Upward Departure

I was a little off.

Brubaker was sentenced to 30 months in prison yesterday, about twice what I predicted. I predicted he’d have an offense level of 14 and he actually was assigned a 19. (In my prediction, I admitted that it could break either way, depending on what was included in the sentencing recommendation and what the monetary value total was. I was also trying to be conservative, because I’ve been burned before.)

His sentencing range was, then, 30 to 37 months. The judge sentenced on the low end of that range.

All things considered, I’m pleased with it.

Jeremy has a long post on a new crime in Ohio. Before I get to my version of the story, I quote here Jeremy’s last paragraph on the subject - written yesterday before, I think, he knew some of the detials I’m about to relate. I can only think that if Jeremy had read the FBI affadavit I’m about to write about, he would have put this whole paragraph in bold, and starred it:

“Before I move on, though, a word about the Hayes library’s security procedures (or severe lack thereof). The media reports about this case note that “the library … now requires a photo ID from anyone reviewing rare books. Such requests were previously left to the discretion of staff members.” After all the thefts we’ve seen in the last few years, any library which has rare books/manuscripts in its collections and is not taking even minimal precautions like checking photo IDs, keeping permanent records of visits and items examined, keeping a staff member in the room with visitors at all times (how did McCarty get the book into the bathroom?!) and not allowing outside materials into the reading room (Scranton’s backpack should have been taken away as a matter of course) frankly has no business being responsible for such materials.”

Not only do I agree with Jeremy here, but I think he is going easy on the library. And before you think either of us overly harsh, here’s the story.

On June 27, 2008, a young couple walked into the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, and asked to see “Laws of the Territory of the United States North West of the Ohio,” referred to from this point on as ”The Maxwell Code.” I note here that library personnel were aware that a similar copy of the Maxwell Code sold, less than a year earlier, for $103,000. (That is, one hundred and three thousand dollars. American.)

This item was published in 1796. The Maxwell Code was boxed with “Laws of the Territory of the United States North West of the River Ohio,” referred to from this point on as “The Freeman Code.” This Freeman Code, from 1798, would later be sold for $35,000. (That is, thirty five thousand dollars.)

Why $138,000 worth of our cultural property was bundled together in this manner and handed over, I cannot guess. But I’m sure there is a reason. Why these things were allowed to leave the eyeshot of a librarian, I cannot imagine there is a reason for.

But anyway, they were. And then, subsequently, the man took the items into the restroom. The women’s restroom.  He was spotted coming out of said restroom by an employee, who promptly took the books back from the man. But did not call the police. Or check the books. But the employee did reshelve the books.

In case this isn’t clear enough: $138,000 worth of books went into the women’s restroom with a man. That man was caught, the book retrieved and then the man was sent on his way. At the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, that was the end of the story. (In their defense, it was a Friday.)

(In all of my years of covering these thefts, I don’t think I’ve quite heard of anything like this. And just so the folks at the Hayes Presidential Library know, they’ve made it into my class. They’re on the flippin syllabus from this point on. Starting this semester. I’m shoe-horning them in. I’ll make room. And Soon. Destruction of Nineveh. Destruction of Alexandria. Looting of Poland, 1939-1950. Rutherford B. Hayes Library. Before I get to Transylvania, before I get to Breithaupt and Harner and Smiley and Blumberg and Spiegelman. My students have got to hear this and hear it immediately.)

In the event, the library employee did note the description of the couple. The male was described as six feet tall with a slender build.

This man, named Joshua McCarty, had in fact stolen the Freeman Code from between its covers, but left the approximately 150 blank pages it was bound with. That was, presumably, why the employee didn’t think anything was missing and reshelved the items.

In July, McCarty contacted an Illinois book dealer to ask if he was interested in buying or brokering the Freeman. The book dealer was initially suspicious of McCarty: Joshua said his name was John when caller ID suggested that his actual name was Joshua.

