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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
Dark side of bibliomania
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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The Book Thief is a fascinating tale of the theft of rare books and manuscripts and the thief’s eventual capture and trial.
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Librarian and lawyer: Travis McDade’s latest is an intriguing and compelling read.
In the late evenings of the spring of 1994, Daniel Spiegelman, a small man in his late thirties, stole several rare manuscripts and maps from Columbia University’s Butler Library. By the time the thefts were discovered, Spiegelman was already i
n Europe, trying to sell them on the open rare book market.
Spiegelman’s crime, his eventual capture and trial is the subject of Travis McDade’s riveting book, The Book Thief: The True Crimes of Daniel Spiegelman (Praeger Publishers). McDade’s book is the first book-length account of a book thief. A librarian and a lawyer, McDade focuses on rare book thefts and the legal trials that follow. What holds McDade’s attention in the Spiegelman case is Judge Kaplan’s unique, groundbreaking sentencing.
Gripping narrative
The Book Thief reads like a thriller with its suspenseful, gripping narrative of how Spiegelman planned and executed the theft. Columbia’s Butler library is equipped with high tech security systems, and yet Spiegelman broke in. Like all old libraries, McDade tells us, Columbia’s Butler also had one small security flaw. And one flaw was enough. I’m not going to say what it was or mention anything more about how Spiegelman did it. It’s a fascinating tale, and one that you should discover for yourself in the book.
McDade’s precisely calibrated, elegant style is gripping; his research, impeccable. It was Consuelo Dutschke, the curator of the medieval and Renaissance collection, who first discovered the missing manuscripts. Jean Ashton, the director of Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, was notified. As in most cases of library rare book thefts, McDade informs us, suspicion first fell on the staff.
Among the many rare items Spiegelman stole were “17 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts dating from 1160 A.D. to 1550 A.D., including Euclid’s Elementa, three Books of Hours, two papal bulls, eight Arabic and Persian manuscripts dating from the 10th century to 1887, 284 historical maps, 237 individual maps razored out of a 17th century version of Blaeu’s Atlas Major and 26 Presidential letters.” In all, he stole rare books, letters and manuscripts worth several million dollars. McDade points out that there are two kinds of book thieves — those that steal to make a profit, and those who steal to collect. It is the second who is the most dangerous to libraries because the material, once taken, vanishes. Luckily, Spiegelman was stealing to sell and it was only a matter of time before these manuscripts and maps turned up on the open market.
In the book’s second chapter, “Smart Thief, Bad Crook”, McDade describes the capers of at least a dozen book thieves who have been stealing from rare book repositories. Some worked as a couple, some were professors and graduate students with access to rare book rooms and a few were even librarians. Stephen Blumberg, perhaps the biggest book thief of the century, stole in all 30,000 rare items, totalling more than $20 million. He served only a five year sentence.
Extraordinary sentence
However, says McDade, in what was one of the most extraordinary sentences in recent federal criminal history, Judge Kaplan declared that “great research libraries are repositories of our social, cultural, and scientific heritage. Their rare books and manuscripts are vital to understanding the world and often are irreplaceable objects of study for scholars who add to our knowledge of ourselves and our environment.” Kaplan then sentenced the book thief to “60 months in prison, three years of supervised release and 300 hours of community service towards increasing adult literacy and pay restitution to Columbia.”
McDade’s intention in The Book Thief is to show us that Spiegelman’s punishment is important to deter other book thieves. And that Kaplan’s verdict has now set a court precedent for the prosecution of other book thieves. Another heroic figure from the trial is rare manuscript librarian Jean Ashton who spent many days in court, persuading people about the importance of these rare manuscripts and maps. In an e-mail interview, McDade told me that he was drawn particularly to the legal aspects of the story: “I had thousands of pages of documents and court transcripts to sift through, but I didn’t mind doing it; it was like hunting for clues to solve a mystery, trying to uncover neat little bits of information from the smallest scrap. For example: There was a photocopy of a receipt that didn’t mean anything at all to me at first. I put it in the ‘useless’ pile and forgot about it. Then, when I’d run out of good material to use, I went back to the ‘useless’ pile to see if anything in there made any sense. That receipt turned out to be for one of the safe deposit boxes Spiegelman used to store some of the stolen items; it had a box number, the address of the bank, the alias he used, when he rented the thing and how much he paid.”
McDade’s next writing project will be about another book crime. He currently teaches Legal Research at the College of Law at the University of Illinois and hopes to soon teach a class on book and manuscript crime at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. What should be noted about the crimes of Daniel Spiegelman is that it is a story of destruction and greed and not, as in the case of Stephen Blumberg, a dark tale of bibliomania gone wrong. Travis McDade’s The Book Thief is the most intriguing, compelling, satisfying book about books published in a long, long time.
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