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: HARRISON, Benjamin. Document signed (“Benj Harrison”) as governor of Virginia, certifying the service of Daniel Cumbo, a Black Revolutionary soldier. $6,000 to $9,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: ONE OF THE FIRST PRINTED ANNOUNCEMENTS OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. $4,000 to $6,000.
    Potter & Potter Auctions
    How History Unfolds on Paper:
    Choice Selections from the Eric C. Caren Collection
    Part IX
    April 18, 2024
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: FIRST PRINTING OF LINCOLN’S IMMORTAL GETTYSBURG ADDRESS. $4,000 to $6,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: HIGHLY IMPORTANT MORMON ARCHIVE. ALLEY, George. Archive of 23 Autograph Letters Signed by Mormon Convert George Alley to His Brother Joseph Alley. $10,000 to $20,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: [AVIATION]. [ARMSTRONG, Neil A.] Aviation Hall of Fame Gold Medal MS64 NGC, Awarded to Neil Armstrong in 1979. $2,000 to $3,000.
    Potter & Potter Auctions
    How History Unfolds on Paper:
    Choice Selections from the Eric C. Caren Collection
    Part IX
    April 18, 2024
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: NEWLY DISCOVERED FIRST PRINTING OF "WITH MALICE TOWARDS NONE... " FROM THE ONLY NEWSPAPER ACTUALLY ALLOWED TO PARTICIPATE IN LINCOLN’S SECOND INAUGURAL PROCESSION. $4,000 to $8,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: THE MOST IMPORTANT GEORGE WASHINGTON DOCUMENT IN PRIVATE HANDS; GEORGE WASHINGTON’S COMMISSION AS COMMANDER IN CHIEF, 1775, ONE OF ONLY TWO ORIGINALS. $150,000 to $250,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: A VERY RARE ACCOUNT OF BLACKBEARD’S DEATH AND ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PIRATE ITEMS EXTANT. $3,000 to $5,000.
    Potter & Potter Auctions
    How History Unfolds on Paper:
    Choice Selections from the Eric C. Caren Collection
    Part IX
    April 18, 2024
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: EDISON, Thomas. Patent for Edison’s Improvements on the Electric-Light, No. 219,628. [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Patent Office], 16 September 1879. $2,000 to $3,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: [VIETNAM WAR]. The original pen used by Secretary of State William P. Rogers to sign the Vietnam Peace Agreement, Paris, 27 January 1973. $10,000 to $15,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: SONS OF LIBERTY FOUNDER COLONEL BARRÉ ANNOTATED TITLE-PAGE, “WHICH OUGHT TO ROUSE UP BRITISH ATTENTION”. $4,000 to $6,000.
  • Forum Auctions
    Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    28th March 2024
    Forum Mar. 28: [Langland (William)]. The vision of Pierce Plowman, nowe the seconde time imprinted..., Roberte Crowley, 1550. £8,000 to £10,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: [Shakespeare (William)]. [Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies], second folio edition, [by Tho.Cotes, for Robert Allot], [1632]. £30,000 to £40,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Bible, Czech Biblia Bohemica, first complete Bible printed in the Czech vernacular, Prague, August 1488. £30,000 to £40,000.
    Forum Auctions
    Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    28th March 2024
    Forum Mar. 28: Shabthai Tzvi.- Collection of four printed and illustrated broadsides detailing the appearance, rise and fall of the false messiah, Shabthai Tzvi, Augsburg, 1666-67. £40,000 to £60,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Leaf from the Beauvais Missal, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on parchment, [Northern France (perhaps Beauvais or Amiens)], [fourteenth century (c.1310)]. £4,000 to £6,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Aubrey (John). [Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme], manuscript in English, Latin and Greek, [c. 1693]. £30,000 to £50,000.
    Forum Auctions
    Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    28th March 2024
    Forum Mar. 28: Byron (George Gordon Noel, Lord). Poems on Various Occasions, first edition, Harriet Maltby's copy, Newark, Printed by S. & J. Ridge, 1807. £30,000 to £40,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Tolkien (J.R.R.) The Hobbit, first edition, second impression with dust-jacket, 1937 [but 1938]. £7,000 to £10,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Blake (William).- Thornton (Robert John). The Pastorals of Virgil, 2 vol., engraved plates by William Blake, 1821. £8,000 to £12,000.
    Forum Auctions
    Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    28th March 2024
    Forum Mar. 28: America.- Mount (William J.) & Thomas Page. The English Pilot…, [bound with] The Fourth Book, describing The West Indies Navigation from Hudson's-Bay to the River Amazones, 1721. £20,000 to £30,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Oldfield (Henry Ambrose), Rajman Singh Chitrakar & others. An album of 160 photographs and 13 original artworks, (1833-1919), [c. 1850s-1880s]. £20,000 to £30,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Audubon (John James) [and William MacGillivray]. Ornithological Biography…, 5 vol., first edition, presentation copy inscribed by Audubon, Edinburgh, 1831-49 [i.e. 1831-39]. £10,000 to £15,000.
  • Forum Auctions
    Colour Plate Books from the Library of Norman Bobins
    Part 2
    27th March 2024
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Alken (Henry). Sporting Notions, first edition, T.McLean, 1832-33. £800 to £1,200.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Bardi (Lorenzo). Nuova Raccolta delle piu interessanti Vedute della Citta di Firenze…, Florence, Lorenzo Bardi, [c.1840]. £1,500 to £2,000.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Crawfurd (John). Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava..., first edition, 1829. £1,000 to £1,500.
    Forum Auctions
    Colour Plate Books from the Library of Norman Bobins
    Part 2
    27th March 2024
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Dawe (George, engraver). The Life of a Nobleman, first edition, Geo. Henderson, [c.1825]. £1,000 to £1,500.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: [Doyle (John)], "H.B.". Political Sketches &c., 10 vol. including The Descriptive Key to H.B., Thomas McLean, [1829-51]. £4,000 to £6,000.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Eben (Adolphus Christian Frederick, Baron von) and Nicolaus Heideloff. Modèles de l'Uniforme Militaire Adopté dans l'Armée Royale de Suède, Rudolph Ackerman, 1808. £1,500 to £2,000.
    Forum Auctions
    Colour Plate Books from the Library of Norman Bobins
    Part 2
    27th March 2024
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Geissler (J.G.G.) and Friedrich Hempel. Mahlerische Darstellungen der Sitten, Gebrauche und Lustbarkeiten bey den Russischen, Tartarischen…, 4 parts in 1, Leipzig and Paris, [1804]. £1,000 to £1,500.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Hunt (Charles). Portraits of Winning Horses...of the Derby, Oaks, & St. Leger, from the Year 1842 to 1849…, Rock Brothers & Payne, 1849. £1,500 to £2,000.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Kunike (Adolf Friedrich). Zwey hundert und sechzig Donau-Ansichten nach dem Laufe des Donaustromes…, Vienna, Leopold Grund, 1826. £3,000 to £5,000.
    Forum Auctions
    Colour Plate Books from the Library of Norman Bobins
    Part 2
    27th March 2024
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Lasinio (Carlo). [Matrimony], Florence, 1790. £1,500 to £2,000.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Reinhardt (Joseph). A Collection of Swiss Costumes, in Miniature, second English edition, James Goodwin, [1828]. £800 to £1,200.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Wengen (Gottfried Durst von). Die Öffentliche Maskerade Bamberg am Fastnachts-Montage 1833…, Bamberg, [1833]. £2,000 to £3,000.
  • Sotheby’s
    Modern First Editions
    Available for Immediate Purchase
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: Winston Churchill. The Second World War. Set of First-Edition Volumes. 6,000 USD
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: A.A. Milne, Ernest H. Shepard. A Collection of The Pooh Books. Set of First-Editions. 18,600 USD
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: Salvador Dalí, Lewis Carroll. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Finely Bound and Signed Limited Edition. 15,000 USD
    Sotheby’s
    Modern First Editions
    Available for Immediate Purchase
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: Ian Fleming. Live and Let Die. First Edition. 9,500 USD
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter Series. Finely Bound First Printing Set of Complete Series. 5,650 USD
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms. First Edition, First Printing. 4,200 USD

