Disappearing Ink

by Travis McDade

  That meeting was set for April 24, 2000—the day before Bill Richards put his bid in on the Flannery O’Connor letter.

  We Have Begun Selling Some of the Books

  Caves Curve Books was the perfect front. Custom-made for the Internet, the business practices of the place changed with the advancing technology. By the early 1997 opening of the “store”—it was really just a house filled with books—Breithaupt had already sold plenty of stolen Kenyon items. Mostly this was done in the old-fashioned manner of travelling from one book dealer to the next. Breithaupt and Hupp also found book dealers in journals, like AB Bookman’s Weekly, and sent them postcards with the names of books they were selling. But with Caves Curve Books (“Specialties: History, Art and Architecture, Scholarly works”) they began slowly moving beyond the realm of retail selling to exploit the power of electronic connectivity.

  This, at first, meant that Breithaupt would sell, via email, to friends he had made in New York or book dealers he was able to find on the Internet. Many of the earliest forays into selling via email were small, timid affairs where the Internet was used in place of the phone, post, or personal visits. That a great deal of these sales were initiated from the computer at the Kenyon library’s circulation desk might seem a particularly spiteful turn; in fact, it was largely based on convenience. He was mostly selling items he had found in the general stacks—the sorts of things that did not attract much attention and would be difficult to trace back to the school—or even recent acquisitions in the technical services department awaiting processing. Using a nearby computer, with a nice connection, in the late hours of an academic library, was perfectly natural. (Of course, though most of the books were coming from the general stacks, even then he dabbled in items from Special Collections. In May 1997, for instance, he sold a 1647 Hugo Grotius book to a Chicago book dealer.)

  Breithaupt and Hupp’s knowledge of how to use the Web at the time was rudimentary—they were discovering its commercial potential slowly, as most businesses did in the late 1990s. But their understanding of bookselling was even worse. Despite their collective years of bookstore experience, neither one of them knew very much about the actual book trade; like most amateurs, their tendency was toward inadequate description and over-charging based on retail prices Breithaupt found in magazines and on the Web. They made basic errors involving the minutiae of editions, condition, years, printers, and dozens of other small things that real antiquarian booksellers know. And because they had not paid for their stock, they did not even have a pricing point of reference.

  This was to be expected. Rare and antiquarian bookselling is an extraordinarily tough business for which a love of books is the least qualification. Generalists in the rare book trade often require some knowledge of Latin, French, and German, for a start. The ability to spot, and remember, minute details about particular editions of books, the patience to sift through stacks of old tomes for hours at a time to find a single one worth purchasing—or, in the alternative, to quickly spot a valuable one before another dealer snatched it up—an ability to dicker, hobnob, and stand your ground…all are basic qualifications. All of this comes from years and years of experience, during which thousands of books have passed through your hands. That is, the rare book trade is not a hobby, and you do not get good at it overnight. In the 1990s, most of the top booksellers had learned the trade at the elbow of another dealer, during an apprenticeship that lasted years and involved a lot of travel, heavy lifting, and sweeping up.

  Breithaupt had none of this experience, of course. Worse yet, he thought he knew something about book value and was irritated when others pointed out to him that he did not. This came up all the time as he inevitably overcharged or under-described. For instance, in December 1997, Breithaupt dickered with Pennsylvania dealer Kevin Mullen over two copies of Art Journal. Breithaupt wanted $65 apiece while Mullen was only willing to pay $100 for the pair. Mullen had to explain that he, as a dealer, could not make any money if he paid the price Breithaupt was charging. Breithaupt eventually conceded, but asked Mullen to “maybe kick in ten bucks for the postage.”

