In March, along with six other books and another Flannery O’Connor letter, Hupp sold John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government for $900. This book, with a partially erased set of call numbers on the second page, went to a private collector in Arizona who was very happy to find such a rare thing available; he couldn’t believe his luck. This was a common sentiment for people who found things on Hupp’s eBay site that they never thought they would find for sale. Through the first three months of the year, the couple made more than $15,000 selling Kenyon books and Kenyon Review material on eBay. Because this money was not taxed, this was the equivalent take-home pay to a person earning about $100,000 per year—and was in addition to their legitimate earnings, ex-husband payments, and books sold elsewhere.
The only speedbumps to their increasingly lucrative business were Breithaupt’s ability to get into the Special Collections and the couple’s ability to clean the books for resale. They both failed, for opposite reasons; on the one hand, he was too enthusiastic, and on the other, they were not enthusiastic enough. Like the other difficult and time-consuming parts of antiquarian bookselling—knowing something about antiquarian books, for instance—Breithaupt and Hupp did not seem to have a stomach for cleaning the books of marks. So the books she sold looked exactly like books that had had bookplates ripped out of them, a fact noticed by everyone who opened the front cover. But even when they put some effort in, they still made a hash of it. On A Treatise of Algebra, Both Historical and Practical, by John Wallis, which sold for $650, they tried to get rid of the bookplate without creating an unsightly mess. They failed. Breithaupt soaked it in water before peeling it back—something he did frequently, and poorly. It left a tide mark on the page, thereby making it obvious that it had been soaked in water. He cut out the next (blank) page altogether.
But even a poorly-done job, as pretty much all of them were, took a long time. So any excuse they could find to leave bookplates in, they took. Books in the Special Collections that had come from the Philo Mathesian Society or Nu Pi Kappa—literary societies at the college—were generally not denuded of these tags. Still, this was not really much of a problem. Bookplates in old books are not at all rare, so finding one inside a recent purchase would not ordinarily tip someone off to the fact that the books were stolen. In fact, an obvious torn spot where the bookplate would have been might raise more alarms. So plates from these societies were left in. As were other plates—ones that seemed more obviously Kenyon-related. For instance, inside the front cover of A Collection of Facts Relative to the Death of Major General Alexander Hamilton, which Hupp sold for $430, there was a bookplate emblazoned with an image of Don Quixote. It read “From the Library of William H. Thomas.” Nothing out of the ordinary there, and Hupp described it in the eBay listing as “Previous owner’s bookplate on front pastedown.” But inside the back cover was another one. It contained the unmistakable crest of the school and read “Kenyon College Library. In Memory of William H. Thomas, Jr. Class of 1936.” It, too, had been left in and described in the listing as “library stamps on rear pastedown.”
So the two crooks erred on the side of leaving the bookplates in, even if they were strong indicators of Kenyon’s ownership. But they also left other, less specific, information in, simply out of laziness. Kenyon marked its books with call numbers and some acquisitions information, usually on the first few pages and almost always in pencil. The couple rarely erased these, and when they did, only enough so that a person had to look hard to find it. With an ink stamp that identified the college as the owner, they either cut the page out altogether—if it was otherwise blank—or scratched the stamp out with more ink. On page four of Amedee Francois Frezier’s A Voyage to the South Sea, sold for $2,000, they colored over a Kenyon stamp and then (mostly) erased a Special Collections location identifier. Still, none of that mattered to their business—if any of the people who bought the books were suspicious, they did not do anything about it.
In April, to drum up even more business, Hupp went back to the listserv. She announced on the site that she was not “sure about the appropriateness of this post, so please advise, and our apologies if the list prefers not to receive such notices. We plan to auction online a lovely 1717 first English edition of Frezier’s Voyage to the South Seas.” After which she listed the email and physical address for “Christa and Dave, Caves Curve Farm.” Four days later, the couple sold the work to a buyer in Connecticut for $1,925. Sales like that, in addition to their eBay haul, suggested that this was going to be their best year yet.
