A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Several university employees were questioned; even a member of the Applegate family was suspected. Two years went by and nothing happened. On March 21, 1990, Applegate was seated in an airplane, preparing to take off on a regional flight, when she glanced at the front page of a Register-Guard lying in the lap of a passenger in the next seat. Once again, there was a large headline: “Man Arrested in Theft of Rare UO Books.” Though information was still fragmentary, the Applegate family collection was among thousands of items that had been recovered in a small Iowa community by the FBI.

  Stephen Blumberg picked me up in front of the Embassy Suites Hotel. His trial was at the halfway point, court was in recess for the weekend, and he remained free on a $50,000 bail, provided he did not travel outside the state of Iowa without his attorney, or “enter any museum or library.” A day trip to Ottumwa would not violate any of these restrictions.

  I had been talking with Blumberg throughout the trial, though unlike other journalists who asked how he felt about his prospects, I talked about books. “I’ll bet you and I are the only people in this building who know anything about points,” he quipped during one recess, referring to the various ways rare books are identified. “I wish you could have seen the incunabula I had,” he said another time as we paced through the second-floor corridor. I gave him my card, told him where I was staying, and expressed the hope that we could get together sometime before the trial ended.

  When Blumberg called that Saturday morning, most of the prosecution’s case had been heard. I had listened to key witnesses Kenny Rhodes, Brian Teeuwe, Dwaine G. Olson, Kenneth Broden, and Howard Bergstrom, along with a parade of librarians and curators who told of how their institutions had been ransacked. The defense lawyers would present their case the following week but had already stipulated that the facts as presented were correct. There was no doubt, in other words, that Blumberg had committed the crimes. The only question was why.

  Fifteen minutes after Blumberg’s telephone call, we were driving past the five-domed capitol building into East Des Moines, a little side trip to a run-down section of town before we headed for Ottumwa. We visited for about a half hour with a middle-aged woman named Gerry Madison and an extended family of nine young men and women, most of whom were watching wrestling matches on television when we arrived. Later he told me he had met one of the young men “under the bridge,” as he put it, a place where many of the area’s homeless residents congregate. “These are my kind of people,” he explained and invited two of them to come along with us on the drive to Ottumwa.

  Once outside the city, Blumberg’s mood improved, but a sense of gloom was still apparent. Even though his defense would begin in a few days, acquittal was not an option available to the jury. The verdict would be either guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity. In the latter case, Blumberg would be remanded to the custody of Judge Harold D. Vietor, who would commit him to a mental-health facility. For that strategy to succeed, the defense had to demonstrate that Blumberg was consumed by delusional fantasies. While Blumberg seemed totally sincere about the need to protect fragile American artifacts from destruction, he wanted no part of being declared insane. “It’s Catch-22,” he said. “If I lose, I wind up in prison. If I win, I wind up in the grin bin, and they can keep you in there for the rest of your life. If I win, then that also means I’m crazy and that I’m a danger to society. So to tell you the truth, I’d rather be locked up, do my time, and get out. What’s victory here for me? What’s defeat? It doesn’t look good either way.”

  Regardless of the outcome, United States vs. Steven [Stephen] Carrie Blumberg was unique in that it marked the only time a “not guilty by reason of insanity” defense had ever been used in an American court to explain the consequences of criminal bibliomania.

  “Let’s talk about books,” I said finally. “Tell me about the Blumberg Collection.”

  Blumberg confirmed what the librarians had made clear the day before, that he had a special passion for Americana. That focus developed because he wanted to know more about the antiques he had been gathering for most of his life. “It started as a reference library,” he explained. “Generally, I knew about a book before I acquired it. I knew its significance, and it didn’t matter if it was in a library or at the bottom of a box in a junk store. I knew instantly what it was and how it could help me.” He developed a “want list” but kept his desiderata “pretty much” in his head. “Some things I’d write down, but very little, because I knew what I wanted. I also saw the books as a form of security in that they were a form of knowledge, or a form of art, to be enjoyed.”

  Though reluctant to describe the specific methods he used to get into libraries, Blumberg did say that he often found himself crawling through ventilation ducts and squirming over partitions to penetrate secure areas. “I almost got crushed to death once out in California,” he said. “There was an elevator they used in one of the colleges to haul books back and forth, and I was inside the shaft climbing up. I didn’t think anybody was still in the building, but about halfway up there I heard a terrific noise, and above me I saw this thing coming straight down. I was able to squeeze myself into one of the nooks they have at each of the floors where the elevator stops, but it was pretty tight.”

  Despite the close calls, Blumberg said he never had much fear for his safety. “I didn’t figure the librarians were going to shoot me or anything, but there were some tense moments. I was consumed by the passion to collect. Seeing something like the Miguel Costansó diary they had in court yesterday was enough to take my mind off everything else. I’d be so wrapped up in that, I wouldn’t really think about the whys or the wheres of what else was happening.”