The dealer declined the offer but suggested another dealer in Pennsylvania. McCarty contacted this man (and this time gave his real name) and told the dealer he’d inherited some books, including the Freeman Code and the Maxwell Code. McCarty said he was interested in selling the Freeman right away. And he might want to sell the Maxwell at a later date.

The dealer wanted to see the Freeman and asked McCarty to send it. He did. Then, accorinding the FBI, the dealer “checked online to make sure it was not in any data base as being stolen.”

Two things.

First, any database? I am extremely interested in which database a rare book dealer would check to soothe his conscience. Seriously, does anyone know?

Second, any book dealer worth his salt knows that stolen books are  almost never discovered until well after the theft has occurred - usually months and often years. Checking any database, even if a comprehensive one existed, would be close to useless. A better, more responsible thing to do would be to ask a few questions on a few message boards. Or send out a few emails to Ohio institutions holding the item.

Anyway, none of that happened and the dealer sold the item to a man in England for the aforementioned 35K. The dealer sent the check - less his 10% - to McCarty’s mother’s address. Seriously.

On August 25, another young man came into the Hayes Presidential Library. He asked to look at a copy of the Maxwell Code. He was given it, and he didn’t pony up any ID. When the Head Librarian found about this, she approached the man with the Maxwell Code and asked him for some identification. He said he didn’t have any. But he did have a book bag, and the library staff asked for that as collateral.

There has been - and will be much more - made of the fact that the bookbag was subsequenly found to contain only paper towels. It was a clever and well-executed feint that completely duped the library staff. But what I’m wondering is: just what could the bag have been filled with to justify such a trade? Gold bricks? A Blaeu Atlas? How can a book bag full of anything a 21 year old male has be adequate collateral for the Maxwell Code? What did the library staff think was in that bag that the boy wouldn’t be willing to trade for a hundred large? And, just as a matter of security, why is a library - a Presidential library, no less - taking possession of a bag whose contents they don’t know?

Blerg.

So you’ve probably guessed what happened next. Book bag boy - variously described as 22 to 25, five-ten to six feet, 130 to 150 pounds (six feet, 130 pounds?! “Officer: the library has been robbed by Ichabod Crane!”), fair complected, with black or dark hair and a silver studded earring in his upper left ear - went out to use his cell phone and never came back.

It was in the course of telling the book community that their Maxwell had been taken that someone told them that a Freeman had recently been sold by a dealer in Pennsylvania.

On September 3rd - that is, nine days after their Maxwell was stolen - library staff decided to confirm that their Freeman was still in their possession.

Double blerg.

You know the rest. All of the criminals have been arrested. McCarty, 31, has had a crooked recent life. He has prior arrests for Petit Theft, Falsification, Felony Theft, Receiving Stolen Property, Obstructing Official Business, and Failure to Appear. He was also arrested in Evanston, Illinois, in connection with the theft of $20,000 worth of antique maps from a book store in Pennsyvlania.

Zach Scranton (who is actually six feet, 155 pounds) is the other guy. The Hayes Library employees were shown a picture of him and while “one witness said Scranton was not the subject, the other three witnesses all selected Scranton, with varying degrees of certainty that he was the subject who committed the theft.” Awesome.

I’ll keep you up to date on the legal proceedings.

But back to Jeremy’s original paragraph. I almost never blame the library in these thefts, and neither does he. We both work in libraries and know how difficult they are to keep safe. But a rare book library’s main vulnerability should never be the front door. A thief should never follow the proper procedures and get away with the loot. If he sneaks in the back door or tazes the librarian or shinnies up a dumbwaiter shaft - that’s one thing. But a person who checks out a book from the staff should never then be able to steal the thing, particularly not when that person acts so suspiciously.

I’ve seen a lot of crimes. I’ve never seen a more clear cut example of buffoonish criminals being abetted by a dismally ill-prepared library staff.

A combination one-two punch by Michael and Jeremy has gotten me back online. Honestly, I’ve been writing a ton but just none of it for the blog.

And then there’s a little thing called Rare Books, Crime & Punishment II.

