by Stuart Kells
A 1998 audit of the Library of Congress revealed a devastating discovery: at least 300,000 titles were missing. In addition, approximately 27,000 illustrations had disappeared from its nineteenth-century books on travel and botany.
The modernist Beinecke Library at Yale University is all glass and voids and mezzanines and translucence; doing anything surreptitiously there is almost impossible. But Edward Forbes Smiley III did—for a while at least. A well-known dealer in antiques and rare maps, Smiley cut maps from the library’s books with an X-ACTO blade. In 2005 his wrongdoing was discovered; the jig was up when he dropped his blade in the reading room and was caught red-handed with recently excised maps. Apart from stealing from the Beinecke, Smiley also confessed to having stolen from Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, Chicago’s Newberry Library, the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library and the British Library. The extent of his crimes ran to at least ninety-seven rare maps and documents, altogether worth more than US$3 million. He was sentenced to three and a half years in prison and ordered to pay US$2.3 million in restitution. The Beinecke tightened its security.
According to a 1992 survey of theft and loss, published by London’s Home Office Police Research Group, the most stolen subject areas in British public libraries were, in decreasing order: sex, telepathy, foreign languages, occult magic, music and the arts. The ordering differed by place; sex was more popular among thieves in the big cities, occult magic in the smaller communities.
In the late 1990s John Charles Gilkey stole cheques and credit card numbers, then used them to steal books. He was a regular visitor to Heritage Book Shop in Los Angeles. Housed in a converted mausoleum with a vaulted ceiling and stained-glass windows, the shop was stylishly fitted out with cabinets from England and chairs from Gone with the Wind. In those surroundings, and already inspired by the old libraries depicted in Sherlock Holmes films, Gilkey dreamt of building his own giant library, in which he would read and write at a desk next to a world globe. Apart from stealing books, Gilkey also collected snuff bottles, musical instruments, baseball cards, crystal, coins and autographs—he had Stephen King’s, Anne Perry’s, Princess Diana’s and Ronald Reagan’s. Heritage Book Shop closed in 2007, partly due to stock losses.
The author Allison Hoover Bartlett called on Gilkey after he was sent to prison for his crimes. In The Man Who Loved Books Too Much she describes a Clarice Starling-esque experience. Arriving at the jail, she has a knot in her stomach. Will Gilkey be hostile? Is it safe to talk to him? Security is tight. Bartlett notices the signs in the waiting area. ‘No Levi’s.’ ‘No sleeveless tops.’ ‘No sandals.’ ‘No underwire bras.’ Running back across the hot parking lot, she climbs into her car and wrestles off her bra. ‘I was glad I had not worn a white blouse.’ She returns to the waiting area. Half an hour later her name is called. She approaches Gilkey through a metal detector and two sets of heavy doors. Dressed in prison orange, Gilkey—age thirty-seven, height 175 cm, eyes hazel-brown, hair dark and thinning—sits behind a plexiglass window. Bartlett tries to look as though this is a routine visit, but she is sweating and nervous. Despite all the precautions, Gilkey comes across as a mild, personable chap, definitely no Hannibal Lecter, clearly enjoying Bartlett’s deshabille visit, happy to spill the beans on how he used the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list to know what to steal, and on how stealing books helped him pretend to be Sherlock Holmes.
Over an astounding timespan stretching from the 1820s to the 1840s, Count Libri aroused suspicions in Italy and in France. At Florence’s Accademia dei Georgofili, for instance, where Libri had resigned after only a year in the position of librarian, his successor ‘checked the holdings and found that 300 books were missing’. The thefts were an inside job. There and elsewhere, though, official bumbling and cronyism conspired to save Libri’s skin. Exiled from Italy after taking part in a botched Florentine conspiracy, he settled in France, obtained French nationality and was elected to the Académie des Sciences. Keeping up his respectable professorial facade, between 1838 and 1841 he published a four-volume work on the history of mathematics. Meanwhile, the accusations continued. Anonymous denunciations reached the police; damning rumours reached the press—Libri threatened to challenge the editor of Le National to a duel. Félix Boucly the public prosecutor made inquiries and submitted his findings in an official report. But Libri’s friend M. Guizot, president of the Ministerial Council, hushed it up.
