This all seemed fairly mundane to King and Peelle, but it was a watershed event for Breithaupt. From that point on, the man who had blundered through years of thefts, laundering the stolen goods through book sales when he did it at all, suddenly had a plausible reason for possessing Kenyon College material: he’d found it in the garbage. For almost anyone else, this thin tissue of an excuse would not pass the giggle test, but to Breithaupt it was a revelation. It was more efficient than book sales, and compared with the “I found it in Johnstown” excuse, this one was iron-clad. In the coming years he would ladle onto it preposterous details—that, for instance, librarians threw out Special Collections materials frequently, or that folks travelled from Ohio State and Ohio Wesleyan to dump their rare books behind Olin Library, too. But all of it grew from that small bit of real work he did in the summer of 1997.
A Good Man is Hard to Find
In an eBay world, the most interesting and valuable part of the Kenyon collection was not on the shelves that Breithaupt spent most of his time going through, but rather the cabinets he passed to get to them. The rare books in the Special Collections were very nice, and, as was being demonstrated regularly, quite valuable. But the items in the cabinets were truly unique. The drawers held letters, documents, papers, manuscripts, and ephemera from the archives of the Kenyon Review, a literary journal that, over the course of sixty years, published some of the most famous names in literature.
The existence of the Review was thanks largely to the “Chalmers,” whose name graced the library in which Breithaupt worked. Second only in local importance to the school’s founder, Philander Chase, Gordon Keith Chalmers was, according to P.F. Kluge, “an intense, beetle-browed authoritarian.” Arriving in 1937, the taciturn man set about turning the pretty, likable college into a first-rate institution. “Indifferent to balanced budgets, inept at fund-raising, frequently at war with the faculty he hired and fired, or attempted to fire, Chalmers built Kenyon’s reputation with star recruitments, with an advanced placement plan that became a national model, and with a flurry of activity.” Most important of all, he hired John Crowe Ransom to teach English and start the literary quarterly that would make the college’s name synonymous with good literature. Perry Lentz—like Kluge, a Kenyon alum who returned to teach in the English Department—put it this way: Kenyon, which had once been a bastion of “stress on the profound quality of the Word as a way of knowing God, thereby became a bastion of Ransom’s stress on the profound quality of literature as a way of knowing reality.”
By the late 1990s, the manuscript fruits of Chalmers’ foresight and Ransom’s work sat unmolested in inconspicuous tan drawers, just inside the door to the rare book stacks. In folder after folder, mundanely labeled with an author’s name and a scrawled “KR” next to it, the collection included hand-written letters, annotated rough drafts, and various bits of personal ephemera from the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Penn Warren, W.H. Auden, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, Bertolt Brecht, Ha Jin, Boris Pasternack, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Woody Allen, and hundreds of other famous or soon-to-be-famous authors and poets. In short, this was a one-of-a-kind collection as pristine and untapped as a federally protected wild land—and just as important to American culture.
Take, for instance, the Flannery O’Connor material. Like most archival files, it contained manuscripts that were, quite literally, one of a kind. Aside from annotated, type-written stories, it had more than a dozen of her letters. As with many correspondents of her era, her missives were thoughtful and witty, and contained indispensable material whose biographical insight was as important as diary entries.
For instance, one of the constant subjects of discussion between O’Connor and Ransom was her trouble writing a novel. She was a natural short story writer, but for both financial and literary reasons, she constantly felt the pressure to write longer works. In July 1953, she wrote Ransom to say that she hoped to send him her novel in the fall, but that the work went very slowly. “I seem to have to write the wrong thing thoroughly before I discover what will do.” In the spring of the next year, still struggling, she mused on the stark difference between writing short and long fiction. The one gift was not necessarily transferable to the other, she found, and so the idea of spending so much time on a single long work troubled her. “I suppose writing a novel can only be an act of faith anyway.” In September of the following year, she again thanked Ransom for the Kenyon fellowship, which allowed her to write stories instead of a book. “But I am still with this novel and I mean to finish it if it takes me forever, which it appears to be doing.” By the time she sent the short story “Greenleaf” in 1956, the writer and the editor had exchanged more than a dozen letters, and developed a friendship—enough so that Ransom could note that this latest was “up to the O’Connor canon.”