As Philobiblos reported, there has been a theft in my old stomping grounds of Ohio. I’ll write about that (and some other notable happenings) soon. 

But first this. David Foster Wallace, central Illinois kid made good, is dead. The reports say he killed himself.

Wallace was raised in central Illinois, left here to attend his father’s alma mater, and eventually came back to teach. He was a professor at Illinois State University when his opus Infinite Jest made him a superstar.

But it is his nonfiction that I love. Collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again are two essays that are among my favorites of all time. First, the title work (originally published in Harper’s as “Shipping Out”) about a cruise. And second, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away From it All” (which, along with “Will You Please Be Quite Please”, is my favorite story title) about a trip to the Illinois State Fair. 

Both essays play to the Eastern-sophisticate-on-anthropological-mission-to-understand-midwesterners-where-much-fun-will-be-poked genre, an attitude I normally despise (though strangely abet by subscribing to Harpers, about which more later), but DFW’s writing style was so new and hilarious that I just couldn’t not like them. And since he was one of them/us, I couldn’t not laugh. I love good nonfiction essays, and DFW wrote them.

But here is why I’m sorry he’s dead. This takes a bit to set up but will, I guarantee, not appear in any other encomium about the man you’ll read.

I have read every issue of Harper’s published in the past thirteen years. For some reason, a little episode splashed over several months in 1996 often comes back to me.

In April, 1996, Jonathan Franzen, still many years away from being award-winning-Oprah-denier Jonathan Franzen, wrote an interesting, though maybe a bit petulant, article about the state of fiction. (It was about more than that - a lot more than that - but this is not a review of that essay. As it happens, I really like most, but far from all, of Franzen’s essay. That’s about how I felt about The Corrections and pretty much how I feel about most Harper’s articles.) It’s the sort of article that appears not infrequently in Harper’s.

To judge by the letters published in the July issue, the piece was not very well-liked. One after another, authors of letters to Harper’s excoriated Franzen as whiny, ignorant, wrong-headed, ignorant and wrong. It’s important to note that the letters to Harper’s are not like the letters to Commentary or other such magazines (where they’re as much a part of each issue as the features or columns). The Harper’s Letters section is like that in most other periodicals and I really can’t remember a time when that many letters (10) of a similar bent (negative) were dedicated to a single piece. (I don’t even know if Lewis Lapham’s notorious review-of-the-Republican-National-Convention-before-it-took-place got that many letters or was as widely panned.)

The first nine letters were by what seemed to me to be regular folks with an opinion to express. But the last was from Kurt Vonnegut. It was two sentences (while all of the others were several paragraphs, at least) and positioned by Harper’s at the very end of the section, as if it were the capstone - the final word on the matter. I quote it in its entirety:

Novelists are people who believe they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.

Kurt Vonnegut, New York City

Two months later, in the September, 1996, issue there was this letter from David Foster Wallace:

Kurt Vonnegut, writing in response to Jonathen Franzen’s April Folio on American novelists, “Perchance to Dream,” claims that “Novelists are people [Wallace quotes Vonnegut’s full letter]. This makes Vonnegut look humble and lovable, but as a response to the stuff Franzen was talking about is total horseshit. If Vonnegut’s sound bite were the whole truth, nobody at all would read novels -  who would want to devote hours of brain work to something somebody had written just to dampen his own neuroses?

Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and audience. We can have long polysyllabic arguments about how to describe the way this magic works but the plain fact is that good art is magical and precious and cool. It’s hard to make good art, and it seems to me wholly reasonable that a good artist should be concerned with their work’s cultural reception. I thought it was brave of Franzen to offer not only “lofty explanations” but honest and intimate descriptions of how it feels to try to make good, serious art in a culture that doesn’t seem to value it much. And I was disappointed that the Harper’s Letters editor chose to run only sneery, disparaging letters about the essay. I’ve spoken with way too many readers and writers who admired Franzen’s piece to believe disparaging letters were all that Harper’s got. I suppose one reason it was brave of Franzen to publish his essay is that it made it easy for other writers to look humble and adorable at his expense.

