"TO CATCH THESE THIEVES" THE LIBRARIAN AS PROTECTOR OF THE BOOKSAuthor(s): Marcia ReedSource: Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 10,No. 4 (Winter 1991), pp. 175-177Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27948385 .

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Art Documentation, Winter 1991 175

'TO CATCH THESE THIEVES" THE LIBRARIAN AS PROTECTOR OF THE BOOKS

by Marcia Reed Getty Center

More than a decade ago I was the art librarian in a large midwestern university library. The collection of art and archaeology books was an old one, begun in the 19th century and developed systematically in the following years. In the latter decades of the 20th century, preservation and security for a collection of over a million volumes shelved under one roof had become a problem for which there was insufficient funding or staff time, not to mention expertise. Stored in cavernous spaces on dark metal stacks or on shelving within a low-ceilinged addition, under unshielded lighting, the books sat like dignified denizens of a senior citizens facility, forgot ten by the ambitious generations of the present students and faculty in the professional schools.

There were many solid candidates for an already cramped special collections section residing in the open stacks. The 19th-century periodicals were full of wood engravings and other graphics which had an increasing value each time one saw them listed in dealers' and auction catalogues. Because it was an old collection, my own area, the art library, was especially full of books and periodicals containing original graphics which had value, i.e., could be removed and sold, independent of their surrounding texts.

I was aware of the perils which could befall these rich collections, but this was neither New York, Chicago, nor Los Angeles. Not many others, I hoped, possessed a combined knowledge of the materials and their potential market values.

While working on the transfer of titles to the library's special collections, I became a member of the library's Preservation Committee in order to promote an awareness of the value of the materials and to lobby for funds for their conservation.

Environmental conditions were certainly a problem in such an old building, but security was a special concern. Although there were security staff at the exits of the library, plus a recently installed electronic book security system, neither

was fail-safe. Another unintentional element of the library security system was the byzantine building plan and arrange ment of the books, not strictly by LC classification order but rather into subject collections that reflected the academic de partments' history and research interests. Locating materials in the library stacks could be truly difficult if one were not a cognoscente who had used the library for years. When the Association of Research Libraries sent out an alert on the theft of the Winslow Homer wood engravings from Harper's Weekly, the library was one of the few institutions with copies of the prints intact, because the early issues of Harper's were shelved in an area of the stacks that few people knew existed.

It was of some reassurance to think that if book thieves were to contemplate hitting this library it would not be easy for them. On the other hand, library staff, graduate students, and faculty?if dishonest?would have their work cut out for them. In general, the major thefts from libraries in recent times have not been accomplished by outsiders. Luckily, the permanent academic and library community was a small one. Many of my colleagues had grown up in the Midwest. They were people for whom traditional scholarship and

values such as honesty and fairness still had meaning in the conduct of their daily lives. Still, one worried about the con tinued life and health of the books if conditions did not improve.

Early in the fall of 1981 I received a call from Sotheby Parke Bern?t in New York City. They had previously contacted the other two colleges in the same town, one a small, private community college and the other a well-known women's col lege. Both institutions had relatively small libraries. Ob

viously, the news about the quality of the book collections at the university's library had not traveled to the East Coast. The initial query concerned a particular engraving which might be missing from the library's copy of Pan. Pan was a beau tifully produced Art Nouveau journal published in Germany around the turn of the century. It was lavishly illustrated with prints by the eminent artists of the time. Several other art periodicals were mentioned, and I was to check them also for missing illustrations. The office of Sotheby Parke Bern?t in New York had received a number of original prints by mail from a seller whose address was in town. Since these prints appeared to have been removed from books, the auction house wanted to check out the possibility of theft before agreeing to handle the sale of the prints.

I checked the library's copies of the books from this short list with some apprehension. The results of my searches

were mixed and lent themselves to no speedy conclusions. Some of the plates were missing from the library's copies. However, the contents of these books were often idio syncratically issued, assembled, and/or bound, sometimes without illustrations or occasionally with extra illustrations printed on special papers. In several cases, although the il lustration listed on the "Contents" page was missing, it looked as if it had never been there?no evidence remained of a leaf having been lifted out. In another case, though the plate was not bound in where it was supposed to be accord ing to a contents or illustration list in the volume, upon care ful examination it was found in another place in the volume.

