Showing posts with label Theft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theft. Show all posts

Saturday, June 5, 2021

User Manuals

 Louis Menand, "User Manuals: Charting a  Nation's Soul through its Best Sellers," New Yorker, June 7, 2021 pp. 76-81.

These sales figures are way beyond the range of even the most acclaimed fiction  Some of the books, such as "The Old Farmer's Almanac" and Emily Post's "Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home," which was first published in 1922, are continually updated and reissued, and still maintain market share.  McHugh says that "Etiquette" used to be the second-most stolen book from the library after the Bible  which presumably is taken by people unfamiliar with the Ten Commandments). 

COMMENT 

Perhaps it's a stretch to say that stealing books is a use for libraries, but theft of library books is pretty frequently mentioned in library stories. However, it's not clear whether or not Jess McHugh (author of "Americanon") fact-checked this claim since online sources say that after the Bible it's the Guinness Book of World Records and books about conspiracy theories and the occult.  At one college library where I worked we deliberately left the magnetic anti-theft strip out of copies of a guide about sexual wellness and replaced it as needed. 

I'm not sure how to categorize this one.  Maybe "Life Changing Book"?

Friday, January 3, 2020

American Gods



Neil Gaiman, American Gods. Tenth Anniversary Edition. Author's preferred text. 2011.

     "Hinzelmann, have you heard of eagle stones?"
     "Up north of Rhinelander? Nope, that's Eagle River. Can't say I have."
     "How about Thunderbirds?"
     "Well, there was the Thunderbird Framing Gallery up on Fifth Street, but that closed down.  I'm not helping, am I?"
     "Tell you what, why don't you go look at the library.  Good people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this week. I showed you where the library was, didn't I?"
     Shadow nodded and said so long.  He wished he'd thought of the library himself.  [p.372]

COMMENT

      The entire library episode actually extends from p. 372-377 -- too long for me to type out.  What does Shadow do at the library?  He requests a library card,  has a discussion with a librarian about a man who stole rare library books, researches Native American traditions, talks to a neighbor and purchases weeded library books at the library book sale.  
     Two of these book sale books are probably perfectly appropriate to weed, but one of them should certainly have been kept in the collection unless it was a duplicate-- Minutes of the Lakeside City Council, 1872-1884.  If this was indeed the only copy of local history it was completely irresponsible for librarians to send it to the book sale.  However, the contents of this imaginary book turn out to be a plot point since is contains evidence about children killed by a resident demon.  In real life Gaiman is an outspoken supporter of libraries. As a writer, he had to to betray the librarians and send this particular  book to the book sale in order to give his character  more time to read it.  

Saturday, April 27, 2019

400-Year-Old Stolen Bible is Recovered

"400-Year-Old Stolen Bible is Recovered," (Odd News), Salt Lake Tribune, April 26, 2019, p. A2.

A 17th Century Geneva Bible, one of the hundreds of rare books authorities said were stolen from a Pittsburgh library as part of a 20-year-long theft scheme, is back home... It was among more than 300 rare books, maps, plate books, atlases and more that were discovered missing from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh last year. 

  COMMENT

     This is from the "Odd News" section culled from some unidentified sources outside of the Salt Lake Tribune newsroom.  There is no information about the 20-year-long theft scheme or why it took so long for librarians to discover that the items were missing or whether any of the other stolen books were ever found. 

     Is it odd that someone stole rare books from the library?[1]  That it took 20 years to catch the perpetrator? Or odd that one of the books was eventually found?  In fact, library rare book rooms seem to hold a special allure for thieves.  Perhaps the fact that people are allowed to handle rare and valuable objects in the "book museum" makes it seem like nobody is minding the store. 

[1] Other blog posts about theft.

     


Monday, February 25, 2019

There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves, Too.

Milton Esterow. There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves, Too: Art Gets More Attention, but Millions of Stolen Books Have Yet to be Returned. New York Times,  Jan. 15, 2019, C1, 3.

    "People have looked away for so long," said Anders Rydell, author of "The Book Theives: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance," "but I don't think they can any more."
...
     In the last 10 years, for example, libraries in Germany and Austria have returned about 30,0000 books to 600 owners, heirs and institutions, according to researchers.
..... 
     Ms. Grimsted's work in tracking the lost volumes has advanced considerably since 1990, when she discovered 10 lists of items looted from libraries in France by the Einsatzastab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a task force headed by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.  The task force plundered more than 6,000 libraries and archives all over Europe but left behind detailed recoreds that have proved invaluable in tracing what was stolen.
...
     The Nazi targets were mainly the families, libraries and institutions of Jews but also included the Masons, Catholics, Communists, Socialists, Slavs and critics of the Nazi regime. Though libraries were destroyed and some books were burned by the Nazis early on, they later came to transfer many of the worlds to libraries and to the Institute for  Study of the Jewish Question, which was established by the task force in Frankfurt in 1941.
     "They hoped to utilize the books after the war was won to study their enemies and their culture so as to protect future Nazis from the Jews who were their enemies," Ms. Grimsted said.
 

