Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and the history of science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a close friend of Horblit’s and was instrumental in securing a number of the items for the university. I interviewed Dr. Gingerich to talk about his extraordinary quest to document the history of every known first and second edition of Copernicus, and to talk about another book collector he had known for many years, Haven O’More. Harrison Horblit’s name came up, and I asked if he could explain why the man stopped collecting so abruptly, and what he knew about the unfinished catalogue.
“What I believe happened is that Harrison stopped collecting because he just couldn’t cope with the fact that the books were rising so dramatically in price. He was still collecting at the time, but he was pursuing another field, which was early photography. He had bought, sight unseen, all the early photographs acquired in the nineteenth century by Sir Thomas Phillipps; so he was actively going after other things. But he had dropped out of the history of science.”
The reason Gingerich gave for the Horblit catalogue’s ending at the letter G is especially ironic. “Harrison wanted the catalogue to be the monument to his collection. He also had promised a lot of institutions various favors, but because he wanted his books written up in a catalogue, he was reluctant to give them away outright. So he consigned his library to Sotheby’s, and they agreed to prepare a beautiful series of catalogues. What Harrison then proceeded to do was give a number of institutions a lot of money to bid on his books. He urged them to go through John Fleming, with the result that John bought nearly half of the books in the first part of the sale. Well, when this story got out and spread around, it created quite a stir, because a lot of people felt Harrison really shouldn’t be handing out money to people so they could buy books at his own auction. So along came the second part of the sale, and all the other dealers deliberately sat on their hands. They bought for their customers, but they refused to buy for stock. The second sale flopped so badly that Sotheby’s said, ‘We can’t have this.’ As I understand it, there was some sort of falling out, and Harrison took back the rest of his books and sold most of them to Hans Kraus. And that is why there are only two catalogues, going from A to C and D to G, and why H through the rest of the alphabet never appeared.”
Appearing as a frontispiece to part 1 of the Horblit catalogue is a fullcolor photo of Lot 240, a large folio bound in blind-stamped contemporary pigskin, dated 1543 with the initials AG on the cover. “This superb presentation copy of the first edition is without doubt the most important copy extant of one of the greatest landmarks in the history of scientific thought,” the caption reads, and in the preface to the catalogue is a further discussion of the same item and its place in the Horblit Library: “The pinnacle of the collection is, of course, the magnificent presentation copy of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, 1543, which has the closest associations with the great astronomer’s most intimate circle.” The book was sold for $100,000 to Lew David Feldman and the House of El Dieff, where it passed into the hands of Haven O’More; it was sold in 1989 at the Garden Ltd. auction for $473,000 to an Italian dealer.
For Dr. Norman it was the “great book” that got away. But unlike Horblit, he did get a complete catalogue of his collection, and that means so much more. “Harrison built one of the great libraries of our time, and there is no complete record available of what he put together,” Dr. Norman said. “I have always considered that a great tragedy.” The preparation of his own catalogue, as a consequence, became a “very significant” project, “and not just for what it means to me personally, but because of the information it contains. Catalogues are essential tools in bibliography, and no science catalogue has ever been produced that has all the descriptions and the detail we have put in ours.”
Unlike Horblit, Dr. Norman was “blessed” by having a son actively involved in the rare-book trade. When Jeremy was establishing his own company in 1970, Dr. Norman offered to help. “We sort of had an agreement,” he said. “I lent him books for his business with the idea that he would one day catalogue my library.”
Jeremy Norman acknowledged that his own love for books developed at an early age, largely due to the example set by his father. In gratitude, he was pleased to honor his father with a catalogue. The project occupied seven years of “almost continuous” attention by Jeremy Norman and Diana H. Hook, a graduate of the Columbia University School of Library Service who was hired in 1984 to work on the catalogue. Printed on acid-free paper and bound durably in three-piece red and black cloth, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine was published in 1992 in two volumes and includes full descriptions of 2,597 works. There are more than three hundred illustrations, thirty-two of them, including the plate from the Vesalius dedication copy, in color.
Completing the catalogue also means that for all intents and purposes the collection is finished. “I still would very much like to have a Copernicus; but once you issue the catalogue of your collection, it all becomes a moot point, because you can’t put any more in it. And on that account, I have no plans to compile an addendum.”
As for the future of his library, Dr. Norman said, with evident relief, “I am not going to decide that. Whatever is decided will be by a unanimous vote of my family. It probably either will be dispersed at auction or it could be sold en bloc, depending on whatever arrangement they want to make. But I thought about this very seriously, and I just decided that if I’m gone, what difference does it make if they have a wing somewhere named for me? I will let my heirs choose what they want to do with the collection. Maybe some will keep books, maybe some will take money. It’s their decision.” He paused for a moment, then added, “The catalogue will be sufficient to satisfy my ego.”
13
The Blumberg Collection
“I really don’t know why you want to come out here,” FBI Special Agent W. Dennis Aiken said with an edge of exasperation. “All you’re going to see is seven rooms stacked to the ceiling with old books.” Perhaps he was right; maybe it was foolish to fly all the way to Omaha for what would be no more than twenty minutes inside a secret government warehouse. But the Blumberg collection was about to be dissolved, and if I was going to see these nineteen tons of books together in one place, I had to do it soon. Aiken relented, and agreed to see me the following week.
