Sharpe responded that he had not taken just “one or two” from Duke, but dozens. “How many did you take from us anyway?” he wanted to know. Blumberg guessed five or six hundred, which stunned Sharpe, because “we had only identified about a hundred and fifty at that time.” He then asked Blumberg if he “by chance” had taken a tapestry that was missing from the chapel, and Blumberg said he had not, “though I was in there many times.” Blumberg then dropped a bombshell: “Well, I did steal Duke’s one millionth volume. It had a little card in it that said one millionth volume, Duke University, Flowers Collection.”
Sharpe said he could have been “tipped over” by the admission. “I knew that book was not where it was supposed to be, because I had brought it out and showed it from time to time, and I exhibited it along with the two millionth and the three millionth books. I had been looking for it and couldn’t find it, though I didn’t know what that meant. All I knew was that it was not on the shelf.” Immediately, Sharpe called his assistant in Durham, North Carolina, and asked for the proper entry information of a book printed in 1711 in Bern, Switzerland, which, translated, is titled A Guide for German Travelers from Switzerland to the Carolinas, by Jonas Ochs. Presently, Sharpe’s assistant came back on the line with the bibliographical data, which Special Agent Tucker typed into the FBI computer. “And there it was.”
Blumberg, meanwhile, had been watching with unusual intensity. After the one millionth book had been retrieved, he offered another morsel. “I also took your John Smith narration of his voyage to the Carolinas,” a 1624 work titled Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, and Sharpe thought, “Oh no, there goes that beautiful orange morocco volume.” That book, too, he remembered not being able to find. “So we looked it up, and in the room where we found that, I saw some other pieces he had taken from the Flowers Collection as well.”
While relieved to recover so many valuable items, Sharpe recalled feeling a profound sense of violation. “What I felt more than anything else was that we in libraries have to operate on a trust system every time we bring a book to someone’s table. This is what I think is so sinister about the whole thing. This man chose to debase that, to debase that commodity that is so essential in gathering information in an open institution. And I think he betrayed everything that we try to represent in making information available as freely and as uninhibitedly as possible. And I think that’s what really just enraged me, to think that this man took advantage of that kind of access.”
Sharpe and his staff tried to reconstruct how Blumberg gained access to the secure areas at Duke. “I think he stole a set of our keys,” Sharpe said, “but he didn’t steal them and keep them; he stole them, made copies, and then returned the originals. I can remember once not being able to find my keys, and having to get a spare set that we keep in another part of the department, and then having them turn up again later.”
Blumberg told Sharpe that he had “visited” Duke twice, and that each time he stayed for about two weeks. “What’s fascinating about this is that I can remember getting up in the middle of the night a couple of times and going over to the library to check the department because the alarm system was signaling an entry. We thought something was wrong with the alarm system, because we could find absolutely no evidence of egress, yet all the sensors were working. All the sensors had been alerted and had picked up the movement, but when I got there everything appeared normal. He just walked right on through the security.”
Blumberg’s memory of the specific Duke titles he took corroborated something he told me during our trip to Ottumwa, when his fate was still uncertain, and when he still viewed his assistance in identifying stolen books as “a bargaining chip” he might use down the road with the authorities. “I know where everything came from; they don’t,” he said. At that point, Blumberg asked me to turn off my tape recorder, and then he said, “You know the Uncle Tom’s Cabin they think I got from Harvard? Well, it belongs to USC.” Like so many bargaining chips, though, that one lost its currency; investigators soon determined on their own which institution owned the exceedingly rare first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark novel.
Much of what Blumberg did not tell me about his book thefts he outlined in a series of autobiographical statements prepared for the Menninger Clinic. These statements were mentioned during the criminal proceedings by both Dr. Logan and Dr. Taylor, but were never entered into evidence. I was permitted to read them after the trial. One was headed “Trips,” another “Biography.”
“Trips” was especially useful from the standpoint of establishing basic facts. Dr. Logan established a precise structure for Blumberg to follow in providing information on all of his “collecting” trips. Logan had him answer six specific questions on a month-by-month basis, starting in 1986:
Where did you go?
Whom were you with?
Did you take anything?
What did you take?
From which library?
Why did you take it?
The first entry was for the University of Colorado in April 1986. Blumberg recorded stealing twenty-five to thirty pamphlets and eight to ten books on Colorado history. Why? “They were in nice cases and I wanted to read on Colorado. Liked artwork of cases.” On the same trip he removed four or five books on Western history from Colorado College because he “didn’t have them in collection.” Later, in September, he took between twenty-five and thirty pamphlets “bound in thin books” from the Connecticut State Library. He already “had taken some” from the same place in May of 1985 and “wanted to add to collection and study.”
His 1987 adventures included no fewer than six visits to the f lea markets of Canton, Texas, punctuated by thefts at numerous libraries in California, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico. At the Claremont Colleges he removed as many as 170 volumes, mostly incunabula and books on bibliography and California history. At the University of Idaho he picked up five books on Western history. In December 1987—just a few weeks before Shannon Applegate asked to see the Webfoot Diary—Blumberg removed twenty to twenty-five boxes of manuscripts and pamphlets, and another fifteen to twenty containing “old stock certificates, ledgers, letter heads, pamphlet type things relating to Western history” at the University of Oregon. These materials made for “fascinating reading at leisure.”
