Disappearing Ink

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by Travis McDade


  In general, rare book thieves fall into two categories: those who sell and those who keep. Contrary to popular opinion—which holds that stealing books to own them is somehow less of a crime than stealing books to sell them—the hoarders are the worst. Once a person who steals for his own collection gets a book, it will generally not surface again until he dies. And sometimes not even then. But people who steal to sell put themselves at near constant risk of getting caught. When he wrote this post he was almost certainly in the former category. That is, he might not have looked upon taking things from Kenyon as anything other than borrowing. In any event, it is common for people who steal from libraries to think they are doing the books a favor, treasuring them more than the librarians and students ever would. And Breithaupt certainly did that, surrounding himself with books and literary artifacts on every flat surface in his house. He might even have convinced himself that he was one day going to give them back. In fact, after his thefts were discovered, people who knew him well simply felt the man lacked the guile to pull off such an enormous and ongoing crime. But then there was Christa Hupp.

  Ten years older than Breithaupt, Hupp was also a native Ohioan who wanted bigger things from life. Described in 1981 by the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram as a “32-year-old mother, housewife and fledgling activist” she was one of the founding members of an organization so new “it hasn’t even developed a firm philosophy.” She just wanted to do something. Before the advent of the Internet, that mostly meant getting her name in the local newspaper a dozen times by age thirty-five. These mentions were for subjects ranging from the arts to political activism to cross-country skiing.

  They had a strange relationship, to be sure, and one that most felt meant more to him than to her. He referred to her as his wife, and her kids as his kids, though both claims were exaggerations. By the time of his post on stealing books from libraries, they lived together, with her teenage girls, on her property east of Gambier. And though his steady thefts from Kenyon eventually contributed to the support and education of all involved, there was no formal relationship. It was clear to most people who cared to look that she was firmly in charge and wielded enormous influence over him, even driving away people he might otherwise like to spend time with. In another relationship, this might be the sort of thing that led to minor interpersonal conflicts, like Thanksgiving-plan friction, or tearful phone calls with family members. But with David Breithaupt and Christa Hupp, it soon came to mean the scattering to all corners of the world a small but carefully curated part of the Kenyon College collection.

  For Hupp, the rise of the Internet would eventually mean regular online activism and petition signing. But despite her ostensibly egalitarian political stances, she also had an impressive appetite for money—and it turned out the Internet could help with that, too. Just as the suddenly-accessible Internet was connecting people of like mind on listservs and email chains, she also discovered that it made it possible to turn all of the books and ephemera Breithaupt had accumulated on nearly every horizontal surface in the farmhouse they shared, as well as the shed out back they referred to as the “book barn,” into money. To him they were important objects that he liked to have around—he put one of the Flannery O’Connor letters he stole in a frame and hung it on a wall—but to her they were commodities. She, too, had been working in bookstores since the mid-1980s—including the Kenyon Book Store, Waldenbooks, and a large independent bookstore near Cleveland called Under Cover Books—and she knew that at least some of the things Breithaupt brought home were worth real money, especially with the advent of the Internet as a sales tool.

  As the years went on, and money became tight, she convinced him of the value of many of the things that were just sitting around gathering dust. Breithaupt was not enamored of the idea at first, but he eventually came around. He liked money, too—and anyway, if she wanted to sell books, they were going to sell books. His salary was meager, and hers spotty. The only consistent money they got was from her ex-husband. So Breithaupt agreed, slowly, to allow some of his “acquisitions” to go, and, soon enough, to make a business out of it.

  The Special Collections

  In the middle of April 2000—a week before Bill Richards saw the O’Connor letter up for sale on eBay—David Breithaupt was struggling to hold it together. Looming disaster seemed to be everywhere he looked. Christa had been diagnosed with cancer and was about to go in for surgery. It wasn’t terminal, but serious nonetheless. This meant bills, of course, but it also meant she would be out of commission for a few weeks. And because she was the engine that powered their little operation, they needed to frontload their selling to the first part of the month.

  But there was a problem. When he approached Lucy Crater, one of the custodians on the night shift at the library, and the person to whom he most often asked to be let in to the Special Collections, she refused. This stunned him. He had been coming to her for a long time, and she had never so much as batted an eye at the request; now she turned him down flat. He didn’t know what else to do, so he begged. It was unseemly and pathetic, but it was also effective; she was too embarrassed not to let him in. After she opened the door, she left him alone. When the same basic scene was played out almost exactly the same way a couple of days later with a different custodian, Breithaupt knew: they were on to him.

  But they weren’t. Chris Barth, the Director of Special Collections, had only been in charge of the collection for about nine months. But for most of that time he had been troubled by the fairly liberal access a variety of library employees had to the rarest materials in Kenyon’s collections. That April, after spending months talking to people on the matter—including, as it happened, the very man looting the collection—he decided to do something about it.