  And Breithaupt never really learned. Even years later, at the tail end of his selling career, his pricing skills had gotten no better; his ability to provide accurate descriptions—the lifeblood of the trade—remained nonexistent. Take, for instance, one of his last attempts to sell to a dealer via email, in January 2000. In the months before his attempted sale of the Flannery O’Connor letter to Bill Richards brought everything to a halt, he offered a copy of Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft to Weiser Antiquarian Books. Breithaupt claimed in an email to the dealer that he had seen the book “going for about $350 to $450.” But the dealer, Marilyn Rinn, pushed back, noting that the book Breithaupt had seen going for that price had a dust jacket, whereas the one he was offering did not. (Lack of a jacket, of course, is one of the major drawbacks of selling stolen library books.) So he gave in to her offer of $150. Then two days after the deal was concluded, Breithaupt sent her an email noting of the book, which he had not yet sent, that the only defect is “that it looks as though a book plate might have been removed from the front endpaper pastedown. It’s just a little rough patch, not all that noticeable.” (A bookplate is an ornamental tag adhered to the inside front cover of an important or valuable book, identifying ownership.) But another two days after that, with the dealer’s $150 check on its way, Breithaupt sent her an email noting that, upon further inspection, there was a tear on page eighty-eight. “The dealer I bought it from told me he mended it with archival tape but you still see it,” Breithaupt wrote. Rinn said to send the book anyway. If it was not satisfactory she would send it back.

  Upon arrival and inspection of the book, she noticed the taped page looked bad and the spine was well faded, “and a bookseller would have both of those in the description.” She told him that the true condition of the book meant it was more likely worth about $125, but that they would not make a big deal of it this time. In the future, she said, he could just send them books on consignment, and “that way you would not have to worry about descriptions.” (Rinn probably should have known not to trust him. Four months earlier, Breithaupt had sold them, for $575, Kenyon’s Imagines Deorum Qui Ab Antiquis Colebantur, from 1581. Upon receipt, Rinn’s partner complained that there was a water stain on several pages that had not been mentioned.)

  These sorts of exchanges were common throughout Breithaupt’s bookselling career. Chastened by people who knew the business in a way he did not, he often responded with faux-humility or passive aggressiveness. But he always responded. He needed their money. In a strange way, this almost certainly shielded him from too much scrutiny. While he was usually offering very high-quality material, he was not offering it at suspiciously low prices (one of the hallmarks of stolen goods), and so it was not obvious to most dealers that Breithaupt was a thief.

  But it must have seemed clear to other people. Breithaupt’s siblings, in particular, were suspicious of their pauper brother’s newfound ability, coincident with his job at Kenyon, to get so much great material. At first they expressed these suspicions; eventually, they quit asking.

  For instance, in June 1997, John Breithaupt wrote to David, on the latter’s discovery of a particularly hard-to-find book, “Come on, where the heck did you find it?” John had been looking for the book, fruitlessly, for ten years, and no one he had talked to had even heard of the thing.

  David replied that, “It came after many a moon of intense hunting!”

  In response, John—who routinely challenged his brother to find certain books, as if David had a special gift—mentioned several other scarce titles. One of these, a 1930 edition of the John Crowe Ransom work God Without Thunder, soon disappeared from Kenyon’s Special Collections.

  In December of the same year, David mentioned to his brother that he came across a ten volume set of Laurence Sterne books, printed in London in 1798, for only $15. He claimed that he found it in the nearby hamlet of Johnstow
n.

  “Holy cow, yes! Snag it.” Even if it wasn’t a first edition, John wrote, it was worth something. “What is this Johnstown place? I wanna go there.”

  David responded that “this place in Johnstown is producing some good stuff” including, he said, a copy of Christina Stead’s Lettie Fox, for $8. “I’m in the right place at the right time.”

  About that there could be no doubt. But as further evidence, he also mentioned that he had picked up a Macrobius from 1528 that Kenyon had “thrown out.” (This $5,000 book was offered to dealer Kevin Mullen the very next month. Five years later, when Breithaupt was asked about it by authorities, he pretended he had never heard of such a thing. “What year was it?” he asked. “Macrobius. I cannot recall it. I can’t recall anything that old.” When told that he had sold it for a considerable sum in December 1997, he continued to demur. “No, I don’t recall it. Macrobius.” His memory of events apparently waxed and waned. In 2009, for instance, he remembered that twenty-five years earlier, “I took the six train downtown and got off at Astor place” and the “door was painted a glossy dark brown—it looked as though an inch of paint covered it like cake frosting” and “across the street was a beautiful white stone church with green trim.” But a $5,000 book, stolen and sold in the midst of a financial drought a few years earlier, slipped his mind.)