The Zamorano 80 collection was taken from the “restricted floor of USC Library” during a “solitary trip” in 1987. He used stolen keys at no fewer than nine institutions between 1986 and 1988. Only at Harvard, UCLA, and the University of Cincinnati was he unable during that period to penetrate restricted areas.
Other segments of Blumberg’s written testimony described his early fascination with condemned buildings. He explained the early formulation of his plan. “I would ride out the urban renewal crisis and look for vacant buildings to go in and salvage antiques. Back then they would leave them and kids or vandals would just break them up or sell them for scrap. There was an infinite supply as literally hundreds of buildings were vacant and were being wrecked in each city.”
As his travels throughout the country continued, his knowledge expanded. “I was visiting out of town libraries as my interest in books had grown, and was looking at it as a reading resource and for research.” He also justified his book thefts. The material he saw “was little used and I would never be there again, so I better avail myself of the opportunity.” From the beginning, he never considered selling the books. “I felt I’d be doing a dishonest thing by selling ill-gotten books for money.” As to what would happen to the books “after my passing,” he felt that ultimately they “would get back to the proper hands,” if not “the same location I took them from,” at least to “someone who would use, share, and care for them. I looked at myself as a custodian of these things.”
Blumberg repeated what he had explained in his talk with me, that he always had specific material in mind when he entered libraries. “I would take different b
ooks from different locations to fill in gaps of what I had,” the ultimate goal being the creation of a repository. By “taking vital little slices” from libraries, he felt he could “complete and coordinate the ultimate collection in my field of interest, backed up by fixtures, and parts of these same buildings. I feel I pretty much accomplished this until my demise. I was interested in the nineteenth-century settlements and buildings of the U.S. and its architecture and locations. I used these books as one vast working reference library. I’d authenticate my architectural materials with the books and know the history of the part of the country they came from.”
This “ultimate collection” was supposed to reside in the Elliot House, and Blumberg recalled the joy and hope he felt when he bought that “fine old building” in 1978, and the profound anger that consumed him when he had to sell it three years later. “I had an immense amount of pride in myself in owning that place. I had preserved it and had a prospective use for my avocation. I just hated to sell it.” Forced to move out in 1981, he “had to dispose of my stuff,” including eight old cars he “literally gave away.” He estimated that “fully” 30 percent of his time over the next seven years was “in transit,” and noted that he “felt totally defeated” by the turn of events.
“I just burned and finally exploded. I crossed the line. I rationalized to myself. If for all my insight and hard work and ambition all I could get was city bureaucratical bullshit and deception, I was going to pay it back. I started knocking off everything and place I figured I could get away with.” Teaming up with Howie Bergstrom and “some bikers” he knew, Blumberg “let loose” and intensified his raids. “I figured out the obit scam,” he wrote. “I was beside myself with rage at the city of Minneapolis and my father. I told him I was breaking into places and his comment was ‘Don’t threaten me.’”
After a few years—he was not specific as to when—Blumberg “gave obits up,” primarily because the young men he had befriended were then “breaking into businesses in the area,” and he was not interested in becoming involved in that activity. “I told them I’d buy stained-glass windows, doors and fireplaces from condemned places. I was out of town a lot and they would accumulate things for me and I’d purchase them when I got back.” And he felt a sense of responsibility to them as well.
“Those kids were of great help to me as they gave me companionship and moral support. I was traveling a lot and my library thefts were increasing. I rationalized that by clearly opening the restricted areas of large libraries and museums, I’d have choice pickings. It also was a release to me of my anger and frustration of my failed past. My family had given me, in my mind, deception or stubborn resistance to my wishes. I wasn’t asking for something for nothing, only an even chance.”
It was during a trip to Texas in 1985 that he “started checking the Texas antique market and went up and discovered Canton, Texas.” Canton was great, he enthused, more than six thousand dealers, “mostly antiques and high prices.” Also at about this time he determined that the world economy would collapse and that he would be better off putting “every cent” into “rare gold coins.” Consequently, he began to divest himself of antiques in Texas and at the huge flea market operated three weeks each year in Brimfield, Massachusetts. All the proceeds went into the purchase of gold. Acting reluctantly on his father’s advice, he secured a safety deposit box in Minnesota, a decision he later came to regret when the contents were seized by the government and coins valued at more than $100,000 were taken into custody. “Something kept telling me to go into Mexico and bury it,” he wrote ruefully.
“My only storage problem at this point, I was beginning to see, was in the books,” he continued. “I used them as a reference library of knowledge. I would spend more and more time reading. I read of book collecting and learned how to spot value. I figured a book was a silent source of wisdom and if I illegitimately obtained it from neglect, of mainly the government, I was to use it. Guard it. Preserve it for others, which I did, plus shared with the underprivileged youths.”
Finally, in 1988, he decided to buy another house, and he knew precisely what he was looking for. “Nestled in a lush green valley amidst the miles of corn fields lies Ottumwa, Iowa. Rural Iowa small town neighborly folk. Howdy neighbor! Welcome friend! Nice to meet you! Come far?”