All the while, Libri continued to steal books, and to deal in them. Salting down the stolen books with volumes legitimately obtained from fellow dealers, he organised auction sales and composed catalogues rich with misleading information. (At a later Libri sale, notable for its fraudulent Galileo and Kepler manuscripts, the great English collector Sir Thomas Phillipps was a voracious bidder, acquiring nineteen Cicero manuscripts and more than 100 lots in total. When, in the cold light of day, Phillipps discovered his purchases had been misdescribed, he sought an adjustment to the price. Libri pointed to the conditions of sale. The manuscripts had been sold ‘with all faults’. An adjustment was out of the question.)
Libri stole in a manner that was as ingenious as it was brazen. Impressed by his connections, his appointments, his apparent knowledge and his title, most librarians were only too willing to oblige him with generous access privileges. (The vigilant librarian at Auxerre in Burgundy was an exception.) He stole entire volumes and—using the stiletto he carried for the dual purposes of self-enrichment and self-defence (the Carbonari, a secret revolutionary group, allegedly had a price on his head)—he cut out valuable gatherings and single leaves.
Libraries at Lyon, Orléans and Tours suffered his worst depredations. The adaptable Libri matched his method to the circumstances of each library. The Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon preserved thirteen manuscripts in uncial or half-uncial of the fifth to the eighth century; Anthony Hobson called them ‘the most important homogenous group in any city except Verona’. Most of the bindings were in a terrible state of disintegration. ‘All that was needed was to slit the sewing thread to remove complete gatherings.’ In total, Libri stole portions of six early manuscripts from Lyon. From an important seventh-century Pentateuch, he removed the books of Leviticus and Numbers.
The library at Tours was also in disorder, with numerous manuscripts uncatalogued. Libri again exploited the chaos ruthlessly. ‘Complete manuscripts could be removed and their places on the shelves filled with uncatalogued works of lesser value.’ From Tours, Libri stole twenty-four manuscripts, including another seventh-century Pentateuch (this volume, featuring nineteen large miniatures, is the one Libri would send as a sample to Ashburnham). At Orléans, Libri pulled off a combination of his Lyon and Tours heists. He cut out gatherings, and he stole whole volumes. In total from Orleans he stole twenty-six complete or partial manuscripts. And this appalling pattern of theft continued elsewhere. At the Mazarin Library—that wonderful collection assembled by Gabriel Naudé—a copy of the Galeomyomachia, a Byzantine parody of The Iliad printed by Aldus around 1494, had disappeared from a shelf close to where Libri normally sat. A representative of Troyes, a town in the Champagne-Ardenne region, remarked that ‘after M. Libri’s visit, the library of this town offers much less of interest to book lovers’.
Once Libri had the stolen books in his possession, he took pains to create false provenances for them. He added call numbers and shelf-marks, he altered identifiers such as colophons and inscriptions, and he replaced bindings. Libri kept a set of Renaissance-style binding tools, which he used to restore and ‘improve’ fine bindings. He also sent some of the French manuscripts to Florence to be rebound in Italianate half-bindings of wooden boards and leather spines. He gave French manuscripts false Italian provenances. With the help of paid forgers, for example, he ‘relocated’ manuscripts from Fleury to Florence by changing ‘Floriacensis’ to ‘Florentinae’. The forgers also erased stamps and seals, washed away incriminating marginalia in volumes that were well known to scholars, and
forged ownership inscriptions by copying legitimate ones from other volumes. Libri’s enterprise was as thorough as it was despicable.
After the Revolution of 1848, Félix Boucly’s report was re-discovered. The new government now knew what Libri had been up to. An official shared the information with Terrien, a reporter at Le National, Libri’s printed nemesis. The next day, Terrien saw Libri at an Institut lecture. Libri entered, sporting a tricolour cockade, smiling and shaking hands with those he knew. Terrien, convinced of Libri’s guilt, penned a bold note that brought the affair to a head.
