Disappearing Ink

by Travis McDade

  What she discovered was that the most popular items were those of substantial, but not outrageous, value. For instance, Samuel Taylor’s Angling in all its Branches, from 1800, had no problem selling and eventually went to a buyer in New York for $139.16. (This was a discount over the actual value, which was likely closer to $200.) Also popular were books that were well known, but not too well known; rare, but not too rare. H.G. Wells’ works fit the bill perfectly. In May she listed War of the Worlds, from 1898, and earned $800 for it. A couple of days later, she announced a lesser-known Wells book, Adventures of Tommy, from 1929, and was disappointed with the $66 it brought. So she listed next The Time Machine, from 1895, and got $661 from a buyer in Oklahoma. All told, their first spring foray into the eBay world had been a rousing success—quite in addition to what they had collected from sales through Bibliofind, the auction house, and Breithaupt’s continually ham-handed attempts on email. Of this last, he wrote to Jonathan Lethem on May 22, ostensibly to say that he was looking forward to reading his about-to-be-released book—Motherless Brooklyn—but really to say that, “I need a buyer for the following: an old Mercaters (sic) Atlas 1625 and a typed manuscript for Pynchon’s second published story, Entropy. We will talk price when we have a buyer.”

  Lethem replied that he had heard about the Pynchon manuscript from Michael Seidenberg—their mutual acquaintance, and the man to whom Breithaupt most often offered books and manuscripts and, in general, begged money. Seidenberg had brought Lethem and Breithaupt together years earlier at his bookstore, the Brazenhead, and he was Breithaupt’s most generous benefactor by a wide margin. He seemed willing to send his friend money whenever he asked—and Breithaupt asked a lot—and never really be concerned about what he got in return. In July, he told Breithaupt, who had offered him a Flannery O’Connor manuscript, that he was not sure about the price of the thing but that he would send $500 anyway and they could figure out the details later. “The important thing is to get you the cash and I will send that today.”

  Like a stray cat that’s been fed, once Breithaupt got money from someone he kept going back to him again and again. So Kevin Mullen was a frequent target of his email sales pitches, as was Ken Lopez. But no one seemed to have a deeper well for Breithaupt’s pitches than Seidenberg. That summer, a lot of Kenyon material made its way to New York including, eventually, the Pynchon manuscript. Seidenberg loved it, but thought the typing almost too perfect. Upon examination, Lethem, too, noted it did not look like the work of a writer as much as the work of a writer’s assistant. Seidenberg decided to wait to sell it until he could verify “who did what.” By the fall, he was taking pretty much whatever Breithaupt offered. “Send the yeats send the ransom send the vidal,” he wrote in October. He did not know what of it he could use, but he was happy to mail Breithaupt a check for it all anyway.

  Hupp, on the other hand, did not go in for any of these glad-handing, promissory, meeting-of-the-minds shenanigans—she was running her end of the shop with the steady discipline of a boiler room. She worked hard on getting the descriptions right and marketing the heck out of the books. To her friends, other activists, family members, and the online community, she was a progressive and redistribution-of-wealth advocate of the first order; in actuality, she was the most hard-charging pure capitalist in central Ohio. Everything was done in order, and with precision, so that customers got their books and she kept getting their money. Her turnaround upon receiving a check was prompt, and her packing job was first rate; the feedback she received on eBay mentioned those two facts conspicuously. They also routinely mentioned both her kindness and honesty.

  She travelled a lot to do library research—for obvious reasons, she did not want to do research in Gambier—and also spent some time on the Internet. As Breithaupt had before her, she discovered listservs, though her use was more about commerce than community. In the summer of 1999, she started posting on a map trade listserv both as a way to get information about particular items they had and as a way to prime the pump for possible sales. For instance, in July, Hupp posted a question. “Can anyone direct me to the price references for Arrowsmith’s New General Atlas (Edinburgh 1817) complete?” She had found listings in price guides for the individual maps, but not the complete atlas. And she did not want to keep travelling to Columbus to do research and not find the right guide. This post generated correspondence that allowed her to sell the atlas, in August, for $871.

  Quite literally the only thing Christa Hupp needed from Breithaupt was more supply; with all of their outlets, she never seemed to have enough. Because that was his only job—and just about the only thing he was good at—he intended to keep providing. But where, in the face of pressure, she had become more focused and competent, he became more reckless and bumbling. Never a particularly savvy thief, in the weeks after Hupp joined eBay, he became even more cavalier about his need to get into Special Collections. At one point in his theft career he would wait for key-holders to come by, or actually be in the room before he would approach them—almost as if the thought just occurred to him. By then, getting into Special Collections was no longer a pleasant surprise—it was his job. So he tracked down janitors, no matter where they were. If he could not find one, and he did not want to wait for security personnel to come by on rounds, he actually called the campus police dispatcher. For instance, in the first two weeks of May, he phoned in three different requests for an officer to come out to the library and let him in to Special Collections. All of these calls were logged and kept. They carried notations like “let David Breithaupt, night supervisor in the library, into the Special Archives room in Olin Library.”