After several preliminary searches, there was enough evi dence of theft to take the matter seriously. It was difficult to be certain without more information and physical details. I notified the library director, and I decided to request a copy of the entire list of prints. When I called Sotheby Parke Bern?t, the person with whom I spoke was more guarded about the specifics of the prints and their seller. I was told that the auction sales firm was working with their legal counsel.

A forewarning of theft had come earlier in that same sum mer. While talking on the phone in my office, I watched a middle-aged man, whom I did not recognize, as he read Verve, the French modern art periodical which is illustrated with original lithographs. This man had requested an issue from the library's caged area. After turning several pages, he ran his finger down the gutter margin, lifted out a plate, and put it between the pages of a legal pad. I called the associate director for public services, who called the university police

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176 Art Documentation, Winter 1991

and alerted the library security staff. Meanwhile, the man appeared to be suspicious. My office was not soundproof; possibly he had heard my calls and alerts to the staff. The man returned the issue of Verve, looked at a few other books in the stacks adjacent to the reading tables, and left. The door checkers had been alerted and checked through his papers carefully, but found nothing. I was disappointed because I knew that I had seen the man remove the plate. My assistant

went to the stack area where the man had been observed looking at books, and in a book on Russian architecture, he found a lithograph by Fernand L?ger taken from Verve. Either the man had noticed that he was being watched and dis carded the print or he planned to return for it later when fewer staff and readers were in the library. When we checked the man's name on the circulation sheet it was not legible, nor was he known to anyone on the staff. When, several months later, there was potential evidence of a more serious theft, I was sensitive to the seriousness of the matter. When the complete list of graphics was received from

Sotheby's, to my surprise it was a copy of the original letter and the list offering the contents for sale which their corre spondent had sent. The name and the back-slanted handwrit ing in the letter were familiar to me, since they belonged to a fellow graduate student in the art history department who also worked in the local museum. He was someone whom I had long suspected of stealing books: he had previously worked in the library, and we had noticed missing books in the areas in which he had a particular interest. To alert him to our knowledge of these losses and my own suspicions, I had even discussed them with him and sought his help to un cover the party responsible for the disappearance of the books.

The receipt of the list of prints was the beginning of several months of extensive research for the FBI on the case against the student. As the art librarian, I was the obvious candidate for the task since I knew about art bibliography and the his tory of illustration. The handwritten list gave 162 artists and names of prints, but only occasionally did it indicate a source publication. All of the prints had to be checked in the books or journals from which they might have been removed.

Working with photocopies, since the original graphics had been confiscated by the FBI as evidence, the first part of my research was to ascertain the source of each print. The cata logues raisonn?s for the artists were essential to locating

where each print had appeared. Following the identification of the print and its place of publication, it was necessary to verify an exact match of a particular print and the source volume from which it was taken. The evidence that the prints had been removed from a particular copy of the book or

journal had to be absolutely accurate, taking into account paper condition, binding evidence such as sewing marks, and other details such as foxing, and quality and condition of the paper. Fortunately, most of the prints had not been cropped. Evidence of the gutter margins with sewing holes remained, and the gilded or colored edges of the leaves had not been cut off. For this part of the process it was especially difficult to work with photocopies as matches for the actual pages in books. Since they were the evidence for the case, the origi nals could come to the library for my use only in the com pany of the FBI agent. About once a month, when the prints were available, I assembled the possibilities to be checked. More than a few times the right illustration was missing, but the evidence of the size, condition and color of the paper, and tear marks indicated that the illustration in hand was not the one missing from our library's volume.

I knew that this person also did research and was familiar with other library collections in the area. I went to these libraries and found that some of the stolen prints had come from copies of books in the collections of the other institu tions. When I visited these libraries I noticed that the level of security was about the same as ours?not very good. The same journals and books with original prints were in un patrolled, quiet sections of the stacks. It was possible to leave the buildings unobserved via unattended exits. In libraries other than my own no one questioned who I was. Perhaps this is a value for the privacy of research, but it does not lend itself to securing collections.

