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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  What Moffett found most fascinating about Shinn was that “such a dubious character had been able to find such ready buyers for stolen property within the trade, and for a time I suspected all antiquarian book dealers. Above all, I began to see how vulnerable academic and research libraries were to determined thieves, and how unprepared most of them seemed to be, not only in how to recover their property, but simply in how to catch or prosecute the people who were ripping them off. Overnight, it seemed I found a completely new field of inquiry that had suddenly opened up to me. I’ve never managed to escape its fascination.”

  Shinn’s thefts ended when a librarian recognized him from a photograph Moffett had distributed. “Patricia Sacks of Muhlenburg/Cedar Crest Libraries called me, and I arranged for the FBI to stake out the motel where he was holed up. Ultimately, Shinn was tried in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. He pled guilty and received two consecutive ten-year terms in federal prison.”

  Though he took books from institutions on both coasts “and everywhere in between,” Shinn, like Blumberg, was not prosecuted for theft, but for possession and transportation of stolen goods, which are much easier charges to prove. Moffett said that estimating a dollar value of the material Shinn stole is difficult. “Just as in the Blumberg case, you can never really know how much a cache of books is worth unless you actually put it up for sale and see what it would go for. For that matter, we still can’t be sure exactly how many books Shinn stole because some of the libraries he looted never knew they had been hit, and he sold a lot before we put him out of business. We did come up with a general figure of about three quarters of a million dollars, and until Stephen came along, Shinn was regarded as the number one American book thief of all time.”

  As Moffett saw it, Blumberg’s accomplishment was this: “Statistically, there has not been anyone who stole more books of such obviously high quality from more libraries than Stephen Blumberg. There have been other thieves, perhaps, with higher profiles—Charles Merrill Mount’s spectacular manuscript thefts from the National Archives come to mind—but for sheer quantity and for total value, everyone else is quite insignificant when stacked up against what Stephen brought together.”

  Moffett left Oberlin College in 1990 to become director of the Huntington Library in California, and hardly a year had gone by before he made headlines once again. On September 22, 1991, the New York Times led its front page with Moffett’s announcement that researchers could finally have unlimited access to photographic copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls owned by his institution, a move that ended a forty-year monopoly imposed on biblical scholarship by a group of textual editors approved by the Israeli Antiquities Authority. The scrolls, some eight hundred manuscripts in Hebrew and Aramaic dating from 200 B.C., were discovered in caves east of Jerusalem near the ruins of Qumran on the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956. After taking custody of the ancient documents, the Antiquities Authority was accused of selectively denying access to some researchers while arbitrarily granting permission to others. In the early 1980s, the scrolls were photographed, and negatives were placed in four repositories, the Huntington Library among them. By deciding to make the copies under his control available without restriction, Moffett effectively ended the monopoly. Moffett’s death on February 20, 1995, occasioned a tribute from Dr. James H. Charlesworth, editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at Princeton Theological Seminary. Moffett, Charlesworth said, had “risked his reputation and career to do what he thought was right,” and his decision to release the ancient documents had resulted in an “explosion of interest in scrolls scholarship.”

  Moffett’s opinions on the conditions that typically produce the most serious book thefts were just as controversial, and unlike some of his colleagues at other libraries who would have liked to see Blumberg drawn and quartered, he expressed a measure of compassion for the man. “What Blumberg did is reprehensible and inexcusable, but in a very real way he and Shinn performed a valuable service by demonstrating how vulnerable libraries are to theft. Blumberg succeeded in doing something no librarian had been able to do: he got the attention of the FBI about the magnitude of the problem.” Moffett said that it was not the “occasional rogue collector like Blumberg who poses the most persistent threat, but dishonest students and faculty. And they in turn are less of a problem, historically, than librarians themselves. In the case of rare books and manuscripts, our most serious threat is from ‘insider theft.’”

  In fact, seventeen months before Blumberg was captured, the former head of special collections at the University of Georgia, Robert M. “Skeet” Willingham, Jr., was found guilty in Clarke County Superior Court in Athens, Georgia, on thirteen counts of theft; he had stolen rare manuscripts, prints, and books from the Hargrett Rare Book Room, which he had supervised for ten years prior to his arrest in 1986. Like Blumberg, Willingham was forty-one years old at the time of his conviction, but unlike Blumberg, his crimes generated no national attention and were not explored in any detail by any professional or trade periodicals. Because Willingham stole for profit, the full extent of what he took may never be determined.

  Evidence presented in the two-week trial showed that “Skeet” Willingham not only took valuable items from the rare-book room he supervised but removed, and apparently destroyed, university records that documented their accession. By all accounts, Willingham was a refined country gentleman respected not only for his good manners but for his knowledge of Confederate imprints, an area in which the University of Georgia is remarkably strong. With T. Michael Parrish of Austin, Texas, “Skeet” Willingham compiled an authoritative bibliography of “Southern publications from secession to surrender” titled, appropriately enough, Confederate Imprints. It was published in 1987, a year after his arrest by Georgia authorities.