  Blumberg raised the question of respect several times while we were together. Not only did he seem to crave recognition as the greatest book thief of the twentieth century, he wanted to be recognized for his taste in books. At one point, he jokingly suggested that “one day when all this is gone and forgotten” he might like to give a talk at the Grolier Club in New York about the “true hazards” of book collecting. And he was pleased when he learned that Glen Dawson, the Los Angeles dealer who appraised the cache for the government, had said that “other than the fact that I don’t like ‘ex libris’ books [books that bear traces of prior library ownership], it was an excellent collection of Americana.”

  Curiously, Blumberg did not entirely agree with librarians who complained about their security systems. “I never saw it so much as a matter of poor security. To me it was a matter of opportunity. I’m not bragging or anything, but I’m pretty ingenious with resources, if you know what I mean. If one way isn’t amenable, I can figure out three or four other ways to get inside.”

  On that, at least, Special Agent Aiken was in complete agreement with Blumberg. “My conviction is that Steve Blumberg was going to get this stuff no matter what he had to do. He did nighttime burglaries. He defeated sophisticated alarm systems. He threw books out windows. He knew what was going on in the life of the libraries, and he picked their weakest moments. I suppose if these people were willing to dig a fifty-foot hole in the ground and encase everything in concrete, he might not have been able to get in, but I wouldn’t bet on that either. This is a very clever man. Book theft was his life.”

  The consequential moment in Blumberg’s “growth” as a collector did not come in an elevator shaft or a ventilation tube, however, but through a stroke of happenstance. One day in 1980, while leaving the University of Minnesota library, a bright plastic card on the circulation desk caught his eye. “It was instantaneous,” he said. “I saw that, and I thought, ‘You know, I understand how these things are made,’ and it was in my pocket.”

  What he had just stolen was the identification card of an associate professor of psychology named Matthew McGue. As an added stroke of luck, McGue bore a distinct similarity to Stephen Blumberg. “But I wanted to do this right. I wanted to get all the proper identification, and I knew I couldn’t do it in Minneapolis, it was too c
lose to my own home. So I went out to California and got established there. I got a driver’s license and other things.”

  One of the prosecution’s most dramatic witnesses was Matthew McGue, who identified a faculty identification card entered into evidence as being his, and another that was not, even though it carried his name; the photograph on the bogus ID pictured Stephen Blumberg. McGue described the difficulties he had endured, as time after time he was queried about research he was supposed to be doing. He said that he had never had a California driver’s license, that he had never been arrested in Riverside, and that he had never applied for reading privileges at Boston University, Harvard University, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, or the Ohio Historical Society. Looking at another card that had his name on it, he declared, “This is accurate in every way. But it is not mine.”

  By assuming McGue’s professional persona, Blumberg was able to elevate the level of his collecting. Kenny Rhodes testified that up to that point Blumberg had been gathering material from the general stacks. Now, by impersonating a legitimate academician, “Professor McGue,” he had access to the buildings where special collections were kept, and he relished the role he could then assume. Whenever a “research trip” was planned, he washed, wore eccentric but presentable clothes, and carried a briefcase. Once inside the libraries, he spoke with authority to presumed peers. “I went around to schools, and I was accepted. Even though I’ve done a lot of reading, I barely made it through high school. All my education has come from books and talking to people and observing what’s around me, and speculating and analyzing. Here I was, a visiting professor, there to do research, a scholar. And they accepted me.”

  The Oregon manuscript cache notwithstanding, Blumberg said he was primarily interested in printed books: “The truth is that I touched very lightly on manuscripts.” He took the archive because he recognized an appealing opportunity when he saw one. “They were there,” he said simply. “But mainly, my general interests were architecture and views of cities and American history.”

  So why, then, did he take a Nuremberg Chronicle?

  “Well, okay, so I got into printing history too, and I managed to put together a collection of one hundred incunabula in just three years. So I suppose those were books I enjoyed because they were important artifacts.” He thought about that for a moment, laughed, and added, “That’s quite an impressive assemblage of incunabula being brought together in the late twentieth century, don’t you think?”

  The scope of Blumberg’s foraging came into sharper focus when we arrived at the Ottumwa house. No books had been shelved on the first floor, which Blumberg kept for an old man from Cincinnati named Jim Hall whom he brought in to live with him. Upstairs, however, were nine rooms, all stacked high with plain pine boards. Because the ceilings were thirteen feet high, there was room for eleven shelves on most of the walls. FBI evidence tags were still stuck here and there, but otherwise the place was empty.

  “This is where I had my desk. Over there were my books on numismatics, and I had some nice bindings over here.” I asked him to point out the California Room, named for the state where he made his most dramatic acquisitions and reserved strictly for those books. “We’re in it now,” he said. “This is where I had the one hundred incunabula. The Nuremberg Chronicle was on the lower shelf to the right. The Zamorano Club books were in that cabinet over there. This is where I slept.” He smiled while I snapped a couple of photographs. The only trace of the Golden State left in the room was a University of California pennant he picked up in Berkeley; it was still tacked to a large cabinet.

  Elsewhere, Blumberg had separate spaces devoted to architecture, periodicals, and photographic portfolios, as well as a special sorting room and a book repair and classification area. “I was working on my own catalogue system,” he said. “I based it on the Dewey Decimal System, which I had memorized. It helped me locate things when I was on the road, and I was using it as a model for what I was putting together here.” Near the processing area was a music room where Blumberg said he had set up a line of old horn Victrolas. “I’ve got one hundred twenty thousand old seventy-eight records down at the warehouse along with a lot of other stuff.”

