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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Prior to his arrest in 1990, Blumberg had no further hospitalizations, though he did receive periodic inpatient treatment at the Central Medical Center in St. Paul between 1970 and 1990. In 1974 his doctor reported “a severe schizoid personality disorder and possibly a paranoid state,” but by that time Blumberg was well into his travels through the backroads of America in search of antiques, stained-glass windows, doorknobs, seventy-eight-r.p.m. records, and rare books.

  For his part, Henry Blumberg began to develop some pride in his son’s collecting and stopped calling the items he gathered “junk.” There came, too, a degree of outside attention. In 1972, two publications took note of Blumberg’s activities, one of them a local newspaper, the other a national architectural magazine. “The Victorian World of Steve Blumberg” was the headline on a January 16, 1972, Sunday feature in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press; a shorter article in the November 1972 issue of Historic Preservation had a similar title, “The World of Stephen Blumberg,” and led with an unusually prescient paragraph:

  “Stephen Blumberg lives in a paper world. The Victorian houses he loves, with their gingerbread decoration and stained-glass windows, exist only in the intricate drawings he has done of them. They are nearly real— buildings similar to them exist in cities around the country— but the real buildings are neglected in run-down parts of town.” The article focused on a skill Blumberg had been developing since he was fourteen, “drawing picturesque old buildings” modeled on structures in Minneapolis-St. Paul and other cities he had driven to throughout the country in the “big, old limousines” he favored. His three-room Minneapolis apartment was described as “loaded with hundreds of relics from buildings that have been demolished or allowed to deteriorate.” The article emphasized that he had located the actual buildings “by referring to old city guidebooks that feature engravings and vivid descriptions.”

  In order to make “completely realistic” sketches of the buildings, Blumberg told the reporter, he would have had to “add all the modernization” that had gone on around them, but that “by cheating a little” and creating idealized settings he called “architectural composites,” he was able to “show the beauty of the city better.” Dr. Logan believes that what Blumberg actually was doing in these sanitized drawings was to remove all evidence of the twentieth century. “I go to these cities and invariably wind up in the oldest and worst districts,” Blumberg explained in the 1972 article. “But this, to me, is only an added incentive; I want all the more to salvage and preserve the structures, even if only graphically, because of the apparent imminence of their destruction.”

  “The Victorian World of Stephen Blumberg,” in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, included what in retrospect are some unusually pertinent observations. “Stephen Blumberg stands amid the Victorian Americana he has created out of three rooms of an old building at 1605 Hennipen Avenue in Minneapolis and it is difficult to describe his life style,” the article began. The writer was struck by the fact that despite Blumberg’s youth—he was twenty-three—“he lives almost a solitary existence, completely absorbed in his passion for the ‘gingerbread’ period of American architecture and the accoutrements that complemented it.” Blumberg was described even then as an “anachronism” who is “intense” and “in deep depression, not for himself, but for the terrible sins committed by Urban Renewal in demolishing the Victorian glory in the name of progress across America.”

  The reporter described some of the artifacts in Blumberg’s apartment. “Stephen has amassed perhaps the most outstanding collection of stained glass from the condemned mansions, houses and public buildings of every major city,” while his “piles of glazed ceramic tiles are enviable,” and his “antique doorknob collection” numbered in the “hundreds.” To get them, Blumberg had “haunted the once grand and then fading and now extinct old residential sections of Chicago’s south and west sides, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Boston, New York and Philadelphia,” even getting himself arrested once for “stealing ornamental doorknobs from an old Minneapolis mansion on the assumption he had not gotten the owner’s permission. He had.”

  The reporter wanted to know why Blumberg had such a special fascination for stained glass:

  “‘Stained glass,’ he says, lovingly describing one of the pieces with which he has decorated his home, ‘is the most beautiful part of Victorian America—even more lovely than the carved woodworking, the friezes, the balustrades, wood paneling and ceramic tiled walls, floors and fireplaces.’”