  He was quite possibly the least sneaky rare book thief in the history of the crime, and yet he kept getting away with it.

  The Dealer I Bought it From

  By late summer 1999, the couple had business down to a library science. Hupp knew exactly what sold well, and so she needed more of it. H.G. Wells books, in particular, were a boon. Aside from the three she had sold that summer, Hupp moved The Invisible Man, in August, for $565.55, First Men in the Moon in October for $510, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, in November for $220. It was relatively easy for her to find accurate descriptions of these books and they were not so rare that people asked a lot of inconvenient questions about provenance. By the beginning of autumn, they had been on eBay half a year and sold scores of Kenyon books at a nice, reasonable pace. But as they had from the beginning, they always needed more money.

  And in the end, that might be the strangest thing about this already-strange story: where the money went. Several attempts at reconciling the accounting would later be done; one prepared by Kenyon’s law firm, later accepted as factual by an Ohio court, was based on the amount of money deposited in various of the couple’s bank accounts between 1995 and 2001. (Bank records before that time had been expunged.) This analysis demonstrated a staggering discrepancy between what the couple earned legitimately and what they deposited. For instance, in 1997, the couple’s total legitimate earnings, including a reported $812 in book sales, was at just $25,000. The amount deposited to their bank accounts, on the other hand, totaled $123,558. This was not an anomaly. The next year, though Breithaupt earned a mere $10,537 in wages, he deposited $50,537 in his bank accounts; Hupp, who earned $12,095 in wages, and received $8,341 in alimony, deposited $49,348. This wild difference in actual earnings versus bank deposits continued, every year, right up to 2001, when the couple together made about $35,000 in legitimate income (including $18,967 Hupp received from her ex-husband) while depositing $95,477.

  These astronomical amounts were impossible to explain, though Breithaupt later tried. He would mention to authorities his father’s estate, which he valued at about $200,000. As executor of the estate, Breithaupt said, the money came to him—put into his checking account—and he distributed it to his three brothers. But his share of the inheritance, he admitted, was only $50,000, a sum that fell short of explaining even a single year’s profits. Another way he
tried to explain his unexplainable infusion of cash was freelance writing, for which he got paid, he said, around $10,000. Like his writing, these claims were largely unsuccessful fiction. In one sworn statement after another, these meager writing assignments—for which he had no proof of payment—would be stretched and bent and moved around in time to attempt to cover one bank deposit after another, though the amounts and dates never seemed to quite fit. He even mentioned that he loaned a Gambier friend $10,000 during the mid 1990s, and that since he got paid back sporadically it explained some of the money that came in. But even if believed, all his explanations would still come up way short. Between 1995 and 2001, according to this bank record analysis, the couple deposited into their accounts several hundred thousand dollars more than they made in salary.

  Despite this money, much of it untaxed, Breithaupt was always broke. He routinely asked people for money, and frequently fell behind on financial obligations. In 1998, for instance, there were fully fifteen checks returned from the couple’s People’s Bank of Gambier account for insufficient funds. And this was not an anomaly; the next summer, the account bounced five more. In July 1999, still desperate for money, Breithaupt asked his friend Andrew Hall to lend him $1,000. He closed the request with this note, making good on an earlier promise: “Also, send me your latest address, I have an early Pynchon story in the Kenyon Review to send you.” After a tepid response from Hall about the dangers of lending money to a friend, Breithaupt sweetened the deal, offering to sell Kenyon’s copy of John Marshall’s “Life of George Washington” for $1,200 instead of the listed price of $2,000. (“ps, but if you want to loan, thas OK too!”) The loan never came, and the Pynchon work went to Seidenberg. What is most startling about this, though, is that in the same month that David was begging for money, Hupp sold seventeen Kenyon books on eBay.

  So where was it all going? Well, only Hupp knew for sure. She handled the money that came to the Caves Curve Farm, and also the separate PO Box she rented in nearby Danville, Ohio. Of the money that both of them saw, some of it went to basic living expenses, like upkeep of the old house and cars, and a large chunk of it went to the college costs for Hupp’s two daughters. But most of it went nowhere—it was just the money they lived off of. And so they kept needing it.

  That fall, Christa was shoveling books into the eBay maw as quickly as she could get her fingers to write the descriptions. In October she sold Thomas McKenney’s Sketches of a tour to the lakes for $650, Wells’ First Men in the Moon for $510, Guy Tachard’s Voyage de Siam for $1,100, and six other books from Kenyon. Breithaupt also sold four books with the Pacific Book Auction Gallery for a tidy $2,000. In November, Hupp sold eleven more books on eBay and another seventeen in December—including a signed copy of P.F. Kluge’s Alma Mater for $45.