Nine months earlier, as his trial in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Iowa reached the halfway point, Stephen Carrie Blumberg had invited me to spend a Saturday with him in Ottumwa, the city where he had been arrested by a squad of federal agents. We spent nine hours together, and for much of that time he talked passionately about why he had looted scores of libraries and institutions throughout North America during two decades of uncontrollable collecting. “You are about to see the skeleton of my life,” he said as we walked toward the big brick house on North Jefferson Street. “Twenty years’ worth of work and knowledge and accumulation,” he said bitterly, “and it’s stripped bare. It’s just a shell.”
Two hours after arriving in Nebraska, I took a taxi to a McDonald’s off Interstate 80 and waited by the flagpole as Aiken had instructed. After picking me up, he drove to a nondescript brick building with opaque windows and the number 8631F in the front. No other journalist had been admitted to the warehouse, and its whereabouts had been hidden from everyone except the professional librarians who had helped identify the stolen books. Inside, past a bank of glowing security devices, Jerry Tucker, an agent who had been working full time on the case for nineteen months, was typing data into a computer terminal. Because Blumberg had removed identifying marks from most of the books, determining who owned what had caused monumental problems. Tucker’s job turned out to be nothing less than forensic bibliography, and he had become very good at it. The delicate way Tucker handled each volume suggested as well that he had become a bibliophile in his own right. “Isn’t this something,” he said quietly as he picked up a miniature book “abou
t the size of a dime” taken from Claremont College outside Los Angeles. He pointed with special admiration to a large atlas in a green clamshell box stolen from the University of Southern California, and he marveled at the decorated leather spines of some eighteenth-century books that soon would be returning to Connecticut.
As Aiken had said, the building was stacked top to bottom with books, though the most striking image was not one of mass, but of neatly stenciled signs secured to the 3,500 feet of plain metal shelving the government had purchased for the unprecedented task. I scribbled some of the names in my notebook: University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Riverside, Duke University, Harvard University, University of Minnesota, Colorado College, University of Cincinnati, University of New Mexico, Connecticut State Library, University of Oregon, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Washington State University, University of Southern California, Dartmouth College, Zamorano Club, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Wayne State University.
“Coast to coast,” Jerry Tucker said. Blumberg had taken about 23,600 books from 268 libraries in forty-five states, two Canadian provinces, and the District of Columbia. Aiken said that a forty-foot tractor-trailer was rented from North American Van Lines to haul the books from Ottumwa to Omaha, and another was needed to remove a mass of seized antiques. “None of us knew how big this was going to be until the day we walked into that house,” he said. “Eight hundred and seventy-nine cardboard packing boxes. It took seventeen people two days to get them all out of there. We had twenty-three thousand books, and we had no earthly idea where any of them came from.”
Making the dilemma doubly difficult was that very few of the books had ever been known to be missing. “Every institution we called, without exception, either had no idea what they lost, or didn’t understand the extent of their losses,” Aiken said. “I couldn’t tell you how many people came in here and said the very same thing: ‘I know the shelf this is supposed to be on.’”
Roger E. Stoddard, the curator of rare books at the Houghton Library of Harvard University and a witness for the prosecution at Blumberg’s trial, spoke for many of his colleagues when he explained the unique nature of the problem every institution faced. “We have twelve and a half million books at Harvard. As a practical matter, you discover that a book is missing when someone wants it, because until you check your records and determine that a book is not signed out, you have no reason to suspect it has been stolen. Harvard alone has one hundred separate libraries. There is no way to monitor every book in a large institution and provide access for students at the same time. That is why libraries are such vulnerable places.”
Though Blumberg removed most traces of identification from the volumes, he kept a selection of bookplates in several scrapbooks, a little collection of mementos he had gathered during his travels. “It basically was a list of the libraries where he had been,” Aiken said. “What it gave us was a place to start. It told us whom we had to start calling.” In his interview with me, Blumberg confirmed that he had kept bookplates as souvenirs, though he said he did not steal from all the institutions represented in the scrapbooks. “That became a collection in its own right. You’ll see there’s a bookplate in there from the New York Public Library; I have never been in the New York Public Library.”
Because his thefts went largely unreported nationally, Blumberg was able to plunder books from libraries pretty much at will. He had been detained at the University of California Riverside in 1988 with burglary tools in his possession—and an alert security officer at Washington State University had matched his fingerprints with those of an alias he had been using — but no general alarm was sounded throughout the country. The big break in the case came only when Kenneth J. Rhodes, Blumberg’s willing companion of fifteen years, turned his friend in for a $56,000 bounty negotiated with the federal government. The remarkable crime spree came to an end at two A. M. on March 20, 1990, when federal agents descended on the Ottumwa property and took the itinerant biblioklept into custody.
