Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 30, 1995 TAG: 9508300075
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
You can still read many of the Library of Congress' journals of 19th-century expeditions and its rare old botanical encyclopedias and bird books.
You just can't see the pictures.
Nearly 27,000 valuable maps, engravings and hand-colored illustrations have been cut out and fenced to unscrupulous or unwitting dealers, librarians suspect.
The stolen plates, worth an estimated $1.75 million and now indistinguishable from legitimately acquired ones, are believed to be feeding a burgeoning U.S. market in rare prints and engravings.
And 300,000 books are missing from the library entirely, according to the latest tally of losses. Many are rare, old, richly illustrated and saleable.
What's going on in the stacks of the nation's central library is simply the largest example of a wave of theft that has touched art books, bird books, atlases and other precious volumes in libraries across the United States, enriching difficult-to-detect thieves and the dealers - knowing and unknowing - who market the stolen artwork.
As a result, public, private and university libraries across the nation are hemorrhaging their ill-protected, irreplaceable older materials, experts say.
Loath to admit embarrassing losses, and torn by the centuries-old challenge to make books available to readers while still protecting them, librarians traditionally suffered their thefts in silence.
In the 1980s, they responded with more guards, clamped down on public access and discovered their real problem: their staffs. Since then, rising prices for anything antique - and light sentences for educated first-timers committing nonviolent crimes - have all but overwhelmed libraries' tighter internal controls.
``Thefts have gone WAAAY up. There's more stuff being stolen AND the thieves are more sophisticated,'' said Katharine Kyes Leab, a book trade publisher in Connecticut who for 12 years has compiled a listing of library losses reported nationwide.
``Stolen books and manuscripts have not gotten the attention that stolen paintings and art objects have,'' added Stephen K. Urice, director of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, a leading rare book and manuscript center. ``But the surge in cultural theft certainly includes them.''
Stephen Blumberg knows precisely how vulnerable libraries are. Blumberg, now 45, bored and brilliant heir to a St. Paul, Minn., real estate fortune, beat the security systems of no less than 268 public, private and university libraries over a 20-year period ending in 1990. Experts valued his haul of books, maps, illustrations and other rarities at $7 million.
Blumberg looted university libraries in 45 states, including Harvard, Duke, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, Wayne State University, the University of Colorado, the University of North Carolina, the University of Florida and the University of Southern California.
State libraries and archives in Kansas, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Connecticut and many Western states also were plundered, according to FBI investigators.
``Very few of the 23,600 books Blumberg stole had ever been known to be missing,'' noted Nicholas Basbanes, author of a new book on book collectors titled ``A Gentle Madness.'' Why? ``Librarians normally don't know a book is gone until somebody calls for it. That takes a while in a library with a million books, especially when it comes to rare, obscure books on arcane subjects.''
Like most book thieves - biblioklepts is the fancy word - Blumberg drew little jail time; he'll be out in January.
``There's been a tendency to think of stealing books as a victimless crime, almost a cute little hobby,'' said Ellen Dunlap, director of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass.
Most big library thefts, according to Dunlap and others, are inside jobs involving librarians, scholars with special access to collections - or book lovers like Blumberg who steal credentials to gain insider access. Few others, experts explain, are likely to know which books are valuable, how library security systems work, how to sell hot books and how to cover their tracks.
``Quite simply, almost no one is as dangerous as my colleagues and I are to the security of the collections in which we work,'' confessed Daniel Traister, rare book curator at the University of Pennsylvania's Van-Pelt Dietrich Library.
A popular doctoral candidate, working as a reading room attendant, stole hundreds of books, including 17th-century editions of Shakespeare from Traister's collection, for example. Chief special collections librarian Robert Willingham Jr. was convicted of stealing and selling prizes from Confederate-era collections at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Yet professionals and pseudo-professionals often are considered above suspicion by security guards. ``They just don't bother you if you're old enough and white enough and wearing a clean white shirt,'' said professor Terry Belanger, rare book librarian at the University of Virginia.
Once pages have been cut out and slipped through library security, ``there is absolutely no way for a buyer to know, in most cases, that a plate has been stolen,'' said Dale Sorenson, president of Waverly Auctions Inc. of Bethesda, Md., a rare book and manuscript specialist.
So big and hot is the market for single plates, compared to old books, that a set of illustrations is generally worth more than the whole books from which they've been cut.
Books are somewhat better protected, either with magnetized strips called tattle-tapes or with imprints identifying them as library property. Tattle-tapes can be silenced with a device that costs $17.99 at Radio Shack, however, and many libraries don't mark their most valuable materials for fear of marring their appearance and reducing their value.
At the Library of Congress, a staff of about 120 guards, working two shifts, tries to protect 500 miles of bookshelves holding 16.4 million volumes. Most guards man security checkouts at library exits, opening purses and briefcases routinely, but not, for instance, asking visitors to remove suit jackets.
by CNB