And then, suddenly, it all came to an end. In Milledgeville, Georgia, Bill Richards was simply doing his job—trying to find interesting, uncollected material about Flannery O’Connor on the Internet. The World Wide Web, as an entity known and accessible to most Americans, was barely half a decade old, and there was still a sense of giddiness in the academic community about its power to reveal, create, and connect. For the most part, the dark side of the equation for academic institutions—its ability to serve as a fence for stolen material—was not yet known. So it was with happy surprise, not skepticism, that Richards discovered the short O’Connor note. Within hours of that, David Breithaupt’s fate was sealed.
The strange thing was that this had not happened sooner. So many people were buying so many things from Hupp that they recognized to be nearly impossible to find elsewhere, it is a wonder the couple was not exposed earlier. Of course, the most common sentiment expressed to her by these eBay buyers, after their appreciation of her packing job, was to keep them in mind if she found similar items. It did not benefit anyone to look too closely—and so almost no one had.
Part II
I Received Some Strange Email from a Fellow
When Chris Barth came to work on April 25, 2000, he had no idea that it would be the first in a steady succession of eighteen-hour days. Barth was not only Director of Special Collections but a Kenyon graduate—and part of an alumni group as fiercely protective of its school’s reputation and legacy as any in the nation. He was also a scholar of Kenyon’s history; in 1993 he published a book called Seeking the Kenyon Ideal: The Modernization of Kenyon College under the Administration of William Foster Peirce. If anyone was in a position to immediately understand how serious a theft this might be, it was Barth.
He was out of the office that afternoon when Bill Richards from Georgia College and State University called to tell him about the Flannery O’Connor letter, but Lynn Manner, a longtime employee of the Olin and Chalmers (and later Director of Special Collections), was in. Manner talked to Richards for a while, got as much of the story as she could, and then greeted Barth with the bad news shortly after he arrived back. Barth listened closely and then immediately picked up the phone and called Richards. He had a flood of questions Manner couldn’t answer, and he needed to talk to the source. This was a nightmare—and it was exactly the sort of thing Barth had been dreading.
In the months before Richards found that letter up for sale, Barth had been working to improve the security situation at Special Collections. At any academic library, security is a minor concern; libraries, as a whole, are underfunded, and, within libraries, special collections and archives are the most underfunded departments. So incremental change was the best he could hope for; if he couldn’t stop people from going in, a record of who had done so would be helpful. Swipe cards, a camera, keypad locks—anything would be better than an untraceable, duplicable key. Still, the only thing he had done so far is talk to people about the problem. Included among these, as it happened, was David Breithaupt. One evening in the spring of 2000, the man who was responsible for the weird things Barth noticed about the Special Collections wandered up to him as he was working the evening shift on the reference desk. Breithaupt wanted to talk about the vulnerability of the collection. The Internet, Breithaupt noted, had suddenly made rare books and manuscripts more valuable to thieves, both because they were easier to sell and because it was easier to know what was worth stealing. Breithaupt had some cr
edibility with Barth on the subject simply because the thief would sometimes alert the Director of Special Collections to something in the general collection that ought to be in the rare book stacks. If even the part-time evening guy knew about the vulnerability of the collection, Barth had thought, it was probably time to take some action. So Barth had been steadily making the idea of tougher security more palatable to people, and the day before Bill Richards put his bid on the O’Connor letter, he met with Dan Werner to talk about implementing serious upgrades in Special Collections. It was akin to closing the paddock door after the horse had gotten out—though, of course, they did not then know the horse had gotten out.
When Barth got off the phone with Richards that Tuesday, he knew. Richards had not told him much more than Manner had, so he was still in the dark about the scope of the problem. But he knew for sure it was going to be a lot of trouble—and he had no idea who to trust. This is typical when any special collection has been burglarized. Those with the best and most complete access are always the first ones suspected—another of the unquantifiable harms that results from these thefts. Everyone suspects everyone else, and even after the actual criminal is caught, the memory of distrust lingers. It is not unusual for people who have been through the trauma of this sort of theft to leave the school and, sometimes, the profession altogether.