Rare Book Monthly

Articles - July - 2013 Issue

Say it ain't so

An entertaining read - available from the author

Recently Mike Stillman wrote a story about a manuscript and book theft from the 1970’s that was solved with the admission of a person long associated with the Lambeth Palace Library that they had stolen from their archives.  Conscience ultimately won out and the library learned that perhaps as many as ten times as many books were taken as had previously been identified as missing – some 1,400 items altogether.  The material was recovered when the thief disclosed through his attorney after his death that Lambeth material was hidden in his attic.  It’s a happy if unsettling ending and an easily ignored indication of an immense problem, the theft of books, manuscripts, maps and ephemera that is overwhelmingly an un and under-reported crime.

A year ago he wrote about the Girolamini thefts, books found to have been taken by Massimo de Caro, director of the Girolamini Library in Naples.  Fifteen hundred books were initially reported missing and recently that number increased to 4,000.  For Mr. De Caro the important number is now 7 as in 7 years.  That is 2,556 days in jail books.

Theft is the often third step in a book’s history.  The first I’ll buy it and the second “it’s around here somewhere.”  But of course it's not.  It’s on to its next life a la The Bookman’s Tale [see the May issue of AE Monthly for a review].

The problem is that unusual examples are often difficult to understand and tend to share shelves with nice but less important material that in time mutes their significance and obscures their value.  In some institutions such materials are well identified and separated by value, the most important materials behind screens and locked doors.  But not all and it's at the margins that important material tends to be vulnerable, particularly if those stealing are themselves the trusted insiders.

The Lambert Palace experience illustrates that important books can slip through the cracks, particularly when the thief is someone working in the building with access through security, to the material and the cataloguing.  In such circumstances things can disappear; from the shelves and from the catalogue.  Two things saved the Lambeth from extraordinary losses, the library’s bookmarks that kept a presumed large portion of the stolen material from being disposed and in death, the thief’s decision to return what he could not cash.  In this case the story has a happy ending more or less.

