A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  From Arizona they moved through a “dozen different states,” always gathering antiques, always stealing books. “We crossed back through Texas, Louisiana, and we collected things all the way coming up through the South, through Kentucky, Tennessee. We went to Nashville, Knoxville, Memphis, Louisville.” Rhodes said that Blumberg constantly kept an eye out for “slum areas” with empty and boardedup houses where they could go in and take all the hardware, stained glass, and fixtures.

  Some of the house fixtures would be sold to dealers, and many items would be stored in Cincinnati or shipped back by United Parcel Service to the Twin Cities, where other friends placed the booty in a leased warehouse. “We’d sell it to some big buyers, people that were restoring old buildings, you know, restaurants and things of that nature.” And in the evenings, invariably, Blumberg went out alone to the libraries. “Every time he came back, he had books,” Rhodes said, and when Blumberg returned to whatever inexpensive motel they had rented, he would spend much of the night customizing his newest trophies. “He’d clean them up again, constantly licking the books until he made himself sick,” working to get the stickers off and “make them look like normal books.” Inside each volume he would write a little code in pencil to suggest they had been bought from secondhand dealers at prices of “anywhere from five cents to a dollar.”

  After going on several of these trips, one of which lasted for six months, Rhodes said he got a job in 1978 repairing stained-glass windows with a Michigan antiques dealer, while Blumberg continued on his travels, always going to Texas, but alternating the routes he took so he could visit different sections of the country. Rhodes said they remained in touch over the next two years, and Blumberg continually boasted about the “universities he went into and what books he had got.” Reade wanted to know if Blumberg had formulated any clear ideas in advance, and whether he was familiar with what he was stealing. “He did extensive research on what books were rare and valuable and that he wanted,” Rhodes said, “and if it was a collection or a whole run, he’d spend extra time in that city, that town, and keep going back because you couldn’t get the whole set of books out at one time.”

  About 1980, Rhodes said, Blumberg looked him up in Kalamazoo and brought him up to date on his activities. Blumberg had continued his pattern of “traveling, buying, selling, stealing, and acquiring books at libraries.” Reade asked how Blumberg got into areas that were off-limits to all outsiders, including qualified researchers. “There were a dozen different ways that he described,” Rhodes answered, “from pushing up a panel from one side of the wall, wherever he could crawl through over the ceiling, get through ductwork. There was a steel grating around one rare-book section, but he said whoever built it didn’t do a very good job because they left six or eight inches from the ceiling, and he could climb up. It would be like venting material. He could climb up the metal grating and slip over it, and get in and pick much finer, better, higher-quality, more expensive, rarer books.”

  Rhodes said Blumberg showed him keys that allowed access to other libraries. “He would wait until the staff left, and he’s quite, quite clever with locks, and I consider him a locksmith, and he would pick some locks and get in and get into the librarian’s room and go through their key chains, their key rings. If he could find the key that would fit [the secure book storage area], he would slip it off and go get a copy of it made, and the next day he would slip the original key back on the key ring, and then he would have his own passkey.” Reade entered into evidence several dozen keys found in Blumberg’s house that fit locks in many of the institutions that were robbed.

  Rhodes said the plunder continued through much of the 1980s, though he and Blumberg lost contact once again. The next time they spoke, Blumberg reported that he had been spending a lot of time on the West Coast. “He always wanted to go out there because of the universities, and he finally got out there and fell in love with the ‘easy pickings,’ as he called it, in California.” Reade asked Rhodes to explain that phrase. “He said he would get pickup-truck loads of books out of there,” so many that he had to get a larger vehicle. Blumberg was able to take so many “because he could pick the locks” to “certain floors,” and because he knew how to “stop an elevator on any floor, and most people couldn’t do that, couldn’t stop on the rare-book floors.” Often, Blumberg would “go in after hours and get book carts and pick dozens and dozens of rare books and put them in the elevator, take them down and box them up and set them on the shipping dock and come back and pick them up later.” Because there were so many books, help was necessary to load the truck, and Rhodes said Blumberg enlisted the assistance of several young men.

  In 1988, Blumberg was apprehended in a restricted area of the University of California at Riverside library. Along with the identity card of a University of Minnesota faculty member, Blumberg was caught carrying a bag of dental picks, sandpaper, and other tools, along with a pouch containing about a pound of gold. Blumberg later told Rhodes that in the moments before his arrest, he frantically “ate a rubber stamp” that was with his burglary equipment. Another witness, Brian Teeuwe, also recalled the incident with the rubber-stamp, which said “University of Minnesota.” While posing as a professor from the University of Minnesota, Matthew McGue, Blumberg often used the stamp on targeted books to suggest that he had brought them in with him. I asked Blumberg if he in fact ate a rubber stamp at Riverside. He said he did, and I asked why. “How else was I supposed to get rid of it?” he answered.

  Teeuwe testified that he went to the University of Southern California about seven times and helped Blumberg remove books. “Stephen would go into the special-collections room, which was on the seventh floor, and he would pick out the books that he wanted and then bring them down to the sixth floor, where there was a study area; and he would use his razor blades, sandpaper, and he would even lick to get the catalog pockets out of the book to remove the markings and put his own in. Then I would take the books out of the library.” Teeuwe said that Blumberg joked about “how easy” it was to remove books from Claremont College and that he bragged how he had been to “almost every university in the country.”