  Again and again, he would mention to John some of his stunning “finds,” a practice that ended only, like everything else, in the early spring of 2000. A couple of months before he was caught, David told John that he had found the manuscript of Randall Jarrell’s poem Woman, published in the Kenyon Review in 1964, in the Kenyon trash. John found this “amazing,” but, of course, by that point, probably not surprising.

  Not that his brother Jim was let out of the fun. David sent him a first edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stolen from Kenyon. Jim, like John before him, seemed to suspect that something was not right. After mentioning the value of lesser versions of the book he had seen on the Internet, Jim wrote, “You really find this in a ‘ratty bookstore’ or did you five finger it from Kenyon.” David told Jim that he had found the book in a box with a bunch of other stuff, including “a signed copy of poetry by Yates [sic]” in Johnstown, for $35. Later in the month, David sent Jim another Twain, this one a more recent version of Huck Finn that David would later claim Denison University in Granville, Ohio, threw away. Jim asked again where he found it, noting it “[l]ooks like it had a book plate in the inside cover.” David did not say, and Jim did not repeat the question, he just kept accepting book after book after book—including some pretty incredible signed copies—from his otherwise poor brother.

  The strangest thing about this was that his brothers were well aware of how little money David had—they sometimes argued about the fact. Jim, in particular, lamented having to play the financial heavy with his payment-delinquent brother, who was always coming up short when family bills needed settling. So when, a mere month after Jim scolded David for failure to pay something he owed—he told him to get a second job, in fact, “or put Christa to work”—David mentioned that he now owned a signed copy of Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. Even if his family believed the preposterous story about some magical store in Johnstown delivering for pennies on the dollar some of the greatest books in American history, should they not have wondered where he was even getting those pennies?

  Other targets of his largesse were much less likely to be suspicious, simply because they did not know him at all. This, of course, was part of the point of giving them things from the Kenyon collection in the first place. So the poet Robert Peters was gifted a couple of copies of a Kenyon College literary magazine called Hika, from 1951, and he responded with a long, and kind, email. Ken Kesey, whom Breithaupt had gone to Cleveland eighteen months earlier to see perform at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was sent “a nice two volume set about Merlin” from 1899. Nick Basbanes, author of the then-recent book A Gentle Madness, was not gifted a book, but was asked about the value of certain things. It was clear that Breithaupt was trying to curry favor with the world’s most important cataloguer of bibliophilia—and a man who had written in his book a long, somewhat sympathetic chapter on America’s most well-known rare book thief, Stephen Blumberg.

  Not that all this giving away of books interfered much with business; in fact, it sometimes went hand-in-hand. In November 1997, for instance, he sold to Massachusetts dealer Ken Lopez issues 1 and 2 of volume 16 of Hika—the same volume from which he donated a couple of issues to Robert Peters. Lopez would later become moderately famous for helping track down book thief John Charles Gilkey, a man who stole from book dealers. But in 1997, he was buying from book thief David Breithaupt, a man who stole from libraries. The two issues he bought had early works by E.L. Doctorow in them, and the author had signed both. Lopez’s later catalogue entry made note of this, along with the fact that Hika was published in Gambier, Ohio.

  As it happened, this sale came shortly after Breithaupt revisited the subject of library theft on the Beat Generation listserv. In the sixteen months since his post about the near-sacrilegious nature of stealing from libraries, his thinking on the subject had evolved. Now, instead of it being unequivocally bad, he merely cautioned readers to be guided by their own conscience. As a helpful bit of advice to those who wanted to avoid purchasing stolen library books, he wrote they should only buy ones stamped by the library as discards.

  Not coincidentally, he stole a “withdrawn” stamp from the Kenyon circulation department.