Other O’Connor letters contain her humor, news of disappointments, and sometimes pre-emptive corrections; in one story she had written “fender” instead of “bumper,” a fact a friend noticed, and she asked Ransom to correct it. (“That is how much I know about automobiles.”) And then there was this. In 1959, Robie Macauley succeeded Ransom as editor. In 1960, they published O’Connor’s story “The Comforts of Home.” On the third page of the otherwise unillustrated story, there was a strange and unsettling sketch of a naked woman, front-facing, her hand over her eyes. This disturbed O’Connor, and many who knew her, and she told Macauley as much. She said that it lowered the story and the Kenyon Review, “which will not cease to be dull by becoming vulgar. I don’t know what you’ve gained by it but you’ve lost a contributor.” She went on to note that it made her particularly sick because she considered him a friend and had been reluctant to write to him about the matter at all. She ended by wishing him and his family a happy New Year and encouraged him to “quit trying to compete with Playboy.”
These sorts of personal, sometimes revelatory, biographical facts crowd the letters and notes of hundreds of files of the Kenyon Review. It would be impossible to place a monetary value on the whole collection, but to a man like David Breithaupt, the possibilities were almost endless. If he was selective, there was more material there for him to steal than he could manage in a lifetime—and if he took even minor precautions no one would know it was gone. Like most archival collections, there was very little item-level cataloguing of the folders; in fact, it would not be until after Breithaupt was already stealing from the collection that a woman was hired to do a comprehensive sorting. Incidentally, she apparently found Breithaupt to be particularly creepy, constantly asking about her comings and goings. Of course, she likely thought his queries were of a personal nature when they were, in fact, just business. In any event, a stolen sheet or two would not only never be missed, but could likely never be identified as having been part of the collection. Breithaupt took grand advantage of this, at first stealing individual pieces from folders, including the works of Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Walter Gropius. But as he had with books, he eventually built up the courage to steal more, and better, items. This meant taking the complete files of W.H. Auden, Norman Mailer, Dylan Thomas, Thornton Wilder, Frank O’Connor, and, of course, Flannery O’Connor. Whatever his crimes against the general and rare book collections, the ravaging of the archives was a desecration of the first order. There is simply no way of knowing how much irreplaceable manuscript material he stole, sold, or destroyed—and so no way of knowing what was lost to the collective understanding of these artists. The only one who knows, and will ever know, is David Breithaupt.
The best that can be said about this looting is that it could have been worse. Breithaupt discovered the Kenyon Review material fairly late in his theft career—and almost entirely by accident. On October 6, 1998, novelist Amitav Ghosh came to the college to give a reading. David Lynn, then, as now, the editor of the Kenyon Review, was a fan of Ghosh’s work and was instrumental in bringing him to campus. It was at Ghosh’s talk that night that Breithaupt sidled
up next to Lynn and, eventually, asked him about the Review’s archives. He knew they had to be somewhere in Gambier, and he assumed they were in the journal’s offices, just across campus. Breithaupt joked that he would be willing to pay Lynn $30 for some old Pynchon correspondence, if he could find any. Though Lynn could not know it, there were two sad but serious facts contained in this jest. The first was that Breithaupt did not have $30 to give anybody for anything. The second was that between thirty and thirty-five bucks was the standard price he liked to tell people he paid for valuable literary items. This may have been a random number, or one that he decided people might find believable, but whatever the case, he used it a lot. (It might have started with the story he liked to tell about the time when New York’s Phoenix Bookstore went out of business. Apparently, the Beat poet Peter Orlovsky sold several of his manuscripts to the store some years earlier to feed his drug habit and at this final sale, Breithaupt bought them back, as a gift, for $30.) In any event, as to the Kenyon Review archives, Lynn told Breithaupt he did not know where they were, but that he would check.