During these months, while I worked on the case, I had qualms about the serious nature of the task; occasionally I was genuinely frightened. My work on verifying the theft of the prints was going to seal the fate, in a negative way, of another colleague. He would have no future as a potential museum curator or professor. However, these apprehensions were always overruled by my firm belief in the librarian's professional duty to secure and to preserve library collec tions. Libraries were public trusts to be available to everyone

who needed the collections. Research on the prints and verification of their location in

specific libraries' copies was emotionally draining and time consuming. Research on the theft had to be carried out in absolute secrecy, yet as the art reference librarian I had an open office that was staffed nine hours a day and also needed to attend to daily work routines. The suspected thief was in the library most days. Both his presence in the library and proximity to my residence unnerved me and made it difficult to work in my office since he often came by to chat. I couldn't leave my work on my desk, and I had to be careful not to leave papers in the stacks that would betray what I was

working on.

After completion of the research, I met with the FBI agent and the chairman of the art history department to plan how the case would be handled. The chairman said his name

would be given to the papers, and I would not be connected with the case. I asked the FBI agent what he said when con fronting people with evidence of a crime and was told that most people had a sufficient amount of guilt about their crime and seemed to be expecting him.

The following day the agent informed the suspect about the indictment. In the man's apartment they talked about the case and he admitted what he had done. Asked if he had any more prints, the man took one out of a frame on his wall and demonstrated, with a matting knife, how he had cut prints from bound volumes. What was most astonishing was the answer to why he had done it. He said that he felt the library did not sufficiently appreciate the materials in its collections. Since he did, it was all right for him to take them. The FBI agent did not ask how he could then feel that it was right to sell the prints. The man outlined his own moral boundaries by setting aside the university museum's collections, from which he said he did not take anything. And this was so, for when news of the theft first came from Sotheby's the mu seum staff checked their collections and found nothing miss ing. No arrest was made, and the day after the FBI agent's visit the thief disappeared.

I still work in an art library and I recall this case frequently. Why do I remember, sometimes even dwell on this episode, although it happened almost a decade ago? One reason is that to my great dismay nothing happened. With great na ?vet? I had apprehensively expected the sword of justice to fall swiftly and decisively, climaxing the months of tension, secret meetings, and my own earnest work on behalf of the cause of security and sanctity of the library collections. In fact, the case remains untried, unsolved, and unresolved to this day. The thief has not reappeared, and the prints, though returned to the library, have never been restored to their former places in bound volumes. There is no staff to work on the project. To this day, I often wonder what has happened to the thief whose status shifted from favorite student to in dicted felon by the work of his own hands. In my present work I notice that I am less trusting and more suspicious than my colleagues. I still feel burned by my brush with the bad faith, shabby morals, and ragged logic of this particular re searcher who said he appreciated these works of art more than others, and so he mutilated them and sent them away to be sold at auction. What are the lessons from such episodes and encounters

for contemporary librarians and curators like myself? How can one play a game in which selfish ruthlessness sub stitutes for rules? I have learned that there is no effective combination of processing methods, ownership marks, and security systems which will successfully protect collections, because the implicit foundation of library and museum col lections rests on the cornerstone of honor and respectful use.

The salient questions to ponder are these: What does it

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Art Documentation, Wi nter 1991 177

mean for libraries and museums when inadequately protected but highly valued and marketable commodities comprise their collections? What are curators' and administrators' roles and responsibilities when security systems don't really

work, and when thefts originate inside the organization? Why have laws not been enforced, or are they unenforceable for library and museum collections, in contrast to those which protect personal property and corporate goods? Can libraries protect their collections despite the lack of effective social prohibitions? Living in Los Angeles, I often compare the pre ponderance of car alarms and the energetic prosecution of car thieves with the ease with which thieves have stolen art

from not so well guarded museums and archaeological sites. It is obvious that more serious and expensive security mea sures are taken to protect replaceable consumer items than to protect cultural patrimony and artifacts of intellectual his tory. Consider how much is spent on insurance for those icons of contemporary life, our cars and our houses, and how

much is spent on preservation and storage of documents and artifacts. What does it tell us about our culture and civi lization that the former are transitory and perishable monu

ments to our lifestyles, and the latter survive and speak to us despite our society's carelessness and lack of moral prohibi tions?despite all odds?

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