Stephen Blumberg’s telephone call to my room that Saturday morning in Des Moines during his trial came a half hour after I had spotted Rhodes in the hotel lobby and had asked him for an interview. “What’s in it for me?” the career criminal wanted to know. Nothing, I said, just an opportunity to give a more balanced version of his story. Rhodes had admitted during pretrial proceedings to extensive felonious activity, including a contract offer he said he received once from drug dealers to kill a school official in California, and he had described three other occasions where he worked as a paid government informant. “If all I have to go on is your testimony,” I told him, “you come out looking like a pretty bad guy.” Rhodes squared his shoulders and squinted his eyes. “We don’t need to talk,” he said evenly. “I am a bad guy.”
The evening before our hotel-lobby encounter, though, the solidly built Rhodes had been all charm. He had dined in the hotel atrium with a group of university librarians who had testified earlier in the day, and he was the center of attention. Dressed smartly in a salt-and-pepper sports jacket and sipping appreciatively from a straight-up martini, he was an able conversationalist, the kind of amusing rogue rarely met in faculty clubs. He even made a flourish about signing for the check, leading his table companions to assume that dinner and drinks were on Kenny Rhodes, when in fact the United States government was covering its star witness’s expenses.
Despite his checkered past, Rhodes provided some of the most damaging testimony against Stephen Blumberg. Yes, Rhodes admitted, he had committed felonies, he had been involved in drug dealing, he had in the past bartered information with federal agencies for money and immunity. But he also described a friendship with Blumberg that went back to the mid-1970s, and his detailed accounts of their nomadic adventures were unshakable. Where appropriate, Rhodes also paid tribute to the defendant’s expertise.
“Was Mr. Blumberg, from your conversations, knowledgeable, fairly knowledgeable, about antiques and stained glass?” Assistant United States Attorney Linda R. Reade asked him. “Expert,” Rhodes replied, “absolutely one of the tops in the country.” During cross-examination, he went further. “He could identify any window, what time period it was from,” as well as “tell you what city it was from” and “what studio made it.” Blumberg, he marveled, “was just walking knowledge and information.” Later, he even admitted to admiring the book thief ’s independence, made possible by a generous family trust that gave him what was disclosed at the trial to be about $72,000 a year in unencumbered funds for living expenses. “At one point I was quite envious of him. He had a very carefree life. He could come and go. He could travel anywhere he wanted at any time and do anything he wanted to do, and he chose to do what he wanted to do.”
Rhodes described numerous exploits: driving from Detroit to Cincinnati, from Cincinnati to Blumberg’s hometown of St. Paul, out again to the Southwest and Texas, often spending several months on the road. Detained once by snow in Ohio, “Stephen managed to get into the library and obtain some books” at the University of Cincinnati. Their travels usually featured excursions into abandoned buildings to gather cast-iron gates, stained-glass windows, chimney pots, doorknobs. On one trip they spent about a week in Houston, “and Stephen would make a nightly run over to Rice University, because they didn’t have an alarm system in their libraries, and he’d go over every night for about a week and bring out as many books as he could.”
Rhodes said Blumberg gained access to Rice by claiming he was a scholar doing research; once he was alone with the books he had selected, he would prepare them for removal. “He’d take the card pocket out, and he would also take the library sticker off the inside of the binding. He’d search for any little metal alarm devices. And he’d sand the edges of the page off [to eradicate library stamp marks], and he’d restaple [the pages] and then reglue. He had a little container of glue and a razor blade, and he’d cut out a page that might be embossed with ‘Rice University’ on it, hide that
in his briefcase and do that to each book, and it would take a considerable amount of time. He would actually have to physically lick the bookplate until the glue loosened and he could peel it off. And then he’d put the new [bookplate] on and out through the security he’d go.”
When this particular disclosure was reported by the Associated Press the following day, officials at Rice University said that they had no knowledge of stolen books, and that an inventory would be undertaken immediately. “This is news to me,” Associate University Librarian Jennifer Cargill told the Houston Post. She acknowledged that there had been no alarms in the general stacks during the period of Blumberg’s admitted thefts. “I was unaware that we were one of the sites,” Cargill said, “and I’m interested in learning more about this.” In due course she would learn that one of Blumberg’s most prized acquisitions— a beautiful sixteenth-century volume known as the Bishop’s Bible—had come from Rice.
Rhodes said that the routine was similar everywhere they went. Sometimes Blumberg would wear an oversized coat with large pockets sewn inside to hide books; other times, when larger removals were planned, he would go in after hours. Rhodes described a week they spent in Tucson. Every night Blumberg would go over to the University of Arizona library, find the books he wanted, lick stickers off the pastedowns, and use sandpaper to remove embossed stamp marks off the edges. Because there were security systems, Blumberg had to be more careful.
“So he would go in at different hours,” Rhodes explained. “I would have to come pick him up.” And when Rhodes arrived there would be so many books that Blumberg would have to make several trips inside, each entry timed to coincide with the point when guards were being relieved. “He’d go in during one shift, leave, hide some books in the bushes and go back in and get some more books and come back out, and I was to pick him up at a certain spot at a certain time every night, which I did.”
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 58