The next day, in an excited email to his friend Andrew Hall, Breithaupt mentioned the possibility of getting his hands on some Pynchon material. What he did not know was that he had all the access to it he could ever want. But because the file cabinets in the Special Collections stacks were not obviously labeled, Breithaupt labored for years stealing rare books while thinking there was little of value in the long rows of beige drawers.
In any event, it was several months after Breithaupt’s encounter with Lynn that he finally figured out the truth. The documents were not across campus, but virtually at his fingertips. After discovering approximately where they were, he talked to Chris Barth about them, to find out exactly where they were. The librarian agreed to show him something, the same as he would anyone else who made a request. Breithaupt asked about the Pynchon file, and Barth produced it for him. It was a seminal event for Breithaupt, and he could hardly contain his excitement. Afterwards he told his friend Jerry Kelly “we have a Pynchon manuscript over here in the archives. I touched it!” To Hall he wrote “I held a real Pynchon manuscript in my hands today!”
What he touched that day was the Pynchon story “Entropy,” published in 1960. And far from being sated by having his hands on this little piece of literary history, it merely whetted his appetite. Two months after he held it in his hands that first time he wrote again to Hall to say, “I have the Pynchon manuscript.”
Hall replied simply, “I do not want to know.”
From that point on, the Pynchon manuscript would be mentioned with some regularity. He clearly got a kick out of “owning” it, and he dangled it in front of several people, including Jonathan Lethem, to whom he offered a “page of a Pynchon manuscript” as an incentive to write an intro to a book of Breithaupt’s short stories. Unlike rare books that had a lot of value and some cache, the unique items in the Kenyon Review archives were a jackpot of literary street cred. Breithaupt often exaggerated (and routinely exploited) his humble contacts for his own self-worth. But all of a sudden he had access to a supply of material that could legitimately make him a star. To him, that was even better than money.
The Library Where We Do Most of Our Research
In the spring of 1998, Caves Curve Books took its next evolutionary step. Even though they had exploited the existence of the Internet for research and email, they were still basically a traditional retail affair, approaching dealers on an individual basis with particular material. Then Hupp discovered Bibliofind. Later purchased by Amazon, this was an online service that allowed members to list and describe books they wanted to sell. Essentially an online catalog for book dealers—and Yahoo! Internet Life’s “#1 Favorite site of 1997”—the service was a boon to the couple. Suddenly they had a nearly limitless market to go with their nearly limitless supply. Better yet, their business did not have to rely on Breithaupt’s ability to connect with dealers, a task for which he had proven not naturally suited.
Hupp took to it right away, and earned descriptive skills and contacts of the sort that would blossom in the coming years. Mostly what they sold on Bibliofind were books from the general stacks as well as a collection of contemporary books signed by authors. That is, aside from a couple of issues of the Kenyon Review, there was little listed on the site that could connect what they sold to the college. Even so, many were described as ex-library copies or with bookplates or with tears on the endpapers where bookplates had been. Hamilton Busbey’s The Trotting and Pacing Horse in America, for instance, was noted as having “presentation signature to library along with library markings, all in pencil, on front free endpaper.” The book was listed for $90. Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising was “signed by author on bookplate on half-title page.” It was listed for $70. Martin Dibelius’ The Message of Jesus Christ was “ex-library copy with few markings, some underlining in pencil, else a VG copy.”
These were books that Breithaupt had poached on the many long nights of his library shift. By doing a search of the catalogue, he could fairly easily find all the books in the general collection from a certain time period, or that were first editions, or signed, and then gather them at his leisure. Or he could do what he liked to do best: just browse the shelves until he found something interesting. At the end of his shift, or on a break, he would just walk right out the back door with them, a couple at a time. Over the course of their year on Bibliofind, Hupp listed more than 650 books for sale, most of them from the general collection, and priced at less than $100.