  • • •

  For much of the preceding week, Assistant United States Attorney Linda R. Reade had done a thorough job of characterizing Blumberg’s life on the road. A number of young men befriended by Blumberg were given reduced sentences on conspiracy charges in return for their testimony. Dwaine Olson and Brian Teeuwe told how they accompanied Blumberg on trips to flea markets and how on numerous occasions they loaded stained-glass windows, chandeliers, light fixtures, hand-tooled fireplaces, and crates of doorknobs into a van and helped him move them around between various states, often ending up in Texas.

  While everyone acknowledged that the vast majority of antique windows and fixtures he gathered were taken from condemned buildings about to be demolished, apparently Blumberg also practiced something called “combing the obits.” Bloomberg accomplices Brian Teeuwe and Howard Bergstrom told how their friend would scan newspaper obituary pages for the names of old people who had just died and left no apparent survivors. Locating the homes where these recently deceased people lived, Blumberg and his cronies would break in and burgle whatever antiques he found appealing.

  Bergstrom testified that between 1980 and 1983 alone he committed about one hundred of these crimes with Blumberg. “We traveled to Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts,” he said; the object was always the same: stained-glass windows, doorknobs, mantelpieces. “Some of the places we just ran into, some we’d find in the obit columns.”

  Every witness testified to the disarray in Blumberg’s personal hygiene. He rarely bathed or changed his clothes, a pattern he followed for at least twenty years. Throughout the ten-day trial, he wore the same blue jeans, plaid shirt, and cardigan sweater, though he appeared to be bathed and to be wearing clean clothes. Later he told me that when he was on the road and needed fresh clothes, he followed a standard practice. “I used to go inside a Goodwill box, take off my dirty pants and shirt, leave them in there, put on some clean ones, and pop right out.”

  One item the FBI recovered in Ottumwa was a spiral-bound booklet titled The Shinn Lists, a compilation of books stolen over a period of years, presumably to be sold for profit by a man known as James Shinn. That information was gathered in 1982 by William A. Moffett, then director of libraries at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. Moffett was the first not only to suspect Shinn’s activities, but to gather the information that eventually led to his arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment. Shinn’s “want list” was not like Blumberg’s, but his career, and his reputation, were. The first sentence of the 144-page booklet explains: “The Shinn lists are being shared as part of an effort to document the career of a man The American Book Collector has called ‘the most accomplished book thief ’ of our time, and to assist dealers, librarians, and law enforcement agencies in the process of replevin.”

  Kenny Rhodes testified that Blumberg mentioned several times how Shinn was said to be the “greatest book thief the world had ever known,” and that this claim seemed to rankle him immensely. When I asked Blumberg about it, he not only admitted to being “fascinated” by the notoriety of his rival but also added that he had investigated Shinn’s exploits carefully. “I had a real good collection of news clippings,” he said. “I even went to Oberlin College to their school newspaper and went through the files there one night. I even looked up Bill Moffett’s house. I was sort of a fanatic about it. I just wanted to see where Moffett lived. It was in a brick Victorian house.”

  Why did he want to see where Bill Moffett lived?

  “I wanted to see what the guy who undid Shinn lived like. I thought I would probably like him. I would really like to have met him. I would still like to meet him.”

  So did Blumberg admire Shinn?

  “I was just fascinated—sort of like a moth being drawn to a fl
ame. I was fascinated by Shinn’s undoing, but I didn’t admire him. I thought he violated the books. He was in it for the money. He sold them.”

  Shinn first attracted national attention when he was arrested in the Oberlin College Library on April 23, 1981, after behaving suspiciously in the library stacks. A search of his motel room led to the discovery of sixty books stolen from Oberlin, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, as well as an impressive variety of false identification papers, burglary tools, and counterfeiting implements. Released after posting a $4,000 bond, Shinn disappeared and continued his library thefts for eight more months before being arrested again in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on December 16, 1981.

  Once in custody, further investigation showed that Shinn had an extensive criminal record and had used several aliases—he would later tell Moffett that his identity of choice was George V. Allen—and that many of the books he stole were sold to unsuspecting dealers on the basis of want lists routinely published in AB Bookman’s Weekly, a leading trade journal. “Shinn is clearly not only an accomplished thief but also possesses considerable ability at altering his books to remove shelf marks, endpapers with bookplates and card pockets, and perforations, stamps, and similarly obvious marks,” William Burton reported.

  Moffett’s interest in what we might call bibliopathology began with his work on Shinn. “I spent an awful lot of time trying to find out who he was, what he had stolen, how he had managed it, which libraries had been his victims, whether they were aware of having been robbed, and whether they were interested in trying to recover their property,” he told me. A few institutions were not interested at all. “Some people are obsessed about collecting books; I collect book thieves. They are my obsession. I have hundreds of folders documenting cases of book theft, probably the most extensive file of its kind anywhere.”