David Foster Wallace, Bloomington, Ill.

Written at a time when young novelist Wallace was far from cemented as a success, this was the most genuinely risky thing I’ve ever seen written in Harper’s. Writers in the magazine mostly pretend to speak truth to power while pretty much speaking to the choir; DFW actually did it.

His writing was different, and not everyone’s cup of tea. But, to quote another cultural icon, “he’s got guts - and guts is enough.”

I’m sad that “got” is now ”had.”

Rest in Peace.

As a few of you have noticed, #3’s salty comment on my last post seemed to destroy the comment feature on the blog. And, since the comments are really the most important part, I haven’t been posting.

Instead, I’ve been trying to correct the problem. (Okay, okay. I think we all know that’s not true. But I have been checking back to see if the problem has corrected itself.)

I’m going to go on hiatus for a few days and figure out the next step. Maybe I’ll move to a new site. Maybe it’ll fix itself.

You’ll know shortly after I do.

You may remember Hoosier Eugene Zollman from way back in May. Well, as Jeremy mentioned, he’s finally been indicted in Kentucky. For a two count violation of the Theft of Major Artwork statute.

I’ll pause here for applause.

Between April 11, 1994, and May 26, 1994, Zollman “did steal from the care, custody and control of a museum, that is, the Special Collections Library of Transylvania University, located in Lexington, Kentucky, various objects of cultural heritage.”

Here what is new:

The case has been assigned to Judge Jennifer Coffman, a former librarian and the judge in the Transy Four case. The case is being prosecuted by David Marye, the prosecutor in the Transy Four case.

I don’t suppose Mr. Zollman reads this blog but if someone who knows him does, tell him this: plead guilty as soon as possible. US Attorney Marye did an outstanding job at the trial level with the Transy boys and an even better one on appeal. He recognizes the importance of our cultural heritage, he knows the requisite statutes and he is unlikely to make mistakes.

This indictment is really good news in the book world.

Daniel Lorello has pleaded guilty to second degree grand larceny. According to this article, NY AG Cuomo reports he stole more than 1,600 items. He faces, apparently, two to six years in prison and a $73,000 bill for restitution. But I’m old enough to remember New York’s own Rebecca Streeter-Chen, so we’ll see.

Sentencing is October 1.

Jeremy has posted on the recent sentencing of a British electrician who had “a haul of stolen valuable and historic maps and books at his home.” Just to convert that to American for you: a “haul” is roughly $175,000.

The electrician, Richard Delaney, had been contracted to do some work at Birmingham University. This gave him access to the special collections. Of course, it wasn’t until he failed to do some of his electrical work - and then didn’t return a van and gas card given to him for the job - that police came to his home. Where they found the haul.

In the least surprising aspect of the crime, Delaney was given a sentence of one year in jail, suspended. That’s right - no jail time.

This is typical for England, of course, but still not as bad as Norman Buckley, who committed a similar crime and got an English judge to suspend his sentence on the rather novel theory of heartbreak: Buckley was distraught - and driven to theft - because his girlfriend had broken up with him.

In Delaney’s case, at least, the defense was more typical: heroin addiction.

I note this little episode in the context of the other book-related news that seems to be constantly coming out of England, regarding defamation.

In the United States, it is relatively difficult to successfully charge libel (God bless you, First Amendment!). England, as many articles have noted, is a lot more friendly to plaintiffs in this area. So people who have small defamation grievances (that would never pass muster in US courts) are bringing suits of intimidation in England based on defamation. (Congress is (or was) considering a bill that would indemnify Americans from such nonsense.) 

All of which has prompted me to come up with a new logo for our neighbors across the sea.

England: where truth is not an absolute defence, but heroin addiction is. 

Maybe an Etonian can convert that into Latin for me.

So I’ve been prompted to follow through on my promise to make a prediction about James Brubaker’s sentence. My predictions are always wrong, of course, even when I have most of the facts. And in this case, I’m missing plenty. I don’t know what, for instance, will be included in the sentencing recommendation and I have no idea the monetary value that’ll be claimed (or assigned by the judge).