  Despite this, Breithaupt bounced four more checks that season, and struggled to explain to his brother why he owed family money he could not pay back (“you know the story—it goes fast!”). Jim told him to “hustle to unload some books” or get a second job. Choosing, in a way, both options at once, he offered Ken Lopez one of William Butler Yeats’ privately printed copies of The Trembling of the Veil at $1,900. (Kenyon had one of the world’s greatest Yeats collections, and Breithaupt stole from it with enthusiasm.) Lopez replied that it was a nice offer but priced too high—roughly five times what he wanted to pay. That astounding discrepancy in price was the work of a man who still had not one clue about the market value of books, but was desperate as ever for money. In any event, Breithaupt relented. (Two months later, Lopez’s December catalog offered for sale Yeats’ The Trembling of the Veil, noting it was the limited edition of this autobiography, published the year before Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and “one of 1000 numbered copies signed by the author.” Lopez’s description mentioned only a few minor problems with the book, most notably, “Faint bookplate removal abrasion [on the] front pastedown.”)

  Around the same time, Breithaupt offered to Weiser Antiquarian Books a book from 1581 called Imagines Deorum Qui Ab Antiquis Colebantur. He was reluctant to part with it, he said, because it was “one of my treasured copies but I have two kids in college so, I am unloading a few titles.” The dealer wanted the book—they seemed to find a buyer quite quickly—but asked for a more reasonable price. Breithaupt knocked $75 off the too-rich asking price of $650 but also, of course, failed to mention what the dealer later described as “a water stain throughout the pages.” This damage was the result of a ham-handed attempt to clean the book of marks.

  Just Some Folks Selling from Their Personal Collection

  “The mood changes when autumn is over,” P.F. Kluge wrote, of the Kenyon campus, “and autumn is over in a wink. The skies turn gray, the fields are empty brown, and those trees that waved leaves at freshmen and their parents in August stand out now, black and skeletal, like pickets in a fence that holds us in.” If Breithaupt and Hupp paused as the calendar turned to 2000 to enjoy the fact that the Y2K bug didn’t kill their financial lifeline, there was no evidence of it.

  In early January, Breithaupt reconnected with Andrew Hall, noting that as the new year started and “we send the kids back to college, we are experiencing that special $ pinch.” He then offered him the George Washington books he had offered six months earlier, this time for $700 instead of $1,200. Hall was still not interested, despite the discount. He probably knew that if he waited long enough, Breithaupt would practically hand them over for free. But Hupp was not waiting on anyone. On January 13, she sold Kenyon’s copy of De Arte Supputandi, from 1538, for $660.55. This was a roughly $3,000 discount over the actual value of the thing, a trend that continued on January 21, when she sold Jedidiah Morse’s The American Geography, from 1792, for a very low $49. It was worth closer to $1,000. If she knew how little she was getting, she did not stop to shed tears—money was money, even if it was less than it could have been. On January 27, she sold Jan Luyts’ Astronomica institutio from 1692 to a Canadian, for $1,510, American. She also sold half a dozen other books, and two letters. One, written by Flannery O’Connor, went for $511.01. Another, by Walter Gropius, earned $76.01.

  Sales continued briskly in February, including not only a dozen books, but a Joyce Carol Oates manuscript—it brought $103.80—and an issue of the Chicago Law Journal from 1886. It sold for three dollars even, but cost $3.80 to ship. The second most valuable item sold in February was listed at mid-month. Called The Navigator, Directions for navigating the Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio & Mississippi, it was printed in 1818; Hupp described it as a very good ex-library copy, with a gift bookplate on the front pastedown and “a very few faint pencil markings on blanks and some text pages.” Most importantly, there were more than two dozen maps in the book, including thirteen sections of the Ohio River. It was this fact that most interested Christopher Watters, a professor at Middlebury College whose hobby was collecting old maps and books related to the Ohio River Valley. He also had a side business called Cartographics of Vermont, an antiquarian concern that specialized in nineteenth century American maps, atlases, globes, and books related to American exploration and surveys. Bidding started at $250 and ended exactly eight days later, with the twelfth and final bid, when Watters offered $810. (This was a good buy. The William Reese Company is offering a copy of this for sale now for $3,000.) Three days after that, Hupp sent Watters an email congratulating him and asking for a check to cover the price and shipping. He asked that the book be shipped by UPS, but she replied that that was difficult. They had once been able to send UPS packages from a little store in Gambier, but the paperwork got to be a hassle, so now they just sent everything by US Post. It cost a little more, and might have been a hassle for some customers, “but we aren’t real book dealers, just folks selling off some of our personal collection to help defray tuition expenses for 2 college-age daughters.” Watters was sympathetic, having similar expenses; he sent her a check for $816.95, and asked her to keep him in mind if she found any other map-related Americana.
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br />   She said she would. She also said as much to the Nebraska physics professor who bought the most valuable thing they sold that month—a Ptolemy Almagest, from 1528—for $4,750. (Among her descriptions of the book on eBay: “Penciled library notation on page following title and signs of pocket or bookplate removed from front pastedown. Small ‘Does Not Circulate’ stamp on rear pastedown.”) Like the previous gentleman, she got chatty with this guy when he asked after her store. She noted that they did not yet have one. “Though we often fantasized about opening a shop, college tuition for our two daughters came first, and fortunately so did the Internet explosion.” She then gave a brief history of Caves Curve—first Bibliofind, then eBay and books on consignment—before noting that “for the most part the books we sell are from our personal collection,” but that she would keep his interest in early science books on file, in case they came across anything promising.