  People who knew Willingham well were incredulous at the charges. Defense witnesses told how he taught Sunday school, sang in the church choir, served on the Washington, Georgia, city council, and was basically “a hometown boy” who did well. “He’s a wonderful guy,” a lifelong friend asserted. “I cannot say enough about his integrity. I never even played golf with him where he cheated on a shot.” Among others who appeared in his behalf was former U.S. Representative Robert D. Stephens, Jr., of Georgia.

  “Mr. Willingham is not on trial for being a nice, gregarious person, but for being a thief,” Assistant District Attorney Rick Weaver said. The prosecution produced testimony from an Atlanta rare-book dealer with the unlikely name of Gary Zippidy Duda; Duda said he and his partner had misled police over how they acquired a rare letter written by Nathanael Greene, an American general in the Revolutionary War. “We both lied to the officers,” Duda admitted. “We were concerned about getting Skeet in trouble.”

  Georgia authorities began an investigation in 1985 when W. Graham Arader, a well-known manuscript and print dealer with offices in Philadelphia and New York, informed officials he had been offered a letter written by General Greene that he was certain belonged to the University of Georgia. A year later, a Hargrett staff member noticed that a rare map of South Carolina was missing, and further investigation showed that many others were gone as well, including twenty-eight maps once owned by George Washington. Several searches of Willingham’s home turned up more than five thousand maps, books, and other antiquarian documents, some of which were believed to be university property.

  An indictment was issued in 1987, and testimony began the following year; Willingham insisted he was innocent. The principal charge was that he stole the University of Georgia’s copy of Les Liliacées, an eight-volume collection of nineteenth-century floral prints by Pierre-Joseph Redouté that one witness estimated could be worth as much as $1 million if broken up and sold individually. Only two volumes were ever recovered, and several prints from them were missing. Willingham had sold those books to a physician for $40,000 after removing all library records that might have established university ownership. The prosecution, however, found a photocopy of a library card that had been cross-re
ferenced in the Science Department. It matched nearly word for word a letter Willingham wrote offering the Redouté prints to an Atlanta dealer, including matching lists of misnumbered pages that one art expert told the jury were unique.

  Willingham had insisted that he acquired the prints from the estate of a dead relative, but crime laboratory tests showed evidence of a signature, “H. Jackson,” on the front page of the first volume. The prosecution asserted it was the signature of Henry Jackson, the nineteenth-century professor of natural history who brought a set of the prints home to Georgia after visiting France and later presented it to the university. The state crime lab technician James Kelly said that even though the name had been erased, he was able to pick it up with an infrared light. Evidence was presented that Willingham demanded cash for the prints, and that he received his money in paper bags, $27,000 as a down payment in 1984, and the remaining $13,000 on delivery.

  Kelly also identified a blurred oval ink stain on the back of an oversize map taken from Willingham’s home as a university library stamp. A portion of the map’s cloth backing had been cut away, but enough of the ink had bled through to allow an identification. Kelly testified that twelve Indian prints traced to Willingham had been torn out of rare books in the university library. He was able to determine that the prints came from the university’s set of McKenney and Hall’s History of the Indian Tribes of North America by matching tear patterns and stains.

  On September 8, 1988, Willingham was found guilty on thirteen counts and sentenced to fifteen years in prison and fined $45,000. The jury acquitted him of one charge: that he stole a collection of Civil War orders by the Union admiral John Dahlgren, then gave the material back to the university in return for a $3,600 credit toward membership in the prestigious President’s Club. On July 8, 1991, the book thief who sang in the church choir and never cheated at golf lost his final appeal and was ordered back to jail, where he had been off and on since his conviction. On September 1, 1993, after serving a total of thirty months behind bars, Willingham was released on parole with the condition that he not live within forty miles of the University of Georgia.

  • • •

  I asked Blumberg if that is what he really thought he was doing, rescuing these things. “Yes, in all of it I was doing that—not only the books, but the doorknobs and the windows, the old house, and even the old people like Mr. Hall; yes, I believe I was.”

  But how was taking books out of secure repositories an act of rescue?

  “Well, maybe that’s a rationalization on my part. I was sort of— okay, let’s put it this way: they were sort of on an interlibrary loan to me. That’s what I figure. I don’t know if that’s how they would consider it, but that’s the way I look at it. Because I always intended to give everything back. I don’t regret putting the collection together, but I regret my inconsideration of others. So in that respect, I wouldn’t do it again.”

  At another point he was talking about Canadian imprints, and the title of a certain bibliography that had escaped him. “Damn,” he said, “if we could go through my books, I’d show it to you. It’ll come to me eventually.” That thought then jogged his memory about conditions he had seen in the Omaha warehouse where the books were being kept by the FBI. “What bothered me as much as anything is that the books were not in order,” he complained. “All my organization was gone. I had everything in perfect order; I could put my hands on anything I wanted, instantly. I had the incunabula categorized by year. I had the Americana by states and regions. And I had little special collections within the collections. Everything had its place. When they took me out to Omaha, it was no longer a collection.” I pointed out that the books were “out of order” in Omaha because shelving had been arranged according to actual owner, not his classification scheme. “I guess that’s true,” he agreed. “They are more interested in provenance out there than they are with subjects. But I’d still like to break it down by categories so we could make some comparisons.”

