The Pope's Bookbinder

by David Mason

  His suspicions aroused, Jerry started examining all the books he had bought.

  He found a good Ontario history book with the signature on the title of Andrew Hunter, a local historian who had written the best history of Simcoe county, indicating it had been his copy. Jerry started making calls to find out what had happened to Hunter’s library after his death. Eventually we ascertained that Hunter had willed it to the Ontario Historical Society. Jerry phoned there.

  Yes, they had received his library, but they couldn’t identify his books because apparently they didn’t have their books catalogued. Jerry mentioned the young scout’s name. There was silence on the other end.

  “He works for us part-time. But surely he can’t be stealing. He’s such a nice young man. In fact, his father is a Protestant minister and also a member of the Ontario Legislature, a Minister in that government, in fact.”

  “You’d better send someone down here to look at the books,” replied Jerry, now certain we had caught a thief.

  Jerry and I spent the whole day going through the stock trying to reassemble all the books bought. In spite of the trouble, we were pleased with ourselves. We had caught on, in spite of his clever front, done the detective work ourselves and stopped a dangerous thief fairly early.

  The next day a delegation from the Ontario Historical Society appeared, three elderly men.

  I was first astounded, then enraged, by their behaviour. They treated Jerry with barely concealed contempt. It was obvious that they considered him on a level with a criminal himself. These old fools, no doubt retired or amateur historians, seemed unable to comprehend that Jerry had saved their books and had done it all himself. If he wasn’t completely honest and very smart these thefts would have continued indefinitely, but they acted as though he were himself implicated.

  I was furious, but when I said something to Jerry afterwards he just shrugged. “They can’t help it, Dave. They have to blame someone and they don’t want to blame themselves for not cataloguing their books or protecting them properly. So they make me the scapegoat for their lapses. And they’re probably all friends of the guy’s father, anyway.”

  Jerry was always saying things like that. Someone would commit some particularly despicable act and Jerry would say, “They can’t help it, Dave. They weren’t lucky enough to have a proper upbringing like we had.” Jerry said that a lot; he believed that parents were responsible for the moral education of their children, something which he and his wife took very seriously. I have spent some forty-odd years being amazed by Jerry. One of the greatest ironies to me is that most of Jerry’s brothers were priests—one of them a bishop—and his two sisters were very active in lay capacities in the church. But Jerry, who often joked that he was considered in his family to be the classic non-achiever—in

  ordinary terms, a loser—remains the single most Christian Christian I have ever met.

  The young man was arrested, confessed and received a suspended sentence, a very common treatment for book thieves then—and now, even though thousands of dollars worth of books were involved. But I learned another of those important lessons which all booksellers need to learn early. We must protect our own reputations; it will be assumed by many that we welcome the opportunity to buy stolen books. I learned to be always suspicious, to check out people who offer good books, and to ask subtle questions to entrap the nefarious.

  We had a collector in Toronto, a man called Darwin Yarish. He was very passionate about books, having formed a very important collection relating to Walt Whitman, and another on Irish literature, and had been one of my earliest customers, one of the very few long-term ones from my Gerrard Street days. Darwin was very intense about books. I had had a problem with him early on because his job as some sort of technician in the University of Toronto library didn’t pay a lot and he wanted all my best books. Like many of my young customers Darwin got to pay off his purchases over time, so much a month, which he always did. But my problem arose when he wanted to buy the three best books I owned, not hugely valuable then, but still, the only three really good books I owned, and in the context of those years worth a not insignificant amount.

  “Darwin, I can’t let you take them all, it will take you three years to pay for them; in the meantime I don’t have the books and I don’t have the money. I’m too small to let my best things go out of circulation and with no money to replace them. I’m too small and it’s not fair. You’ll have to buy each one after you’ve paid off the last one, if they are still here.”

  Darwin was angry. He acted like I was being unreasonable, a warning sign that I was dealing with a man whose lust for books was barely under control, if it ever had been.

  Sometime after that I was having a drink with a librarian friend, Beth Miller, then the special collections librarian at the University of Western Ontario. I must have recounted that amusing anecdote and I must have mentioned his name, because a few days later I got a letter from Beth, an indication of how astute and professional she was, enclosing an article from an archivist’s professional magazine which related that a library worker from the University of Windsor had been arrested, accused, and found guilty of the theft of some extremely valuable Herman Hesse manuscripts from an institutional library in Michigan.

  Beth’s note read “David, the name you mentioned the other day struck a bell. Could this man be your customer?” The thief’s name was Darwin Yarish, and his defense on his arrest sounded eerily similar to Darwin’s attitude to my three best books. He wasn’t even slightly repentant. Rather, he justified his theft by contending that he, not the library, deserved to own those manuscripts because he revered them. He appreciated Hesse’s greatness and he was just liberating them from philistines. A classic justification, one not uncommon from a pathological thief.