COMMENT

    Everyone associates Nazis with art-theft and book burning, so it's a bit surprising to learn that they were also building libraries of stolen books, albeit with nefarious purpose.  The intent to weaponize cultural information is a truly dark side of diverse collections.  In other library anecdotes, collection diversity is is a purely good thing, essential for library patrons seeking self-knowledge and a sense of identity.

    It's not entirely clear from the article whether the primary value of returning the stolen books lies in their rarity, their information content, or in symbolic restorative justice.   According to researcher Patricia Grimsted,  Nazis looted the books specifically because of the way the information represented the specific communities they came from.  One of the books returned to heirs is described as "an important 16th century volume," but another is a "children's activity book."  Whatever their monetary value, it's clear that both books had deep value to the people who received them.

   So it seems that the sense of identity is still represented in the looted collections, even when they represent identities lost to war and genocide.  There is a conundrum that the libraries should have copies of these works, but at the same time, the way these particular copies came into the library collections is monstrous and unacceptable.  The article does not say if there is any effort for libraries to purchase replacement copies of the returned books.  However, it seems like after the books are returned, building collections to tell the history of those Jews, Masons, Catholics, Communists, Slavs and political activists would be another form of restorative justice.

   

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

A Night at the Museum

Jane Halpern, " A Night at the Museum: How a French Cat Burglar Pulled Off he Biggest Art Heist in Decades," New Yorker, Jan 14, 2019, p. 30-39.

At the age of ten, Tomic pulled off his first heist. He broke into a library in Mostar, climbing through a window that was nearly ten feet above street level.  He stole two books, each of which appeared to be several hundred years old.  (The older brother of a friend learned of the theft and returned Tomic's plunder.) Tomic said of his early criminal adventures, "It was intuitive. Nobody ever taught me anything." 
COMMENT

     Not one, but two stories about criminal careers that began at the library!  (see: Lee Israel).  Perhaps the temptation is that library patrons are invited to touch and use objects that are rare and valuable.  They seem to belong to nobody.

    Many years ago a graduate student friend admitted to me that he had stolen library books that were relevant to his PhD thesis.  The books were so specialized he could not imagine another person ever wanting to borrow them.   Sometimes you encounter stories of people who, like the friend's older brother, develop guilt over unreturned library books.  Sometimes people return stolen books  many years later, occasionally together with an appropriate fine.

    One college librarian I worked with used to buy books on sexual health and deliberately fail to install protective magnetic strips that would set off the anti-theft gates.  He thought there was a need to put such books in the hands of students too embarrassed to check them out.  When the books inevitably disappeared he'd simply replace them, deliberately stocking the library shelves with books meant to be stolen.

Friday, February 1, 2019

Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75

Margalit Fox, "Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75," New York Times,  Jan 27, 2015, [online].
     Of her body of forgeries, Ms. Israel wrote in her memoir, “I still consider the letters to be my best work.”
     By dealing in typed letters, Ms. Israel was obliged to copy only the signatures. This she did by tracing over the originals, first covertly in libraries and later in her Upper West Side apartment, originals in hand. For over time, after whispers among dealers about the authenticity of her wares made composing new letters too risky, Ms. Israel had begun stealing actual letters from archives — including the New York Public Library and the libraries of Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities — and leaving duplicates in their place.
     “She would go into these libraries and copy the letter in question, go back to her home and fake as best she could the stationery and fake the signature, and then she’d go back to the institution and make the switch,” David H. Lowenherz, a New York autograph dealer, said on Monday. “So she was actually not selling fakes: She was substituting the fakes and selling the originals.”
COMMENT

    Obviously, Lee Israel (1939-2014) shouldn't have been stealing library books, but her inspiration to crime was remarkably similar to the motivation of other researchers who love to poke around in the manuscript archives. In the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me (2018) Lee Israel (played by Melissa McCarthy who deserves an Oscar) is shown in a library doing research for a biography of Fanny Brice when a letter signed by Brice herself falls out of a book. As she gawks at the letter, McCarthy perfectly captures that sense of spooky connection with history that so many researchers describe.  She shows the letter to a buyer who has the same awestruck reaction.  The star-struck reaction leads Israel into a life of crime, in part because she is so deeply pleased that her own writing is good enough to be mistaken for the words of other more famous writers.

     I have heard librarians claim that that format doesn't matter as long as the information content is the same.  Israel's facsimiles had the same textual content as the letters she stole, but clearly they aren't the same.  It's not just the chemistry of the physical object [1].  The objects that Israel stole were valuable specifically because they have that spooky connection to history, an intangible thing that  is mentioned again and again as a transformational library experience. It seems that it even transformed the library experience of literary forger Lee Israel.

[1] Hidden Traces.