  The reporter wondered how Blumberg knew where to find all these deteriorating mansions. “He takes old city guidebooks published before 1900 and follows those to the old neighborhoods. ‘I have the pictures in the guidebooks of how some houses looked, or buildings, and I have found them in desolate, horrible run-down blocks.’”

  Blumberg then told how he obtained his material: “I beg, buy—but never steal—anything from empty, about-to-be demolished buildings.”

  The reporter talked to Dr. Henry Blumberg for a final comment. “What bothers Stephen’s father more than the son is where this youthful obsession with one age of American history will lead.” The article concluded by quoting Dr. Blumberg directly:

  “Here he’s got all this talent for collecting, for drawing, for painting, this urge to get involved with preservation, he’s got this fortune in ‘gingerbread,’ and he lives like a hermit.”

  These two stories offered rare early glimpses into the “Victorian world of Stephen Blumberg,” and constitute the only outside attention this unusual young man’s dogged preoccupation with the past received during the next eighteen years.

  When Blumberg was showing me through the empty rooms of his Ottumwa house, I noticed a rectangular piece of soiled cotton cloth lying at the bottom of an empty pine shelf. The FBI had removed all the shelves’ contents, but this little fragment had been left behind, most likely because it was not a book and had no apparent value. It was a print, embossed in red ink on a plain white background, of an old gingerbread house.

  “It’s something I made when I was in high school,” Blumberg said sadly. “I carved it out of a piece of linoleum, and used the linoleum like a woodblock to pull a couple of prints. I did that in 1965 when I was sixteen.” He gave the print to me as a “memento” of our day in Ottumwa, a gift I accepted with thanks after he inscribed and dated it in the lower-right-hand corner. Later, in the downtown warehouse, he also gave me a brass doorknob selected randomly from one of many plastic milk crates stacked in a corner. He looked intently at the fixture and quickly announced it was made in 1895 by the Reading Hardware Company of Reading, Pennsylvania. “Just soak it in a paint stripper or something, and then, if you want to polish it, polish it up nice. It’s a beauty.”

  Though Stephen Blumberg had been stealing for most of his life, the element of revenge did not become a factor until the mid-1980s, according to Dr. Logan. One prosecution witness, Brian Teeuwe, came close to explaining what drove his friend to take so much material out of the Twin Cities and drive it south. “Steve used to say that his great goal in life was to steal all of Minneapolis and sell it to Texas.” Dr. Logan testified that it was the loss of an old building Stephen called the Elliot House that had generated so much rage.

  In 1978, using part of the $72,000 annual stipend he received from a trust established by his grandmother Carrie, Blumberg bought an old building at 1628 Elliot Avenue in Minneapolis “that was going to hold his Victorian collection,” a thirty-six-room Romanesque structure built in 1888. It would be a “show place” where “he could create the world that he wanted to create.” Almost immediately, however, “there were various building and zoning restrictions and various codes.” His father, “for whatever reasons not entirely clear,” argued strongly against the house and “urged” Stephen to sell it. In one instance, where Stephen had trouble evicting a destructive tenant, “his father actually paid the man’s rent and came into court and testified for the tenant. Steve was absolutely astounded.”


  Difficulties with the city continued, until Blumberg was finally forced to sell the property. “He became virtually enraged,” Dr. Logan said. “He really did not have a mission or goal in life. His ideas about the government conspiring against him and others like him really increased after this time, as did some of his activities in taking things.” That was when he began the obituary burglaries. “He would talk about going through the drawers of these dead people, trying to figure out what kind of person this was, almost like an archaeologist.” When Blumberg found photographs of “these elderly dead people,” he would take them, “put them up in his home and tell people they were his relatives.”

  At this time Blumberg’s fascination for books moved away from Americana to embrace “all old books,” including the oldest of all, incunabula, though he had no interest in fiction, art, or much of anything that went into the twentieth century. Dr. Logan said Blumberg was convinced that the bureaucracy “was trying to prevent the ordinary man from having any access to seeing these rare works of beauty.… He would somehow liberate and preserve them, and sort of thwart this government plot. So he was focused more on taking books, and his travels began to increase.”

