When Rare Books Go Missing, Booksellers Band Together

Antiquarian booksellers discuss stolen books and how they combat thieves

Courtesy of New Boston Fine and Rare Books.

In January of this year, Kimberly Blaker of New Boston Fine and Rare Books reported to the ABAA’s Missing and Stolen Books Blog that this first edition of The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, published by J. Parsons in 1793, was stolen. The book was shipped to London in a fraudulent credit card transaction, and it has not yet been recovered.

While large-scale thefts from libraries and museums tend to make news, antiquarian booksellers are also frequently the targets of thieves, whether in open shops, at or en route to and from book fairs, or when shipping books purchased over the Internet. Since the beginning of the year, the Missing and Stolen Books Blog of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) has recorded fourteen separate instances of thefts or items gone mysteriously missing—four have been recovered so far—and they offer something of a cross section of the kind of theft commonly observed in the trade.

One entry details material missing from under a dealer’s table after the Papermania show in Hartford, Connecticut, this past January, which had been purchased by the dealer at the show. Both White Fox Rare Books in Vermont and Roy Young Bookseller, Inc. of Ardsley, New York, reported items absent from shipments back from the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Pasadena in February, and L & T Respass Books of Northampton, Massachusetts, reported a Confederate imprint pamphlet removed from its booth during the same fair.

Books lost during shipment is a particularly vexing problem, said ABAA security committee chair Garrett Scott, as frequently it is unclear when or how this happens and where along the chain responsibility for the losses should be fixed. Peter Stern of Peter Stern & Co. in Boston reported one case where a book he had placed in a UPS Drop Box turned up just days later in another local bookseller’s shop, someone having jimmied the box open and robbed its contents. The book was recovered, but, Stern said, he won’t be using drop boxes to mail packages anymore.

Online credit card fraud has been the modus operandi in several of the thefts reported this year, including a series of at least six thefts, believed related, from booksellers Peter Stern, Brick Row Book Shop of San Francisco, and Krown & Spellman Books of Culver City, California. The books were shipped to Miami and Colorado Springs and remain missing. Stern said he neither expects that the books will be recovered nor assumes that the booksellers will be compensated for their losses, and that in response to these crimes he’s now requiring that books purchased by credit card be shipped to the billing address associated with the card. Until this recent case, he said he had seen so little fraud over the years that it’s just “not even on the radar.”

One ongoing case of credit card fraud is that of Christian Essian, who went by the name Christian Nettle (and reportedly several other aliases as well). Essian is known to have ordered rare books from several dealers in the US and the UK and had them shipped to a Bloomsbury address in London. He was arrested in February and will face trial in July. The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association (ABA) and the ABAA security committees have requested that any member bookseller who either sold books to or purchased books from Essian contact Pom Harrington, convenor of the ABA’s security committee, as well as the Art and Antique Squad in London. More details should come to light following Essian’s trial this summer.

All Images courtesy of White Fox Rare Books.

In February, Peter Blackman of Vermont’s White Fox Rare Books returned from exhibiting at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair to find that thirteen items had gone missing. This scarce Paris-published Comical Alphabet, c. 1850, with brightly hand-colored illustrations and captions in both English and French, was among them. Blackman believes the books were removed from a shipping case while in transit. He posted the news on the Missing and Stolen Books Blog, but so far, he hasn’t had any leads.

All Images courtesy of White Fox Rare Books.

Also among the missing: another Paris publication, Alphabet Grotesque, c. 1850s by artist B. Coudert. Leporello with twelve leaves of colored plates featuring amusing caricatures of types representing letters of the alphabet.

All Images courtesy of White Fox Rare Books.

Blackman also reported the loss of an elegant manuscript version of a wide selection of Silvio Pellico’s poetry, ornamented with twenty-nine text illustrations rendered in pen, many of birds in natural settings. It is bound in full tan calf.

It’s worth remembering, as Scott pointed out, “a bookseller is always having to keep his antennae up against dealing with theft and fraud both coming and going. Spending a thousand bucks on something it turns out you don’t have title to is as much of a loss as having something walk off your shelves.” We have seen multiple cases of booksellers assisting with the recovery of material lifted from institutional libraries, including the 2012 thefts from Becker College in Worcester, Massachusetts, of more than a hundred books from the Samuel May, Jr. Collection. When the college posted the list of books believed missing from the collection, Stern immediately recognized several of them that he had recently acquired (from the thief, as it happened, whose story of their provenance seemed perfectly reasonable). Stern credited the college with having detailed catalogue records that made the detective work straightforward. He quickly gathered all the items and returned them to the college. He said he was grateful that he hadn’t sold any of the books, as it meant that he didn’t have to “go hat in hand” to customers and inform them that the books they’d purchased were stolen property and would need to be returned. As for the restitution he is due to receive from the culprit, Stern said he plans to donate the money to Becker College.

By implementing the Stolen and Missing Books blog (http://security.abaa.org/security), which replaces an older database for the documentation of these thefts, Scott noted that the ABAA hopes to gain more control over the reports submitted, and to be able to swiftly and easily provide updates when books are found. The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) also hosts a site for reports and news of stolen books (www.stolen-book.org), as does the Rare Books & Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association (http://bit.ly/RBMS-theft-reports). A relaunch of the ABAA website, planned for this summer, will include a redesigned, dedicated security page as well.

While security in the book trade has tended to be, somewhat of necessity, reactive and reliant to a large degree on anecdote rather than statistical data, as more and better tools for documenting and tracking common thefts are developed and deployed, those in the trade will find themselves better equipped to combat fraudsters of every stripe.

“It hurts every time it happens,” Stern said, “but it’s still relatively rare. Maybe that’s because we’re a backwater, or maybe we just deal with a lot of honest people.”