Monsieur, you are doubtless ignorant of the discovery in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of a judicial report regarding your work as inspector of public libraries. Believe me, you must spare the new society reactions they would find repugnant. Come not again to the Institut.
Libri hurried back to his apartment, frantically packed his books and burned his papers. Using a friend’s passport he crossed the channel with his wife, Guizot’s daughters and eighteen cases of books, valued at 25,000 francs. In England, Libri posed as a political refugee and was welcomed by real exiles such as Panizzi and Guizot.
Back in France, an expert panel published a damning formal indictment. Tried in absentia in June 1850, Libri was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment ‘and the deprivation of his civil rights’. Despite everything, Libri still had his fans. Prosper Mérimee published ‘such a loud defence of his friend that the courts ordered him to appear before them, accused of contempt’. Though Libri, too, published pamphlets contesting the French verdict, his guilt was increasingly clear to all, including the Earl of Ashburnham, who suspected at an early stage in the affair that ‘fraudulent attempts’ had been made to hide the true provenance of the Libri manuscripts. For three decades the French and Italian governments doggedly pursued the stolen manuscripts. (Tim Munby described the full saga in his 1968 Harvard lecture ‘The Earl and the Thief ’ and its 1969 sequel, published in the Harvard Library Bulletin, ‘The Triumph of Delisle’.) True to his character, Ashburnham made the recovery of the stolen books as difficult as it could possibly be.
When the French ambassador offered to refund what Ashburnham had paid for the manuscripts, in exchange for their return to France, the earl refused. Unluckily for Ashburnham, the Libri manuscripts were not the only stolen property in his collection. Sixty-four of the Barrois manuscripts had been filched from the Bibliothèque Royale. Léopold Delisle became Keeper of Manuscripts at that library in 1847. He then became Administrateur général of the Bibliothèque Nationale, as it had become, in 1874. After studying catalogues of the Ashburnham holdings, Delisle published an article showing that some of the Barrois manuscripts had certainly been stolen, while those from Libri gave rise to ‘curious observations’. He remarked, generously, that while he lamented France’s loss of these treasures, he was comforted to know they were ‘in the gallery of an illustrious book lover, who appreciates their true value and to whom French erudition already owes so much’. Delisle made it his mission to ensure the return of the manuscripts.
Ashburnham’s death in 1878 opened the way to more fruitful negotiations. The new Lord Ashburnham agreed to divide the collection. The British Museum acquired the Stowe manuscripts for £45,000. Italy paid £23,000 for the genuinely Italian Libri manuscripts. And, with help from the bookseller Karl Trübner of Strasbourg, the French government acquired 166 French Libri and Barrois manuscripts.
The manuscripts bought by the Italian government were chained to desks in Michelangelo’s Sala until the 1920s. Afterwards, they were kept out of view, their chains still attached, permanently recalling their Renaissance origins and occasionally haunting the reading room with ghostly rattling. In France, the books of Leviticus and Numbers were restored to the Lyon Pentateuch. The Bibliothèque Nationale retained the other repatriated French manuscripts: Delisle refused to return to provincial libraries the manuscripts that had been lost by the provincial librarians, and for whose recovery the provinces had done nothing. Having never really liked his father’s books, the fifth earl spent the sale proceeds on speculative business ideas and, in the words of his nephew, ‘what may loosely be called fun’.
In 1868 an aged and unwell Libri returned to Florence, where he received a warm welcome—and died soon after. Recently, the beautiful sixteenth-century Girolamini Library in Naples, one of the oldest libraries in Italy, endured a sad modern echo of Libri’s crimes.
The treasures among the library’s 160,000 volumes included Galileo’s 1610 Sidereus Nuncius, Kepler’s Astronomia Nova and a 1518 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia. These were some of the prizes on offer when the library’s director, Marino Massimo de Caro, and its curator, Sandro Marsano, began stealing from the library audaciously and on a massive scale.