  Despite the value of the material, Dr. Logan stressed that the books “were not financially significant” to Blumberg. “They became an extension of his own delusional ideas, his feelings of what his worth, his value was. The more depressed or upset he was, the more angry he was about what was going on in his life, so the more he sought a release in either seeking revenge by getting the books or actually having the books, and the more he became fascinated and engulfed in these ideas, in this whole pursuit of taking these things.”

  One of the most striking exhibits Dr. Logan presented was a drawing Blumberg made of himself as part of a series of psychiatric tests in 1965 when he was sixteen years old. The picture shows an older man with a beard, dressed in nineteenth-century clothes. “The same test administered today looks virtually the same,” said Dr. Logan.

  He also described at length the other directions Blumberg’s paranoia took, including his belief that a totalitarian state where the “government would control everybody” was imminent. One illustration of this fear—which had also been described earlier by several of the young men who testified for the prosecution—was Blumberg’s grim prediction that everyone eventually will have “bar codes” tattooed on their foreheads “so they can be scanned” by optical computer devices like so many supermarket products. His conviction that major economic collapse was imminent is reflected as well by his massive hoarding of gold coins and pieces. “So it started out with simple ideas and grew more elaborate as time progressed,” Dr. Logan said in summation. “The one manifestation of his fear of the world at large was that he tried to create this Victorian world much as a cocoon about him.”

  Finally, it came time for Dr. Logan’s evaluation. Everyone had agreed that Blumberg stole millions of dollars worth of rare books, and nobody doubted that he was a collector out of control. But was he insane?

  The lights inside the courtroom dimmed and Dr. Logan projected a slide on a screen. It showed an entry in a book known commonly as “DSM-III-R,” the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatry. Under entry 297.10, he indicated “Delusional (Paranoid) Disorder” as his basic diagnosis. Stephen Blumberg, he declared, suffered from “a very severe, very chronic disorder” that includes a “grandiose delusion.” He explained further: “The content [of the delusion] involves an exaggerated sense of importance and power; in Stephen’s case, his identity as a Victorian man, his importance in preserving Victorian artifacts and books, particularly historically valuable books. Secondly, a persecutory delusion [involves] a person or group [feeling] attacked, harassed, cheated, persecuted or conspired against; and this principally involves … ideas about how the government plans to control and manage and prevent [the person] from obtaining any wealth … anybody who is poor, disadvantaged, or members of minority groups. He includes himself among that group, feels he has been personally harassed at times.”

  With that, the defense rested its case.

  Linda Reade’s cross-examination focused initially not on Dr. Logan’s diagnosis but on how much the Blumberg family paid the Menninger Clinic for the evaluation. Twenty minutes later he was excused, and the prosecution called its own psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Taylor of Des Moines, who said he had examined Blumberg in his office at the request of the government for “no more” than two hours, though possibly for as short a time period as forty-five minutes, as the defense later suggested.

  Dr. Taylor said he had not interviewed any other Blumberg family members, though he did review the medical records that detailed Blumberg’s previous “psychiatric difficulties.” Dr. Taylor said, however, that mental health problems any other family members might have suffered were “of no relevance” to the case anyway. His purpose was to find “evidence of what Dr. Logan claimed existed,” and his conclusion was a summary dismissal of all the defense psychiatrist’s assertions as being “irrelevant” to Blumberg’s state of mind.

  As to the massive book thefts, Dr. Taylor said they represented an area where Blumberg felt he “could become important,” nothing more. Dr. Taylor agreed that Blumberg had “a strong affinity” for the Victorian era, but said all it represented was a “romanticized period” for him. “He drew old Victorian houses. People who are interested in horses draw horses. I certainly don’t think you can jump to the conclusion that because he draws these houses in precise detail, it’s anything other than [that] he has an interest in this, and he said that.”

  While “well aware” that Blumberg “had hospitalization” in the past, Dr. Taylor concluded nevertheless that there was “no evidence to indicate anything that would qualify as a severe mental condition or defect.” Finally, in his opinion, there was “no sense of delusional thinking or paranoid thinking.” Asked under cross-examination to explain how two psychiatrists could come to such profoundly conflicting conclusions, Dr. Taylor said, “Mr. Blumberg told Dr. Logan a different story from the one he told me.”