That, however, was “not the general tone” he found.
“I envisioned a friendly small town neighborly attitude in smaller towns. The friendly farmer in bib overalls, the nice waitress in the restaurant. The cute freckle-faced girl with pigtails. The buck tooth boy with a cowlick. The kindly neighbor with a hot pie under a clean dish towel. The solemn and consoling minister with the welcome and ‘the lord doth bless’ who when he sees need sends over a kindly elderly lady from the church club. Where peril and suffering doesn’t have to be spoken of to be addressed. I moved to Ottumwa, Iowa, to find this and for a while leave the big city and all its evils. All I found was ostracism in a more concentrated form.”
After buying the brick house at 116 North Jefferson Street for $16,000 cash, he “took in an elderly man, also alone in a city,” James Hall from Cincinnati. “I was trying by leaving Minneapolis to escape the bitterness I had to being screwed around in my living and collecting situation as well as gradually weed myself away from the criminal element. The bitterness I had made me want to commit crimes. The selling and on the road and the gold gave me a feel of accomplishment but added to the loneliness.”
All this made him agreeable to the unexpected request from an old friend. “I was contacted by Ken Rhodes and moved him in as I was lonely. Mr. Hall needed a friend, Rhodes needed a place and wanted to open an art glass repair shop. He had the credentials, he did good work.” Because they had known each other for fifteen years, he thought the man was sincere.
“Little did I know my assets in books and antiques would weigh on his mind until he conceived a way to lie and get me arrested, my stuff taken, and conveniently with me out of the way, he could simply state, ‘Oh, that’s mine,’ or ‘I lent Steve that.’ The FBI wouldn’t know about something that wasn’t stolen even after the investigation. He was left there and he stole all the art glass out of the place and all the light fixtures, drapes, dishes, even the doorknobs. This is the kind of scoundrel the government calls a generally reliable informant.”
Rhodes was asked during the trial if he took any of Blumberg’s possessions out of the Ottumwa house, and Rhodes admitted that he had taken material to his home in Detroit and had intended to use whatever proceeds he could generate to establish a “trust fund” in Blumberg’s behalf, a disclosure that even had people at the prosecutor’s table chuckling.
Though a former specialist in internal medicine, Dr. Blumberg said that he gave up his practice in the 1970s for several reasons. Somebody had to manage Zimmerman Realty, but more important, “Stephen became a full-time concern and required most of my attention.” He added that he often felt “helpless” trying to deal with his son’s obsessions.
Dr. Blumberg was in Des Moines for all of the criminal proceedings, though he remained outside the courtroom while witnesses were being questioned. “It’s just too much, too painful,” he said at the time. “It is an appallingly sad situation, and it has been this way since Stephen was a child. He was always a little guy, a shrimp really, but he had the face of an angel. He never had a date, not once. He was always a loner, but he got along so well with older people. He was always introducing me to these elderly people he made friends with, and they all just loved him.”
In addition to the family real estate holdings, Dr. Blumberg also administered the Carrie Blumberg Trust, and always made sure his son received the money he had coming from it. While he knew Stephen had gathered thousands of books, he said he always assumed they were bought legitimately. “They looked like plain old books to me,” he said. “There was no reason, as far as I could see, why he would have to steal books.” Once his son was in custody, Dr. Blumberg underwrote a defense that cost close to
$500,000 and pursued a vigorous appeal. When that was denied in 1992, he paid the $200,000 fine that Judge Vietor had imposed. The judge handed down a prison sentence of five years and eleven months.
“No fewer than twelve psychiatrists have examined him over twenty-six years, and only Dr. Taylor found him sane,” Dr. Logan told me on the day his patient was sentenced by Judge Vietor. “He was in and out of juvenile court on seventeen different occasions,” beginning in 1965 when his father brought him in for incorrigibility. “He was sixteen years old and his father couldn’t stop him from going into old buildings.”
By 1969, Blumberg had been hospitalized three times, and by then he was traveling around the country “going into abandoned households, taking old doorknobs, scooping up Victorian junk,” Dr. Logan said. “You don’t take what a person says, you look at what the record shows. These people don’t pop up like magic. What Stephen shares with a lot of criminals is the kick he gets out of getting away with what he does. He wasn’t risking his life just to get the book, he was risking his life to get it out of the library. Stephen was going for the record. That is why he was so fixated on surpassing Shinn.” Dr. Logan also found Blumberg’s fondness for beautiful bindings marginally significant. “He dresses shabbily, but he likes the way certain books are ‘clothed.’ I haven’t quite figured that one out just yet.”
“The man is a thief,” Linda Reade repeated in court and on the local television news shows. “Just like any cat burglar, he is a thief.” She opposed all suggestions that Blumberg receive anything other than a long term in the penitentiary. “The federal prison system is fully equipped to offer appropriate medical care,” she replied when asked about the professional attention Blumberg seemed to require, if not for his own benefit, then at least for that of the society he would rejoin upon his release from federal custody in 1996, still a relatively young man of forty-eight.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 64