  Darwin had escaped unscathed because the American library offered a deal. Extradition, if fought, would be very expensive and might take years. Darwin gave back the manuscripts and they didn’t pursue extradition.

  But, by now, my dilemma became apparent. I knew Darwin worked in the area at the University of Toronto where books entered the system before they were processed. In other words, in an area where books could go missing with no record of them having been a part of the collection. What was I to do? The University of Toronto was my major client; I already did a lot of work for them and sold them many books. And here was a known thief working in one of the most sensitive places in the library. And to make my dilemma even more complex, I liked Darwin. He was a true book lover, and to bring in economics again, he was a good customer. And it wasn’t like he was a wanted man. He had discharged his legal obligations by relinquishing the manuscripts. I knew that if I reported him he would be fired, and that I would be responsible. While one could not contend that he had paid his debt to society, he had at least mitigated it. What if he had learned his lesson? And here I was wondering if I had the obligation—or even the right—to ruin his life.

  I agonized over my moral dilemma for several days, spending at least two sleepless nights trying to resolve my moral question. I finally managed to deal with it by thinking about it from a reversed viewpoint.

  If the positions were reversed, I decided, if I had a known thief in my place and the university knew it and didn’t inform me, I knew that I would never forgive them. Put in that light, it would be a betrayal on some basic level, and I now knew what I must do.

  I phoned David Esplin.

  “David,” I began “I have a very unpleasant duty to perform. I have come into information that you have a convicted thief working in a very vulnerable place in your library system. I felt I had to inform you of that.”

  There was a long pause, then Esplin said, “Are his initials D.Y.?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are monitoring him,” said Esplin.

  You son-of-a-bitch, I thought. I torture myself for a whole week and finally do the right thing, even as I despise
myself as a snitch, and you guys knew all along.

  I was starting to understand how huge institutions work. In fact, that’s also how governments work too, as we all learn if we’re around long enough. Don’t make a fuss; don’t rock the boat.

  I’ve never accepted that and I hope I never will. But at least my moral dilemma reverted back to their moral dilemma, and I was left with the compensation that at least I had acted properly. Once again my father, the silly banker, was right. We know and it doesn’t matter what others think.

  And in the end I didn’t assign to Esplin the contempt I might have had if his methods had offered serious threat to the local book trade. Maybe, I decided, he was trying himself to give Darwin a second chance. Wouldn’t it be nice to think so?

  Darwin Yarish later became a bookseller, and a good one. He died of AIDS some years after that. I still admire his passion for books, no matter how aberrant.

  And now my favourite theft story.

  One day a young man came into my Church Street store with four books he wanted to sell. He was a young black kid, a teenager, with a backpack. The books he wanted to sell weren’t books in the usual sense—only one of them was.

  That one was a facsimile of an illuminated thirteenth-century manuscript produced in France in the 1880s. The French love such things, but I find them unimpressive. I once went to an exhibition of some of William Blake’s original and hand-coloured books, which changed my view of art books forever. The Trianon Press was founded in Paris to reproduce, with the best modern techniques, William Blake’s original hand-coloured books. They produced some lovely books, but compared to the originals they are insignificant.

  No copy can capture the life that is in original art. At best a copy reminds you of the original. The copy can perhaps bring back the emotion you felt viewing the original, but it is a poor substitute for the real thing.

  There has been a lot of this done in the twentieth century, printing facsimile copies of early illuminated books, but they all seem bland to me, like an unspiced meal.

  So impressed was I by the originals that shortly after seeing the Blake exhibit, I stopped dealing in art books almost entirely.

  But the other three books the young man showed me were the real thing. They were original illuminated manuscripts from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, in beautiful contemporary bindings, stunning in their beauty, with rich primary colours and gilt illumination on the vellum leaves.

  I not only had never owned one before, I had never even handled one, every one I had seen being in some exhibition or other. I did have some single leaves framed, at home. One can still buy single leaves from these magnificent examples of medieval art. While some single leaves are very expensive, nice examples can still be found in the $500.00 to $1,000.00 range, pretty cheap for a beautiful example of real medieval art. For years I have found them perfect as wedding presents for family or friends, for their beauty seems to affect everyone and the religious subjects make them appropriate gifts for such solemn rituals.

  One can also buy single pages from famous editions of books, like a page of the Gutenberg Bible (which will cost a lot), or the King James Bible (1603), The Nurenberg Chronicle (1493), or a page from the first printing of a Shakespeare play, and these

  provide for book lovers a tiny reminder of these great monuments to civilization. They are very impressive framed. And, of course, early maps taken out of atlases and framed also make great wall decoration.

  The complete manuscripts this young man had were small but magnificent. I knew at once that they were stolen; they had to be. I had no idea what they might be worth, but guessed thousands of dollars each, maybe much more, many thousands more.

  He seemed a nice kid, friendly, even naïve. I could tell he hadn’t a clue of their value and I knew I could probably buy them for a couple of hundred dollars. But where had he gotten them?

