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It is a joke in the world of rare books, manuscripts and maps that “every rare book has been stolen at least once”. This strange and shady corner of the industry was highlighted in the latest of the mysterious case of Charles Darwin’s disappearing notebooks. Taken from the Cambridge University Library somewhere between November 2000 and January 2001, they reappeared in March this year, returned to the library in perfect condition, wrapped in cling film and placed in a warm pink gift bag. The Manila envelope was marked in capital letters with “Librarian. Happy Easter x ”.
This is news that is reminiscent of the 2005-06 scandal, says Peter Barber, former map manager at the British Library. An English dealer had come to see him with an American who seemed “nervous and rejected”. He did not ask for any of the usual services – no special access card, no guided tour outside opening hours. A few days later, when the library received a request for a photograph of a rare map inside a book, they found that the map was missing. “I asked for a list of people who had seen this book before,” says Barber. “One was a Mr E Forbes Smiley.” Disturbed British Library staff checked the other volumes Smiley had examined. “Sure enough, maps were missing on these too.” Shortly after Barber informed police, he discovered that Smiley had been arrested at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, after losing the X-Acto magazine he had used to cut out the papers. In total, Smiley was convicted of stealing around 97 maps worth $ 3 million from six institutions – although these numbers are suspected to be higher.
A lot of thefts are done on commission – for millionaires who are obsessive collectors
Rare books have huge prices. In the last year, Peter Harrington Rare Books, in London, has sold a Shakespeare Third Folio for £ 500,000, a first edition On The Origin Of Species for £ 300,000, and currently offers a rare Hakluyt Atlas for £ 800,000. But paradoxically, it is not easy to make money on “invaluable” books on the black market. “Unless you have a James Bond villain stroking a white cat who just wants to keep these items, most rare notebooks like the Mona Lisa are totally and utterly unspeakable,” says London antique dealer Bernard Shapero. Still, Barber claims, “a large number of thefts are committed on commission – for millionaires who are obsessive collectors. They keep them until they die, when they can be returned. That could have been what happened to the Darwin notebooks. “
At the other end of the spectrum are passion crimes: in 1998, a Shakespeare First Folio disappeared from Bishop Cosin’s library at Durham University. Ten years later, Pom Harrington tells of Peter Harrington, antique dealer Raymond Scott took it to the Folger Library in Washington and was arrested shortly thereafter. They knew immediately that he was the one who was stolen from Durham. ” Scott had tried to sell the book to cover his debt from a love affair with a Cuban cabaret dancer: they planned to share the proceeds of the sale. He was convicted of handling stolen goods and removing stolen goods from the United Kingdom.
This library may have said no, but not everyone is so careful. A collector says: “If you go to any rare bookstore – I’m talking here from personal experience in Italy – they will tell you what they officially have. But if you talk, the seller can pull out a terribly rare book from the 15th or early 16th century from under the counter. “
“The thieves who are most problematic are the klepto connoisseurs – the book collectors who make mistakes,” said Ed Maggs, head of security at the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association (ABA). “He or she – even though I have never come across a woman’s case – thinks it’s their right to have it; they think the book needs them. ” Another industry insider points to a recent case of a high-profile but light-fingered collector. “He had a fantastic collection and a lot of money, but he still stole from bookstores and libraries.”
As recently as 2020, Oxford academic Dirk Obbink was arrested on suspicion of theft and fraud for stealing and selling Greco-Roman papyri from the Oxyrhynchus project – the attempt to publish half a million rediscovered ancient Egyptian newspapers – for which he was editor. A collector remembers being shown the papyrus by Obbink. “There are hundreds of thousands of pieces. Some were still in the old biscuit molds they were shipped in from Egypt, in the early 1900s. There was still sand on the papyri.” The collector is confused about Obbink’s motive. “He often said,” I’m hopeless with money. ” “He never tried to sell me anything. He did not buy cars. He was not a gambler. If he needed money, someone with his level of excellence could have managed it in a legitimate way through advice.”
The most problematic are the klepto connoisseurs – the collectors who make mistakes
Today, it is increasingly common for book thefts to involve fake bank orders. According to ABA company secretary Riley Grant, “package redirection is a big one”. Criminals buy books from reputable retailers, and then manipulate loopholes with bids to make last-minute address changes – where they pick up the book, and then scrape. More dramatic robberies include the 2017 robbery committed by a gang linked to the Clamparu criminal ring, which rappelled through the roof of a warehouse near Heathrow where rare volumes of Galileo and Newton were stored while on their way to a book fair. In 2020, the transport appeared, damaged, after reaching Romania via a rented house in Balham. The perpetrators were imprisoned. Pom Harrington was not impressed. “We all just thought, ‘What idiots.’ What are they going to do with them? ” ‘
More popular on the black market are interchangeable examples – not particularly rare, but difficult to distinguish: novels by George Orwell (which can go for four characters), first editions of James Bond (in perfect condition, five characters) or Harry Potter- the series (a particularly rare example that recently sold for $ 471,000).
Trends in book theft often follow cultural fashions. In the late 1980s, interior decoration styles saw popularized botanical drawings, catalyzed by brands such as Laura Ashley. Many were cut out of books and resold as individual prints. “When you take a picture out of a book, how can you see where it was taken from?” says Shapero.
Stealing individual pages has become a specialization. Maggs explains how Harvard and MIT graduate Farhad Hakimzadeh, who mutilated and stole rare books from the British Library and Oxford’s Bodleian Library, used “nothing as aggressive as a scalpel or razor blade” that would now be picked up by the library’s metal detectors. Instead, he put “a long piece of wet twine or cotton thread in the gutter of a book, and left it there.” Maggs emphasizes: “I do not know how long it will take because I have never done it myself … But apparently, when you go back to the book, the paper has softened and the page is just pulled out.”
While the Metropolitan Police’s five-person strong art and antiquities unit, which investigates cultural heritage crimes (including the rarest books and manuscripts), reveals that it has two live cases, “I am the real book detective!” ler ABAs Grant. “I’m sending out the alerts.” These alerts contain all known information about individual thefts and are sent to members in around 25 countries. “The network is one of the main reasons we can return many of the books we make,” she says: “it’s now almost impossible to steal a book in London and sell it in New York.
The current concern concerns Ukraine, where more than 250 cultural institutions are suspected of having been damaged or destroyed. “When it comes to the devastation in Ukraine, who knows when the dust settles, what we will discover. There is great concern about what may have been lost, destroyed or stolen, says Grant.
In 2021, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) launched an international register of missing books to make it more difficult to resell stolen volumes. The name “missing” is pointed out. Fear of damage to reputation is one of the key factors that has traditionally stopped reported book thefts, despite the value. Sometimes this is because they are in jobs (see books, maps and papers worth $ 8 million that were stolen from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh over 25 years by archivist Greg Priore); others, the books may have been misplaced or lost in the library itself – and no one will admit it. “It was a very big deal for Cambridge to admit that they did not know where the Darwin notebooks were,” says Maggs. “But that’s a big part of why these notebooks were returned.”
“No one wins if we do not report a stolen book,” Riley emphasizes. Maggs adds, “It is common for a stolen book to be sold through a good faith transaction – but when it is found out, everyone in the chain regrets the profit and the book is taken back to the owner.” The motto of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers says it all – amor librorum nos unit, or “The love of books unites us”.