  Into the Vault

  The Olin and Chalmers, like most libraries, was a donation receptacle. Well-meaning alums, former faculty, community members, and people unconnected with the college altogether gave to Kenyon their broken books, masses of papers, tables, lamps, trophies, and anything at all that seemed to be too valuable to throw away but not valuable enough to keep. At colleges and universities particularly sensitive about the feelings of donors, these items are often kept in a sort of junk purgatory until a more permanent solution can be found. In this way, Kenyon managed to accumulate a good deal of material that had not been adequately processed or, in some cases, inventoried. One of the places this material was housed in the Olin and Chalmers Library was a storage room known as “the vault.” This “vault” was in no way a secured storage area nor did it house anything of tremendous value; it was just a room in the basement that happened to have some donated material, old files, and books removed (or “deaccessioned”) from the library’s holdings. Included in the vault were boxes of material from Philip Rice, a former chair of the philosophy department at Kenyon and early editor of the Kenyon Review; this included some papers and printed material, but it was mostly just the accumulated junk of an academic office.

  Some of the items in the vault had at least moderate historical value—particularly at a place like Kenyon, where school history is important. But it is essential to understand that nothing in the vault either came from or belonged in the Special Collections. Mostly it was things like Zane Grey paperbacks and duplicate copies of the Warren Commission report—things of interest, and maybe even value, to someone. But nothing any academic library in the country would hesitate to discard. In fact, the thing of most value in that basement was the kernel of an idea, planted in the over-imaginative mind of David Breithaupt.

  In the summer of 1997, it fell to Fine Arts Librarian Carmen King to clear out this storage room. It was the sort of summer project that is routine in academic libraries, and this one was only unique because she was aided in the heavy lifting by Breithaupt. His job was to throw away the things she said needed to be thrown away. She did not know a great deal about Breithaupt—like most of the librarians, she usually left around the time he arrived for work. But she did know a couple of things about him. One was that he really liked the Beat Generation writers, because he would not shut up about his “finds” in the general collection. Another was that he was careless with Kenyon books.

  King w
as once at a book sale in Gambier when she noticed a book that looked exactly like one she had purchased for the library; she remembered it because it had been very expensive and the fine arts had a limited budget. When she picked it up off the table at the sale, she discovered that the book was, in fact, the very one she had purchased for the school. She got permission from the person running the book sale to take it back to Kenyon, where she looked at the item record. King discovered that the book was checked out to Breithaupt. She asked him about it and he claimed he had lent it to Christa Hupp’s mom, and that she must have donated it to the book sale. It did not occur to King—because why would it—that instead of this being a mistake or a misunderstanding, it was part of a deliberate act. In the future, one of Breithaupt’s chief excuses for how he came to possess so many Kenyon books was that he had bought them at local book sales. To a man like him, taking books by the armload from Kenyon, then getting someone to donate them to a book sale, then being there to scoop them up for near nothing, was as close to a fool-proof plan as any. The only thing that went awry here was that King recognized the book, and Breithaupt had included in his “donations” one of the ones he had actually checked out, instead of merely walked out. With the stacks and piles of books at the Caves Curve Farm, it was easy to get confused.

  Before April 2000, this incident, like so many other misunderstandings involving Breithaupt, meant little to King. Like most people, she did not spend much time thinking about him—and that summer she spent most of her time thinking about what to do with all the stuff in the vault. This decision put things, basically, into one of two categories: it was either good enough for the book sale or it was junk. The book sale material would be kept and the junk would be hauled up from the basement to the loading dock area by Breithaupt. Of course, as any lifelong packrat would, he inevitably found some wheat amidst the chaff. For people who treasure books and papers, many things that others consider junk are worth keeping. It did not hurt that some of the things Breithaupt was hauling up from the basement actually did seem interesting. So he asked King if he could take some of the material she considered trash home. She said it was fine with her, but that he would have to ask her boss, Jami Peelle. Breithaupt did and she, too, assented to the request.