  At Riverside, however, Blumberg’s mood changed from amusement to fear. He had been caught, and even though he was using an alias, he was frightened about the possible consequences. Charged with trespassing, he was fingerprinted, released on $100 bond, and given a date to appear on the misdemeanor charge. He hired a lawyer, pled guilty to the misdemeanor, and was given three years’ probation. Shaken by the incident, he gathered up whatever books he had stored in California, returned to Minnesota, and stopped raiding libraries for about two years. Meanwhile, he found a house in Iowa—it was in the middle of the country and “on the way to Texas,” he explained to me later—and bought it for $16,000 cash.

  Shortly after Blumberg moved to Ottumwa in 1989, Rhodes contacted his old traveling buddy and asked if he could come live with him. Blumberg agreed. Once there, Rhodes started gathering information that documented the book thefts, then contacted the FBI. He said he was paid $56,000 by the government for his information, and under cross-examination admitted that he tried to get more money from various universities in the form of a 10 percent “finder’s fee.” Though the issue of what the books were worth came up frequently during the trial, an early figure suggested the value might be as high as $20 million. Rhodes said he used that figure in his discussions with the authorities, and was disappointed when he received no more money.

  Rhodes described how Blumberg carried out his thefts, but it was the victims—in this instance a succession of librarians and curators from all over the country—who explained what the thefts meant to their institutions. At the University of Washington the loss of crucial papers relating to settlement of the Southwest was discovered when librarians were asked by the State Department to furnish material for an exhibition that was being planned in Mexico. Fraser Cocks, the curator of special collections at the University of Oregon, told how twenty linear feet
of manuscript material was discovered missing in January 1987 when a donor’s relative asked to see a particular item. All of the papers related to the early years of settlement and statehood in Oregon, roughly spanning the period from the early 1840s through the late 1870s, were gone.

  “It was an enormous loss,” Cocks said, noting that a prominent autograph dealer, Kenneth Rendell of Massachusetts, New York, and Beverly Hills, had placed a value of $645,940 on the material. Some thirty-six boxes finally were determined to have been taken, and they included the papers of several historic Oregon pioneers. Cocks said the documents were kept in a secure area of the special collections department, which occupies the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors of the university library; researchers are allowed to see only a few documents at a time. He stressed that access to the rooms is granted only to staff members and is possible only with keys.

  “These materials constitute the information from which histories are written,” Cocks told the jury. “Histories don’t just appear. The people who write them get their insights from archives like this.” Cocks began his job at the University of Oregon in 1990, just a few weeks before Blumberg’s arrest. “This whole thing fell in my lap the minute I got here,” he said several months after the trial. “I have no doubt that there was a time back then when Stephen Blumberg knew more about my collection than I did.”

  Susan M. Allen, the head of special collections for the six Claremont Colleges located in Claremont, California, described the disappearance of 684 books estimated by Los Angeles book dealer Glen Dawson to have a total value of $644,038, including several unusually scarce items of Western Americana. She also explained the meaning of the word incunabula for the Iowa jury, using as a visual aide the exquisite Nuremberg Chronicle, printed by Hartmann Schedel, and bound in ivory calfskin, that Blumberg had taken from the Claremont collection. “It is the cradle period of printing,” she said, “which means any book printed between 1450 and 1500.” Allen held the folio up for the jury to see and pointed out that Schedel’s book was the last major history of the world that failed to account for the discovery of the New World; it first went to press in 1493. Among its six hundred illustrations, she added, were a few executed by Albrecht Dürer when he was a teenager. Her feeling for the objects she described was palpable. “I could go on forever,” she said finally, “but I think that’s probably enough.”

  During a short recess, a group of courthouse employees were allowed to look at some of the rare books that had been brought in as exhibits. Don C. Nickerson, one of Blumberg’s lawyers, was standing by the evidence table, holding a cup of coffee, when someone cautioned him to be careful not to spill anything on any of the books. “God,” he said in mock horror, looking quickly over at the defense table, “Stephen will kill me.” Blumberg had not left the courtroom and was watching intently from his chair at the table. During our drive to Ottumwa the next day, I asked Blumberg what he felt as he watched these people flip through the pages of “his” books. “I wanted to go over and explain what they were looking at,” he said, and insisted that he had come to terms with the “loss” several months earlier when he visited the warehouse in Nebraska during pretrial proceedings. “I said good-bye to the books in Omaha.”

  After the recess, Lynne Newell, director of preservation for the Connecticut State Library, explained that all materials under her supervision were kept in secure compartments, “one of which is six stories high.” She recalled being asked by the FBI if anything from the noncirculating collection of state archives was missing. “They showed me some bookplates, which I identified as ours.” Most of the 271 items later determined to be theirs had been shelved “in a vault specifically built to hold them.” One of the books, an octavo titled A Confession of Faith, published in 1710, was the state library’s own copy of the first book published in Connecticut. Another was the first book of poetry published in the state. The total value was estimated by Glen Dawson at $225,280, though Newell said, “We believe they are worth more than that, especially in New England.”