  The general collection at Kenyon contained some real treasures, especially for a person like Breithaupt, who was interested in the Beat Generation. So he stole from it early and often. But the Special Collections was, well, special. Even a century before Breithaupt set foot in the Olin and Chalmers, the college was known to have important rare books and manuscripts. A 1902 description of the collection, in a book about Ohio libraries, noted that this included “many rare and curious volumes, valuable chiefly to the bibliophile. Polyglots and Latin folios, bound in vellum and yellow with age, Elzevirs, and first editions hundreds of years old, make the library…a treasure house.” Over the course of the next ninety years, with the help of targeted buying and the donations of wealthy donors, this treasure house had only improved. It still contained all the great books from hundreds of years earlier, but they were joined now by rarities from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was a credit to the institution, and a destination for serious bibliophiles and researchers. It was also a goldmine for anyone with access to it, an Internet connection, and a willingness to steal.

  This most important room on the campus of Kenyon College sat behind an unlabeled tan door, adjacent to the librarian’s office in the reading room of the Special Collections. That Special Collections reading room, in turn, was one floor down from the circulation desk at which Breithaupt worked, and not on the way to anywhere else. Tucked into a corner, and often locked even during the day, a person had to make an effort to get there. But for the historically minded, it was worth the trip. Philip Jordan, the school’s president for the first five years of Breithaupt’s tenure, liked to speak of the particular power and importance of memory at Kenyon—how it was instrumental to the school’s character. The Special Collections, in turn, was central to those memories. Just inside that first door was a room rich with paintings, prints, furniture, trunks—even a telescope—that told the story of the college in artifacts. These ornaments of the past decorated the otherwise more practical aspects of any good reading room: well-lighted tables and sturdy, comfortable chairs. In short, it was a terrific space that, like many things at Kenyon, had been done right.

  During the day the brightly lit room and the door to it were commanded by the view from the offic
e of the Director of Special Collections—a position occupied by several people during the time Breithaupt worked at Kenyon. Most of the reading room could also be seen from the other office—the one adjacent to the door to the rare book stacks—that of the Special Collections librarian. When those two went home, the door to the reading room was locked and could only be opened with the Special Collections (SC) key. Once in the Special Collections reading room, in order to get into the rare book stacks, a person had to have a Library Master (LM). That made sense. It meant that a person who wanted to get into the rare book stacks needed two separate keys—the SC and the LM. What did not make sense was that for about five years, David Breithaupt had both of them.

  Key control in major library collections, particularly at colleges and universities, is an intractable problem. Despite efforts at keeping them in the right hands, keys tend to migrate over time thanks to carelessness, thoughtlessness, and general lack of awareness. When institutions eventually get around to finding out who has access to which keys, usually in the aftermath of some major security failure, there is often a great deal of surprise. For instance, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the University of Illinois library did a major security-oriented key survey. What they discovered was both astonishing and sadly typical. Individual departments within the library could only account for about sixty percent of their keys. Of the 651 exterior door keys issued to employees, seventy-six could not be located. One department that no longer even occupied space within the Main Library building still had forty-five master or sub-master keys; “This department could not account for most of the keys,” noted the author of the survey. Over time, keys simply made their way into the hands of people who did not need them. Mostly, this is not a problem. People with key access they do not need either do not abuse the privilege or simply do not know they have special access. But, every once in a while, there is an exception.

  In a 1995 key survey at Kenyon College, Breithaupt’s special access was revealed. Because anyone who legitimately needed something from Special Collections could simply ask for it during normal business hours, it was decided that there was no reason whatsoever for the part-time evening supervisor to have such comprehensive access. In a move that both inconvenienced and irritated him, Breithaupt’s SC key was taken away. On April 18, he wrote a note on Kenyon letterhead explaining that it was “with a heavy heart” that he turned in his key. This alone might have raised the hackles of anyone paying attention: no man is reluctant to turn in a key he does not use. In any event, he still had the LM, which could get him into the rare book stacks, but he could only use it if he could first somehow get into the Special Collections room. Over his next five years of employment, Breithaupt would spend a considerable amount of time attempting to get into Special Collections.

  At first, his best way was simply to get lucky. If someone forgot to lock Special Collections at night, he could have unfettered access to the place. But this rarely happened; in fact, the Special Collections door was pretty much always locked. But there were other ways. During his evening shift he would sometimes sit at the Director of the Library’s secretary’s computer. In her desk drawer was an SC key. If the secretary happened to forget to lock her desk drawer before she went home for the night, or if he could figure another way into it, Breithaupt had the run of the place. Of course, she did not often leave the drawer unlocked. So he just tried something else.