Unlike the fairly amateur, catch-as-catch-can way they had been selling up to that point, once they joined the Bibliofind world in March 1998, bookselling became Hupp’s business. She soon quit her job at the Mount Vernon News and devoted herself full time to getting books listed and sold. (Coincidentally, David’s older brother George had joined the MVN staff a couple of years earlier, so the couple still had an ally at the local news organ, a fact that would become important soon enough.) Hupp would next return to the working world years later—at a library in Newark, Ohio—only after the thefts were discovered and Caves Curve Books was shut down. But that all lay ahead; in the spring of 1998, the sale of Kenyon books was generating such a bump in their bank account that she could afford to stay home.
And then the rains came. It was not exactly a Biblical flood—just a steady summer of drizzle. What locals referred to as the wettest June on record gave way to a soggy July of overcast skies and steady light rain. Pretty soon, the basement in that hundred-year-old house on Caves Curve Road had had enough, and started to fill with a muddy flood. A fair amount of their accumulated junk was ruined, along with their water heater and furnace. They had not saved money for such an event, and their insurance company would not cover it. So Kenyon had to pay.
It was at this point that the college’s nice collection of books and manuscripts, until then merely a supplement to their income, became their chief money-earner. With the circumstances of home-ownership thrusting this decision upon them, the money they got from selling books became the third leg—along with Hupp’s ex-husband’s support and Breithaupt’s otherwise meager income—to prop up the rickety stool of their lives. And if there had been any question about it that summer, by the time Hupp’s daughter went to college that fall, the fact was set in stone. Over the course of the next few years, a strange, underground transfer of wealth took place, emanating from Gambier, in the form of books, and arriving in Athens, Ohio, and Bloomington, Indiana, in the form of tuition and sundry expenses.
All of this was possible not only because of Breithaupt’s access to the collection, but because of the Internet. At about the same time that they got onto Bibliofind, they started working with another auction site, Pacific Book Auction Galleries. Whereas the online site was good for selling low-priced, general books, the PBAG took consignments of only higher-end stuff. During 1998, Breithaupt sent nearly two dozen Kenyon books, ranging in price from $150 to $3,000, to be auctioned with them. Th
e other notable difference between the two book outlets was that the auction house had standards: they rejected a bunch of items offered to them by Breithaupt because they were not sufficiently valuable. In any event, by the end of that year they had at least three reliable ways to fence Kenyon’s books, and they had not even tried eBay yet.
Jim Breithaupt had mentioned that online service to David sometime in 1997, and he had checked it out. But Christa was the business decision-maker, and it was not until she became comfortable with it that they signed up, on March 20, 1999. This turned out to be even more financially important to them than Bibliofind; from the start it was a boon. One of the drawbacks to Bibliofind was price-setting. Because they had not paid anything for the items they were selling, they often had no idea what to charge. EBay obviated most of this. The timed auction nature of the process essentially took any sort of pricing consideration out of the equation, as long as the item description was accurate. With the right description and a high enough minimum price, the market took care of the rest.
Because their store had evolved over the course of 1998 into a completely online concern—the structure of the business was already in place—Hupp merely had to point it in a different direction. Her first effort after she created an account—KMHC, her daughter’s initials—was naturally a toe-in-the-water affair. She listed two items without knowing quite what would happen, watched them with interest for a week, and was somewhat pleased when they sold for $157.50 and $2, respectively. Figuring out what sold well and what did not would take a bit of trial and error, though even after she got the pattern down pretty well, some auctions disappointed for reasons that were entirely unpredictable. For a business like the average bookseller, which relied on a model of buy-low sell-high, that would be a problem; for a business like theirs, that relied upon get-free sell-at-any-price, it mattered not a whit. The only thing lost was Hupp’s time, and she had that to spare. In April she sold eight more Kenyon books—a high of $404 and a low of $3.03. In May fourteen more—a high of $800 and a low of $27.07. And in June thirteen more, with a high of $1,200 and a low of $12.40. She was hitting her stride.
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