But such thefts are common and most stories do not have happy endings.  For collectors  - age, declining eyesight and mental acuity may encourage “borrowing” as was the case with material in Frank Siebert’s collection in the late 1990s.  Some material is still on loan.

But surely such thefts are uncommon if not absolutely rare.  Yes?  No.  For the intrepid, the ones willing to be informed, one can always run a search for ‘book theft.’ On Google the 43,500 results will keep you up at night for months if not years.  Wikipedia chimes in with a page on library theft, reporting some of the recent major cases and the fact that English libraries experience theft at the rate of 5.3% whatever that means.
  

And in Oklahoma a textbook salesman is currently accused of diverting $2.8 million of text material from the John Wiley Company and reselling in on the Internet.  The material apparently is not old but the crime is.  When the first collector saw a copy of the Gutenberg and said “I’ll take it” we can’t be sure what he meant.
                                                                                          

The number of reported crimes in recent years has been rising.  David Slade, past president of the ABA in the United Kingdom, was caught lifting material from the Rothschild collection, confessed and was sentenced to prison.

E. Forbes Smiley, a established dealer, resolved the issue of missing volumes by simply excising maps.  He too was sent to prison, as was Denning McTague who while interning at the NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration, was arrested for theft and subsequently sentenced to 15 months.

Theft is apparently common and of course has a history.

In an interesting well-researched book by Jeremy M. Norman I recently read I can see that it’s not a new problem.  His book, Scientist, Scholar & Scoundrel, is a bibliographical investigation of the “Life and Exploits of Count Gugliemo Libri,” an Italian polymath who in the 19th century played chess when his opponents, the stock and gate keepers of many of the great libraries, played checkers and he picked their pockets clean; he the brilliant, well-placed and influential expert on rare and important manuscripts and they, the frequently ignorant and unaware.  He had quite a life, in his most active years living in France moving from Paris to London in 1848 into the warm embrace of they who did not care for the French and therefore refused to believe the charges of document theft stacked up in the Parisian courts like garbage on New York City’s sometimes strikebound streets.  The French, who would come to hate him, ensured that the English, who in that era held the French in contempt, would embrace the hated as, if not a hero, a wronged party.

In the 1840’s and for two decades to follow, the principal acquirer of Mr. Libri’s fenced properties was English Lord Ashburnham whose purchases in many cases would later find their way back to France and Italy, acquired by and on behalf of the robbed, to reunite the dispersed parts with the collections once looted.

How Mr. Libri could succeed in his life of crime arises from his unique capabilities and the era in which he lived, the final four decades before library records and official documentation would begin to become the science it is today.  In his era only a small group of scholars could read the ancient texts and few consistent records were kept.  It was in fact, to read Mr. Norman’s account, easy to steal.
  

That such criminality continues today is established, thus suggesting that more remains to be done.  We can not or should not trust, this the now pungent lingering odor that will hover over visitors and researchers for years to come because a few could not be trusted and it’s a shame.  The world of rare books, manuscripts, maps and ephemera thrives in the atmosphere of trust and is limited and damaged by distrust.  So it turns out what Libri and his many later imitators have taken was more valuable than documents and books, it was our trust.   “I had no idea” is not a defense and neither is it an excuse.  Those who control must be vigilant and those trusted to see, touch and turn must be worthy of the privilege.

In hell there should be a place from which to hang those that steal our confidence and trust.  Such people exist in every generation.  They who steal the printed word should have their own gallery.  And now, if someone will lend me their cigarette lighter …

Scientist, Scholar & Scoundrel by Jeremy M. Norman.  Available on his website – www.historyofscience.com and on Amazon.  It’s an interesting story and very well organized.

Jeremy Norman
Historyofscience.com
Historyofinformation.com
Novato, California
415-892-3181

Writer's Note:  Correction:  An earlier version of this article said that E. Forbes Smiley had been a member of the ABAA.  That is incorrect.  He has never been a member.


Posted On: 2013-07-22 00:00
User Name: wallyj

I believe that special place in hell for thieves is Circle 8, Bolgia 7. That is a ditch of evil within the circle where they are in in an endless cyc


Rare Book Monthly

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    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: ONLY KNOWN COPY OF THE ONLY BOOK BY THE REMARKABLE EVE ADAMS. $8,000 - $12,000
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    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: META REBNER'S WORKING SCRIPT OF THE LOVED ONE. $1,500 - $2,000
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: A KATHY GROVE PORTRAIT OF CYNDI LAUPER FOR THE FEBRUARY 1989 DETAILS COVER. $800 - $1,200
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: A PLASTIC COAT BY MILLIE DAVID FEATURED IN SOHO NEWS STYLE SECTION, FROM THE COLLECTION OF ANNIE FLANDERS. $500 - $700
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: A RUTH BADER GINSBURG JEWELRY BOX. $600 - $900
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