  To Breithaupt, the lack of an SC key was an inconvenience, not a reason to stop. He approached his entry into Special Collections with an attitude resembling a man trying to break into his own vehicle in a parking lot: It wasn’t that he advertised his efforts to gain access, he just didn’t seem to care who noticed. And while carelessness is typical of long-term insider thieves, Breithaupt raised it to almost a strategy. He seemed to be banking on the idea that people would think that no one who was doing wrong would be as open about it as he was. So, while he never made it outright clear to any librarians that he was stealing, he left a trail of evidence that, once the thefts were discovered, led undeniably back to him. A good part of this trail consisted of the breathtaking array of people he asked to let him in to Special Collections.

  After five years at Olin and Chalmers, he knew who had the keys he wanted. On friendly terms with most of these people, he had no compunctions about asking them to use their keys on his behalf. In almost every case, these requests were rewarded. One of the people Breithaupt used to his advantage was Mary Grace, who worked as a custodian at Kenyon, on the 11pm to 7am shift, for a few years in the late 90s. During the night hours, she cleaned the lower-level rooms of the Olin and Chalmers Library, including the Special Collections. Breithaupt regularly asked her to let him into the room, using one of several excuses she found barely believable at first and less so the more times he used them. One was that he had lost his keys, another was that his keys weren’t working, and a third was that he needed to use the magnifying glass in the room. Other times he would simply wander down to the room when he knew she was in there cleaning, and stay after she left. On those occasions when she was in the room, she did not see him use the magnifying glass, but she did see him use another key—his LM—to go through the door next to the librarians’ offices, and into the rare book stacks.

  Grace justified letting him in the same way everyone eventually did: because Breithaupt worked there, she assumed it was all right. While this was a remarkable breakdown in the most basic level of security, it was standard operating procedure for the roughly five years after Breithaupt’s SC key was taken from him. When she was later assigned to a different section of the library, upstairs, away from Special Collections, she saw him less often. The only time she did see him was when he could not find the other custodian—the one who replaced her downstairs—and he needed to use her key. The custodian who took over the downstairs from Grace, Lucy Crater, was, like her predecessor, also approached to let him in. He gave Crater the same excuses he had given to Grace and, for the first five or so times, she let him in with her key. Then she simply started handing it to him when she saw him, saving her the trouble of escorting him to the room.

  A third custodian—who quit in 1999, prompting the change in duties between the other two—also let him in to Special Collections the same as the others. And like Grace and Crater, the main thing she remembered about David Breithaupt, aside from his paper-thin reasons for needing into Special Collections, was that he often carried an armful of books out of the library and to his car. She thought this was a bit strange. But she also thought that of him, so it did strike her as something worth commenting upon.

  The other group of Kenyon employees with both access to Special Collections and a friendly relationship with Breithaupt was the campus security officers. These guys would, as a courtesy, stop by the circulation desk while doing their rounds, usually at about 11pm. Unlike the janitors, this was a group trained to be skeptical, so Breithaupt had to work harder at his excuses for needing into Special Collections—though not too much harder. He used the old chestnut that he had left his keys in the room until it became ridiculous. Then he switched to the magnifying glass excuse. But with the security folks he often made up a new reason as the situation warranted. One time, for instance, he told security guard Leora Watts that his SC key was bent; he even produced a crooked key to show her. Then the two went down to the Special Collections room together, where he pretended to try to make his key work. After it failed, she pulled out her General Master and let him in, as simple as that. Another security guard, Cory Wilkins, was told the same basic litany of excuses Breithaupt had given to the janitorial staff. The difference was that he, after letting Breithaupt in, would sometimes radio his dispatcher the information. But, then again, sometimes he wouldn’t.

  These excuses were not only thin, but also contradictory. If he had an SC key, and had merely left it in the room, why would he, on another occasion, need to be let into the room for the magnifying glass? Anyway, as most employees knew, there wa
s another magnifying glass in the library—it was about twenty feet from where he sat. Nevertheless, because the officers knew Breithaupt worked there, and liked him personally, they assumed it was okay to let him in. They neither denied him access nor consistently reported these requests to anyone else in the library. That he was a nice guy and a library employee ultimately worked absolute wonders for Breithaupt. It allowed him access to the most valuable part of the Kenyon collection pretty much whenever he asked for it. It even meant that he would sometimes get a security escort to his car in the dead of night, protecting him and his armload of books, presumably from drunken frat boys.

  Chris Barth did not know any of this. But by April 2000, he was troubled nonetheless. Little things suggested to him that someone was getting into the rare book stacks. For instance, he would sometimes come to work in the morning and find the lights on in there. Because he always made it a point to turn them off—and was usually the last person to leave—this suggested that someone else had gotten in at night. He was told that maintenance men sometimes worked in there, and they might have left them on, but that did not reassure him. No matter who got in there, a record should be made. He talked to Dan Temple, the man in charge of the library, about this, and put out word that no one should be let into Special Collections without prior permission. Then he scheduled a meeting with Dan Werner, the campus Director of Security and Safety, to go over a comprehensive change in the way the Special Collections was protected.

 

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