  As devastating as that discovery was, though, the image of an Oregon scholar learning that irreplaceable materials deposited in a secure archive by her family in 1960 were nowhere to be found was intriguing, because in this instance, a person’s life—not just the raw fabric of history— had been tampered with by a book thief. Shannon Applegate’s name was never mentioned at the Blumberg trial, but when we talked many months afterward, she recalled what happened on January 2, 1988, when she decided to celebrate the completion of a book that had taken her twenty years to write.

  Her book, published by William Morrow in 1988, is titled Skookum: An Oregon Primer of a Family’s History and Lore. The family Shannon Applegate wrote about was her own, and the title refers to a Chinook word used by an old chief to describe her descendants when they asked if they could settle in the Yancola Valley. “The chief said they were skookum, hia skookum, which means very full of spirit,” the great-great-granddaughter of Charles and Melinda Applegate said. “The letters in the Oliver Cromwell Applegate Collection represented the Charles Applegate branch, the Lindsey Applegate branch, and the Jesse Applegate branch, these three families, three brothers who came to Oregon” in the nineteenth century. Jesse Applegate “led the major part of the 1843 migration, which was the first migration into the state, and tripled the population of settlers overnight. So this is really significant material.”

  Because reliable typescripts were available, Applegate was able to conduct her research without having to handle the original documents. “These things belong to everyone and you do not touch them if you can avoid it,” she said. “Many of the Applegate letters have exquisite drawings in their margins, things like bear traps from the Siskeel Mountains. We’re not just talking about a few letters, we’re talking about this extraordinary collection. These materials have a real richness.”

  Research for Skookum began in 1967, was interrupted periodically by the birth of several children, and continued with unbroken enthusiasm thereafter. “People didn’t think I was ever going to finish, but in 1987, it was done, and there I was at last, in the library, going over the card catalog to make sure all my citations were in order.” Accompanied by her cousin Susan Applegate, an artist who designed the book jacket for Skookum, Shannon suggested a celebration. “We had gone through this as cousins, so it seemed there had to be some way to observe this journey, which in some ways felt every bit as long as going across the country in a covered wagon.” She decided to mark the moment by calling for the Webfoot Diary, a journal named for the early settlers of Oregon who had worked in the southern gold mines. “I had made extensive use of this material in my book,” she said, “but I had never actually held it in my hands.”

  Hilary Cummings, then the curator of manuscripts at the University of Oregon, went off to get the diary. “Well, we waited and we waited and we waited. About forty-five minutes went by, and then I just said, ‘This is ridiculous, what are they doing, rewriting it?’ Finally, Hilary came out, with this sort of ashen face, and this worried look, and she mumbled, ‘I have to apologize, Ms. Applegate, we are unable to lay our hands on the document at this time.’ Well, I live in Roseburg, it takes me an hour and a half to get to the library. So I said, ‘Fine. But I certainly will be asking you the next time I come in to see it.’ I wasn’t anxious at this point, I was annoyed. If someone had told me at that moment the diary was missing, I would have found it unbelievable.”

  On January 22, Susan Applegate made an urgent telephone call to her cousin in Roseburg. “My God, Shannon,” she shouted. “Have you seen the Register-Guard?” On the front page of the Eugene newspaper that morning was a major story under a four-column headline in forty-eight-point type: “UO Documents Missing.” A “slice of Oregon’s history” was gone, the article declared: “Thousands of letters, diaries, Indian treaties, railroad records and stock certificates disappeared from the Special Collections section of the University of Oregon Library sometime last fall, library officials r
evealed Thursday.”

  Though the theft had been reported three weeks earlier—in fact, right after Shannon Applegate asked to see the Webfoot Diary—the police had delayed public disclosure in the hope that the intruder would return for more material. A sidebar to the main story outlined the extent of the losses. “This is how I found out,” Shannon Applegate said. “I was flabbergasted. Susan and I just cried over the telephone. I cannot tell you how personal this was. As I look back, I really did go through all this self-denial with that material, and here it had just disappeared, and nobody had even noticed that it was gone. I felt physically sick.”

  On April 23, 1988, another story in the Eugene Register-Guard raised a flurry of hope with the report that a man had been arrested inside a special collections room at the University of California at Riverside, and that he was a “strong suspect” in a number of other library thefts, including the one reported two months earlier at the University of Oregon. Officials from the University of Oregon, the Claremont Colleges, and Washington State University were said to be “requesting information” about the Riverside arrest. But the man claiming to be Matthew McGue had been released on his own recognizance; the promising lead hit a deadend when the suspect was allowed to go free.

  In Oregon, meanwhile, sadness turned to outrage, and outrage led to suspicion. “There was this sense of powerlessness,” Applegate recalled. “But I was also furious with the university. I felt there had been an incredible betrayal. Scholars aren’t even allowed inside those special collections stacks. It seemed that it had to be an inside job. We all agreed that was the only way it could have happened. How was it possible to remove what they said amounted to a truckload of documents?”