  Blumberg said he had the greatest respect for George Brinley and Thomas W. Streeter among other collectors of Americana. “Brinley was the obvious goal, but that would have been impossible because of the time frame. He’s more than a hundred years ago. But I think I could have caught up with Streeter, and in some areas I actually was getting there, especially in imprints. He was really strong in imprints, and I had a feeling I was getting close to the magnitude of Streeter in the Americana. I just loved to look at his bibliography and see how I was doing.”

  Then, with a sign of nostalgia, he observed, “The chase really is something, isn’t it? It just gets worse, especially when you get close to achieving the ultimate. It’s agonizing. Sometimes you wish you hadn’t started.”

  When Blumberg learned that the FBI had produced a rudimentary catalogue of the books found in his home, he expressed great interest in getting a set. The FBI Omaha Book List consists of five bulky volumes fastened with spiral bindings and carries the identification code 87GOM-36172. Everything is listed alphabetically by author, or in cases where authors are not known, alphabetically by title, and each includes a physical description and place of publication. Blumberg’s displeasure that the books had been “out of order” is reflected by two other pieces of information furnished for each title, “current location” in the warehouse, and “seizure location” in Ottumwa.

  A seizure location of “2B,” for instance, would have been the California Room. One book recovered from that sector was Cosmographia Siue De Situ Orbis, by the first-century geographer Pomponius Mela, an incunabulum published in Venice in 1482, thirty years after the invention of printing, with a value conservatively estimated by Glen Dawson to be $5,000. The Zamorano Club titles—the essential books on California history—were removed from the 2B location as well, and Blumberg’s pride in having come so close to getting all eighty of them is demonstrated by another item recovered there: the Zamorano Coat of Arms.

  This, as it turned out, was Blumberg’s one vigorous attempt to succeed at what is known popularly as “list collecting,” when a collector goes after, say, every novel that has won a Pulitzer Prize, or every book that has been adapted for the screen and won an Academy Award, or every book on the Grolier Club list of one hundred classic works of Western Literature, or every one of the one hundred books that Cyril Connolly declared in 1966 to be the most influential works of the twentieth century. Science fiction collectors will try and get first editions of every book that has won a Nebula Award, while mystery fans will seek out Edgar Allan Poe Award recipients.

  For Blumberg, the goal was to get one copy of every book on a list established in 1945 by a group of prominent book collectors who were members of the Zamorano Club of Los Angeles, an organization founded in 1928 and named for Don Augustin Zamorano, California’s first printer. Initially, the idea was to identify one hundred books central to the history of California, but the six men who compiled the list could agree only on eighty, and that is where it remained. Even then, a degree of political maneuvering was evident. Henry R. Wagner of Los Angeles, a former mining executive who helped make the selections, insisted that The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit by John Rollin Ridge, published in San Francisco in 1854, be included, possibly because he owned the only known first edition of the book. As happens so often with “unique” items, however, two more copies came to light after the list was circulated. Most of Wagner’s library, including his Zamorano books, went to Yale, his alma mater, which explains why an East Coast university is the only institution in the world to own a complete run of books that illuminate the history of California. Even the Huntington Library, which is particularly strong in Western Americana, lacks a Joaquín Murieta.

  Blumberg found many of the items he needed to complete his Zamorano list in the rich preserves of the Claremont Colleges’ Honnold Library. Others he took from the Zamorano Club library itself, conveniently housed at the University of Southern California for many years. One mystery never resol
ved at the trial was which college Blumberg had robbed to get the Zamorano 80 titles owned by the club. Tyrus G. Harmsen, the Occidental College rare-books librarian, said in his testimony that the first he knew about the loss was when he received a telephone call from the FBI in 1990. Prior to that, the assumption had been that the Zamorano Club’s collection of books from its own list had been secure. Harmsen said that in 1989 the club’s entire library had been moved to Occidental College, and the prevailing belief was that the Zamorano 80 books went with them. “They were moved from one locked storage area to another locked storage area, and there was no particular reason why they should have been inventoried at that point,” Harmsen testified.

  Since the club itself did not have every book on its list either, Blumberg had to look elsewhere if he wanted a definitive collection. What he learned is that only two complete Zamorano 80 collections are known. One is at the Beinecke Library at Yale University in Connecticut; the other was owned privately by a retired investment broker and collector of Californiana, Henry H. Clifford of Pasadena.

  Three prosecution witnesses testified as to how Blumberg became so fixed on the idea of filling out “his” Zamorano 80 collection that he not only initiated a surveillance of Henry Clifford’s house but devised various schemes to get inside. Testimony on hundreds of felonious entries and thefts was given during the trial, but this was the only instance where Blumberg was said to have considered taking books forcibly from an individual, a suggestion he told me was made idly by his young friends, not himself. “I have never hurt anybody,” he said. “I am not a violent person.” He stressed that the theft never went beyond the planning stage.