But here is a reasonable, pre-sentencing memorandum prediction.

I’m assuming he’ll be sentenced under 2B1.5 (Theft of, Damage to, or Destruction of Cultural Heritage Resources). So that starts him off with Guidelines level 8. Then 2 more for theft from a museum/National Historical Landmark. Theft for pecuniary gain gives him another 2. And maybe another 2 levels for a pattern of misconduct. So that’s 14.

The real trouble is in the valuation. I didn’t see anything in the plea agreement about how much, in monetary value, they’re putting on him. This is the sort of thing I’ll know more about once the sentencing memoranda have been filed. But I have a very hard time thinking they’ll charge him with more than $70,000. Anywhere between thirty and seventy thousand means he’ll get an extra 6 levels tacked on. But I wouldn’t at all be surprised if the value is placed lower - say between ten and thirty. That’s a 4 level bump. I’ll assume the worst and go with that.

So that puts him at level 18. He’ll get at least 3 knocked off that (maybe more, depending on his degree of “acceptance of responsibility”). But we’ll say, conservatively, he’ll get 4 taken off. That brings him down to 14.

I’m not sure what his criminal history is, but let’s say it’s low: either 0 or 1.

That adds up to a sentence of between 15 and 21 months in jail.  

This is, again, a reasonable prediction. I hope that I’ve missed something. I hope that my calculations are off. I hope the prosecution acts differently than I think it will. But, for now, a year and a half in jail seems like about it.

If someone sees something I missed, I’m happy to hear about it.

On March 8th, 9th and 12th last year (boy, was I prolific back then) I wrote posts about Constantin Tischendorf and the taking of the Codex Sinaiticus from St. Catherine’s Monastery.

The Codex is the earliest known complete extant copy of the New Testament - written in the mid 4th century in Greek.

In those posts I noted that Tischendorf was, at the very least, not completely honest about how he came to hold the Codex.

About a month after I wrote those posts a man named Dr. Ekkehard Henschke came here to the University to talk about the Codex Sinaiticus Project, which entailed making the CS available to scholars worldwide via the internet. It sounded ambitious.

Well, some of the pages are now available online. And they look as promised - remarkably good. The digital images of the pages, accompanied by transcription, are really clear and easy to access.   

This is not an endorsement of even a 150 year old theft. But there is no denying that this will be a boon to scholarship in many disciplines. Tischendorf’s thefts have been justified with the idea that he was bringing this information to the wider public. I’m glad it finally made it.

So there is a new book called Burning Books by Australian Matthew Fishburn. I haven’t read it because it hasn’t been released here yet, but I will when it is simply because some of the material might factor into Rare Books, Crime & Punishment. (Also, I’m anxious to see if Fishburn adds to an area already heavily covered in books, notably by Rebecca Knuth’s recent Burning Books and Levelling Libraries.)

My problem is that in trying to get information on the book, I continue to come across (in blogs, reviews and even an author interview) the irritating little phrase by Heinrich Heine that gets tossed around so often when this subject comes up: “Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.”

This ill-considered remark is awful, and I wish people would quit using it. (Maybe Fishburn will get so sick of hearing it that he’ll publicly disavow its use. Though probably not.)

Here is what I said about this subject six months ago, after having read People of the Book, which used it for an epigraph:

“This phrase comes up all the time in the material I read about book destruction and has come up in class at least once already. It always irritates me.

It’s exactly the sort of ridiculous bumper-sticker phrase that sounds good at first but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I don’t even care that the statement itself is not true (there are a million instances of book burning that didn’t lead to people burning).

The part that is most irksome is the implication that the real crime in that phrase is the people burning. As if book burning was bad simply as an antecedent to people burning, a sort of canary in the mineshaft.

Book burning is not bad because it leads to something else. Book burning is bad.

Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn more books. 

Let’s pass that quote around for a while.”