  The next day, after closing arguments, detailed instructions to the jury from Judge Vietor, and a break for lunch, the jury came back with a swift verdict to convict Blumberg on all four counts. Following the advice of the judge, the jury chose not to discuss its verdict with reporters. In the eyes of the law, Stephen Blumberg was sane, guilty, and criminally accountable for his actions.

  Sentencing was set for April 26, but was put off several times so that appraisals acceptable to both sides could be compiled. The books’ worth was crucial because the length of Blumberg’s prison term would be determined in large measure by the value of the material he had stolen. While the $20 million figure initially put out made for good news copy, everyone in the book world understood that the Blumberg collection was by no means in league with the Bradley Martin or Estelle Doheny libraries, each of which brought more than $30 million in highly publicized auctions held between 1987 and 1990, nor was it superior to the Garden Ltd., which sold for $16 million in 1989. It was an exceedingly valuable selection of books, but just how valuable was a crucial point of contention.

  In her presentation to the jury, Linda Reade produced figures relating to 3,345 specific books and manuscripts from seventeen institutions that had been valued by Glen Dawson of Los Angeles and Kenneth Rendell of Massachusetts at $2,310,377. Some twenty thousand additional titles from more than two hundred other libraries remained to be valued, and they would be the subject of new appraisals prepared by experts for each side, though everyone agreed that much of what remained was bulk. In the end, Bart Auerbach of New York City and Ken Nyesbaum of New Haven, Connecticut, would submit separate appraisals that established a strong middle ground of about $5.3 million for the whole collection, a figure that Reade and Rosenberg ultimately accepted as realistic.

  While he awaited sentencing, Blumberg was brought to the Omaha warehouse on a daily basis to assist in the book identifications, a v
oluntary gesture designed to demonstrate “acceptance of responsibility,” another factor that Judge Vietor would consider when he decided how much time Blumberg would be required to serve in prison. During the July 31 sentencing hearing, FBI agent David Oxler was asked if Blumberg happened to be in the warehouse while a librarian from Duke University was there to determine which titles might be his. Oxler said he was. And did Mr. Blumberg at one point go up to the librarian and apologize for his thefts? Yes, Oxler said, he did.

  When I got back to Massachusetts, I called Duke University and asked John L. Sharpe III, the academic librarian there, to recall his meeting with the infamous book thief. “The agents were concerned that I not be offended by the presence of Blumberg in the warehouse,” he said. “Would it bother me at all, they asked, if he were brought into the room with me. I said not at all; I actually was very curious to see what he looked like and what he sounded like. I wanted to see what kind of character had wormed his way into our libraries and taken so many of our books.”

  Sharpe said that some books already had been identified as having been taken from Duke but that he still had no idea how extensive the losses were. “The thing about Blumberg is that he didn’t just go around removing materials haphazardly. He was quite selective. He had a bibliographical concern.” Sharpe spent his first day in Omaha “working through the collections,” trying to find books that had not yet been determined to be Duke’s. “I kept finding pieces that were not listed in the FBI list, things that I could identify readily by means of the style of the markings on the spine.”

  Blumberg, meanwhile, was confined to a specific area of the warehouse. Books would be brought to him, and he would work at a table. “Somehow, it was mentioned that I was from Duke University, and he looked at me, and he said, ‘Duke University?’ I said, ‘That’s right.’ He said, ‘You have a beautiful campus.’ I said, ‘Yes, thank you very much.’” Blumberg then returned to his work, but sometime the next day, the two of them were left alone for a brief period. “The place was locked, of course, but the agents said jokingly, ‘John, don’t let Stephen go out the front door.’ After a while, he came over to where I was working, stood with his feet kind of spread out and hunched back, and looked at me, and said, ‘I didn’t realize I was creating so much trouble for so many people. I didn’t think it would matter if I took one or two books.’”