But that was only one of a million things swirling around Barth’s head; the only thing he knew for sure was that he had a big problem, and he had to figure out what it was as soon as possible. So he immediately went into the rare stacks and the Kenyon Review drawers to confirm that the O’Connor letter was gone. He was shocked to find the whole file missing. It was a heartbreaking discovery—the sort of thing that makes a rare book librarian sick to his stomach. How could the entire file be missing? This was worse than he could have imagined. The only positive thing about it, though, was what it ruled out: this was not the work of a researcher working at one of the reading room tables. This was someone with keys.
His first impulse was to do a survey of the whole collection, to immediately find out what else was missing. This is a response also typical to these situations. Librarians and archivists who discover items missing from their rare collection want to know exactly what is gone and they want to know it immediately—it overcomes them like a panic. But Barth knew this had to wait. There would be time for an accounting later. The first thing to do was stop the bleeding. For him that meant not only to secure the material but also to see that nothing else was sold on eBay. So he left Special Collections and walked upstairs to tell Dan Temple, Vice President for Library and Information Services—the man who ran the library—about the O’Connor letter and what else he knew of the unfolding crisis.
Barth did not know much, but he told it all to Temple, who was startled by the news. Then the two discussed what the next course of action was. Mostly this involved Barth finding out exactly how bad the damage was—then they could see about affixing blame. The main thing to do was to get started. There was a lot to do and it all needed to be done quickly, so once he left Temple’s office, Barth got to work. Temple, on the other hand, had less he could do immediately. He, and others, could help Barth eventually, but the first few steps in the process fell, as they usually do, to one person. So Temple was sitting in his office at just after 5pm, not even a half hour after Barth left, when events overtook him: Breithaupt walked in with a hang-dog look.
Breithaupt had a friendly-ish relationship with Temple the same way he did with most librarians at Kenyon. It was based on short, cordial visits. He sometimes stopped by, at the beginning of his shift, to mention interesting things he had discovered about the library or to talk about books he had read or interesting local history topics. Whatever he could think of. So at just past 5pm on that April Tuesday when he walked in to Temple’s office, it did not seem particularly out of the ordinary—and, as it happened, his timing was pretty good: Temple needed to talk to him anyway. Two nights earlier, at just after midnight, Breithaupt had asked to be let into Special Collections again. Because of Barth’s recent insistence on security, this had become forbidden, and a report of the request was sent to Temple. Temple was planning on having a talk with Breithaupt about it. It is a strange testament to the level of trust Breithaupt enjoyed that even at that point it had not yet occurred to the Vice President that the missing letter and the report on Breithaupt might be connected. So the thief made the connection for him.
Breithaupt started the conversation by telling Temple that Christa Hupp was having surgery. This was outside their normal conversation range, and so a bit shocking. But the surgery would be mentioned, by both Hupp and Breithaupt, in the coming days, months, and years as if it had talismanic properties for warding off responsibility—and Breithaupt may have thought this was as good a way as any to cushion what he was about to say. After Temple offered his best wishes, Breithaupt spoke again. He mentioned, as if it were an afterthought, the email he had received from an eBay buyer about the O’Connor letter. And then he told a tale of how he had come to have the thing in his possession. It involved a used book sale and a forgotten letter tucked into a page of a book and it sounded desperate and fictional and ridiculous. And while it was all those things, it was all he had. This book sale, along with the Village Antique Mall in Johnstown and the back dock of the library, was part of the holy trinity of Kenyon book acquisitions, and after mentioning them for years, they sounded entirely plausible to him. But the thing about the lies he had been telling his brothers and friends—and surely rehearsing in his head—was that all the people who had heard them up to that point had wanted to believe them. Now these lies had to stand up to the scrutiny of people who had nothing to gain by them being true. They were not up to that standard, but he was stuck with them nevertheless.