The two men were aided and abetted by three Argentinians and one Ukrainian. To hide the volumes’ provenance, just as Libri had, the conspirators removed seals and shelf marks, and in some cases whole bindings. The library’s incriminating catalogue was also destroyed. A single load of 500 books earned the gang a €1 million advance from a German auction house. Apart from his involvement in the theft of around 1500 important books and manuscripts, de Caro also commissioned and disseminated forgeries. In Argentina, for example, he had forgers make copies of Siderius Nuncius: de Caro sold one of the copies to the national library in Naples.
A well-known figure in the book trade (he had also worked as an adviser to a Russian energy tycoon), de Caro had political connections in Italy; he used these, again just as Libri had done, to provide cover for his crimes. Those crimes only came to light after a chance encounter. In the spring of 2012, art history professor Tomaso Montanari called on the closed library and was shocked to find inside a busy scene of disarray: piles of books, garbage on the floor, stray dogs, and a stray blonde, reportedly wearing a track suit and carrying a beauty-case on her way to the bathroom. Montanari alerted the police, and in March 2013 de Caro was sentenced to seven years in prison. The sentence was commuted to house arrest because he cooperated with the investigators.
With the active support of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, the Italian authorities recovered nearly all the stolen books. The library re-opened, under tight security, in October 2015 as part of Domenica di Carta (Paper Sunday).
Book wheels and machines
In Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver describes how, in Brobdingnag, the library of King Glumdalclitch holds around 1000 volumes in a gallery 1200 feet long. To enable tiny Gulliver to read the king’s books,
The queen’s joyner had contrived [a] wooden machine five and twenty foot high, formed like a standing ladder, the steps were each fifty foot long. It was indeed a moveable pair of stairs, the lowest end placed at ten foot distance from the wall of the chamber. The book I had a mind to read was put up leaning against the wall. I first mounted to the upper step of the ladder, and turning my face towards the book, began at the top of the page, and so walking to the right and left about eight or ten paces according to the length of the lines, till I had gotten a little below the level of mine eyes, and then descending gradually till I came to the bottom.
Other famous library inventions include Father Antonio Piaggio’s device for unravelling the carbonised scrolls from Herculaneum; Congreave’s book reacher, which had metal jaws and reminded Melvil Dewey of an apple picker; the revolving shelf and revolving bookcase made by Dewey’s Library Bureau; St Jerome’s lazy-Susan-style rotating book stand; Ramelli’s sixteenth-century paddle-steamer-style book wheel, which helped gouty old men handle large folios at Wolfenbüttel; Charles Coley’s spring-loaded ‘book ejection apparatus’ (US patent no. 4,050,754); Orville Owen’s ‘Wheel of Fortune’, an instrument of Shakespearean heresy constructed as a rotating collage of the works of Francis Bacon and his contemporaries; Lord Spencer’s wheeled ‘siege machine’, which allowed him to reach high books at Althorp in comfort; Hinman’s collator, a device for detecting differences between editions of Shakespeare; the ‘Pen
guincubator’ vending machine for Penguin paperbacks; and the eighteenth-century ‘cockfighting’ library chair. Dr Johnson kept in his library an apparatus for undertaking chemical experiments. The most intriguing machine from ancient times, the wheeled ‘Antikythera Mechanism’, seems to have been a mechanical textbook.
CHAPTER 12
‘The interior of a library should whisper’
The Pierpont Morgan Library
Fernando Columbus’s sixteenth-century library in Seville was the first of many important book collections to be financed with American money. The greatest of these was assembled in New York, late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, on 17 April 1837, John Pierpont Morgan moved to London at the age of seventeen. There, his wealthy and domineering financier father, Junius Spencer Morgan, jointly led the investment house of George Peabody & Co. After a brief stint at a Swiss boarding school, Morgan attended the University of Göttingen, where Gerlach Adolph Freiherr von Münchhausen had been first curator of the University Library; where the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had also served as librarians and where the American author and Hispanist George Ticknor had studied, before helping establish the Boston Public Library.
(The first professor of modern languages and literature at Harvard University, Ticknor became president of the Boston Public Library’s Board of Trustees. He gave the library money and thousands of books, including, by bequest, his own large collection of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan literature, after Harvard pointedly turned it down.)