  “How do you come to have these?”

  “My aunt gave them to me,” he replied.

  Now I was certain they were stolen; books described as gifted by aunts, uncles and grandparents are always assumed in the trade to be stolen, and almost always are.

  “Where was this?” I asked.

  “In Kentucky, Lexington Kentucky, where I’m from.”

  I was still certain of their status, but this kid was too open and nice; he didn’t fit the profile of the thief whose lies under questioning usually become obvious.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “I’m travelling, seeing Canada. I’m hitch-hiking around,” he replied.

  “Well, these books are valuable. I’d need time to study them, do some research before I can offer you a proper price.”

  If I’d been more certain that he was a thief I would have simply held them and called the police in front of him, but he still didn’t fit any of the profiles I knew, so I asked him where he was staying and suggested he return with them tomorrow so I could properly research and make an offer.

  He was staying at the Central YMCA he said, where apparently they put mattresses in the gym so transient kids like him could spend a few days in Toronto during the summer months.

  He agreed, left, and I called the police.

  As it happened, the Toronto police headquarters was then at the top of Jarvis Street, a block from my store. In fact, I had become friendly with several detectives from there who would drop in on their lunch hour to look at books. I phoned and they sent over a detective. I gave him all the details, explaining these manuscripts were too important and too rare to be unrecorded. It was not possible that they weren’t stolen and it seemed inconceivable that Interpol or the FBI or the RCMP wouldn’t have a record of their reported loss. He made notes, took a description of both of the books and the kid, and left. Returning the next day he said he had checked with the F.B.I. and Interpol—there were no missing manuscripts reported.

  In the meantime the police had gone to the YMCA where the kid was staying and interviewed him. (Well, I thought, that certainly puts a finish to any hopes I had of buying them if they had turned out to be legit; he wouldn’t come back to me after I had turned him in.)

  The kid had claimed that his aunt, a cleaning lady, had been given them by a client after her husband, the owner, died. A likely story.

  All this happened in a small town outside of Lexington and the cop didn’t think in the absence of any reported theft that he could justify calling the police in Lexington and asking them to travel all the way out there with no hard evidence.

  I was upset.

  “The thing is, these have to be stolen,” I said, “If not in America, then the most likely place would be Britain or the continent.”

  In those days the international booksellers had not yet set up the sophisticated system we have now to trace theft, but I decided that normal trade gossip would mean that appropriate members of the British trade would know if they were stolen.

  “But I don’t have authorization to be phoning all over the world (this was in the days before we all phoned everywhere, every day) just because you think they might be stolen,” the cop said.

  “I understand that,” I said. “But I have a moral obligation to follow this up. If they were my books I would expect any bookseller anywhere to do what’s necessary. I’ll phone Britain myself and make inquiries.”

  I could see the cop was upset. Here’s a citizen who has been told that there’s a limit to what the police can do, accepts it, but says he’ll do it himself, at his own expense. I could also see that he was impressed by my refusal to let it go.

  “Listen,” he said, “hold off for a day or two. I’ll see what I can do.”

  He came back the next day.

  “I got permission from my boss to have you call England.”

  We made an appointment, I came to the station and called Charles Traylen, the only big English dealer I’d had any dealings with. I told
Traylen the details. The cop who had examined them had written out a pretty good description of their physical appearance. I joked that if he ever wanted a second career he could probably get a job cataloguing rare books.

  Traylen didn’t recall any gossip about stolen manuscripts, but he said he would check the grapevine and get back to us. He did a few days later reporting there was no record of any stolen manuscripts.

  Before I left the detective told me that his boss, the superintendent, wanted to meet me. I guess that they didn’t often get people who insisted on pursuing a solution to stolen goods which didn’t concern them personally.

  His boss turned out to be Adolphus Payne, famous for having captured the Boyd Gang, who had robbed a lot of banks, killed a police detective, been captured, and twice escaped from the Don Jail. Payne’s detective work had located Boyd, who ended up getting twenty years while the men who shot Detective Sergeant Edmund Tong were hanged. Payne shook hands, congratulating me for being persistent.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” I said to Payne.

  “No, should I?” he said.

  I explained that I had grown up three doors down from him on Elm Road, and that his son Doug had been one of my pals in our little neighbourhood gang of friends, until we moved away when I was thirteen. He wouldn’t recognize a kid he hadn’t seen for twenty some years, but the name clicked. We had a nice conversation, bringing our mutual family histories up to date. His son, my old pal, had become a Mountie and lived out west. And then to compound all these coincidences he told me that his wife had recently inherited some old books they had no interest in, and he asked if I wanted to view them. So a few days later I went up to his house, met his wife again (who as a policeman’s wife had often lectured our group as children, warning us of predators and such things). And they had some good books which I bought.

  But that wasn’t the end of it.

  About two months later the original detective came into my store one day.