Temple was startled by the admission, but did not let on that he knew anything about the letter nor did he mention the security report he had received. He simply heard Breithaupt out and asked him to bring the O’Connor letter in the next day. Like a great many people at Kenyon in the coming days, when Temple discovered that Breithaupt had been stealing from the college he was both surprised and not surprised at all.
Barth, in the meantime, was back in the rare book stacks. As soon as he left Temple’s office, he’d gotten right to work, beginning with a folder-level inventory of the Kenyon Review holdings. What he discovered stunned him; someone had been at the collection in a big way. A reliable survey needed to be done, but he knew then it could not be done quickly. He would need to start over and do it systematically. So he was in his office planning just that effort when he received an email from the person whose mess it was he was trying to clean.
“Hi Chris,” Breithaupt wrote. “I received some strange e-mail from a fellow who says a letter I am selling belongs to Kenyon.”
It took Barth a moment to get his bearings. He was already in a bit of a haze over everything he was learning—and then this. He could not register it all at once. He did not want to miss anything, but he also wanted to get the gist of the two-paragraph-long email as soon as he could. From what he knew of Breithaupt he did not immediately think him capable of this crime. He did not have the right keys, for one thing. Nor did he seem to have the temperament. He did not strike Barth as devious—and insider library thieves, whatever else they are, are usually that. He got back to reading the email, hurriedly, as he searched for some explanation. Breithaupt told how he was confused about what this man from Georgia meant, but that he must be referring to a letter Flannery O’Connor sent to John Crowe Ransom. A letter, Breithaupt wrote, “I found tucked into a book I bought at the bookstores [sic] booksale about a year and a half-two years ago when they had that massive cleaning out sale (were you here then?).”
This sounded beyond the realm of possibility to Barth, but it was turning into that kind of day, so he kept reading. The book he found it in, Breithaupt continued, was one owned by Phillip Rice. “The letter had NO Kenyon markings on it at all, of cou
rse if it had an archival tag of any sort I would have brought it to your attention.” He said he assumed it was something “Phil” had simply left in the book. He went on to mention that Hupp was having surgery and he would be in and out the next day but, when he got back, he would drop the letter by Barth’s office. (Hupp, for her part, had a different reaction later that night after Breithaupt told her what had happened at work. On the eve of her surgery, she was irritated by the idea that they had to give the $500 letter back to Kenyon. Their two different reactions—one dishonest, but conciliatory, even sorrowful, the other petulant, aggressive, grasping—would come to typify the difference in how the two would face the long aftermath of the discovery of the thefts.)
Barth immediately called Dan Temple to ask if he knew about Breithaupt. Temple told him about Breithaupt’s visit to his office and the two began discussing what their next step was. In a strange way, the process of ferreting out the crook would have given them the time they needed to figure out their next course of action. Now that he had basically confessed—neither man believed Breithaupt’s story—they did not immediately know what to do. They did not want to confront Breithaupt before contacting law enforcement—that was a good way to get him to destroy whatever Kenyon material he had left. But they did not want to contact law enforcement before they had proof of his guilt. So they decided that Barth would spend the next few days accumulating evidence that this was not all some big misunderstanding, but rather a systematic looting and selling of the Kenyon collection.
The next day was a busy one for Barth. He spoke with Richards again about the O’Connor letter. Then he went on eBay to try and determine other buyers of Kenyon materials through Hupp’s account. He was able to discover several recent transactions of books that matched descriptions in the Kenyon catalog; when he went to the place on the shelf where those books were supposed to be, he found them missing. What was increasingly clear to Barth was that these missing items were not all likely to have come into Breithaupt’s possession because Phillip Rice tucked them into the back of a book. Breithaupt was quite clearly stealing from every part of the library—and had been doing so for a long while.
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