[MSN] Book review. Dark side of bibliomania. The Book Thief is a fascinating tale of the theft of rare books and manuscripts and the thief's eventual capture and trial.

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Dark side of bibliomania 

BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN 

The Book Thief is a fascinating tale of the theft of rare books and
manuscripts and the thief's eventual capture and trial.  

 
Librarian and lawyer: Travis McDade's latest is an intriguing and compelling
read. 

In the late evenings of the spring of 1994, Daniel Spiegelman, a small man
in his late thirties, stole several rare manuscripts and maps from Columbia
University's Butler Library. By the time the thefts were discovered,
Spiegelman was already i n Europe, trying to sell them on the open rare book
market.

Spiegelman's crime, his eventual capture and trial is the subject of Travis
McDade's riveting book, The Book Thief: The True Crimes of Daniel Spiegelman
(Praeger Publishers). McDade's book is the first book-length account of a
book thief. A librarian and a lawyer, McDade focuses on rare book thefts and
the legal trials that follow. What holds McDade's attention in the
Spiegelman case is Judge Kaplan's unique, groundbreaking sentencing.

Gripping narrative 



The Book Thief reads like a thriller with its suspenseful, gripping
narrative of how Spiegelman planned and executed the theft. Columbia's
Butler library is equipped with high tech security systems, and yet
Spiegelman broke in. Like all old libraries, McDade tells us, Columbia's
Butler also had one small security flaw. And one flaw was enough. I'm not
going to say what it was or mention anything more about how Spiegelman did
it. It's a fascinating tale, and one that you should discover for yourself
in the book.

McDade's precisely calibrated, elegant style is gripping; his research,
impeccable. It was Consuelo Dutschke, the curator of the medieval and
Renaissance collection, who first discovered the missing manuscripts. Jean
Ashton, the director of Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, was
notified. As in most cases of library rare book thefts, McDade informs us,
suspicion first fell on the staff. 

Among the many rare items Spiegelman stole were "17 medieval and Renaissance
manuscripts dating from 1160 A.D. to 1550 A.D., including Euclid's Elementa,
three Books of Hours, two papal bulls, eight Arabic and Persian manuscripts
dating from the 10th century to 1887, 284 historical maps, 237 individual
maps razored out of a 17th century version of Blaeu's Atlas Major and 26
Presidential letters." In all, he stole rare books, letters and manuscripts
worth several million dollars. McDade points out that there are two kinds of
book thieves - those that steal to make a profit, and those who steal to
collect. It is the second who is the most dangerous to libraries because the
material, once taken, vanishes. Luckily, Spiegelman was stealing to sell and
it was only a matter of time before these manuscripts and maps turned up on
the open market. 

In the book's second chapter, "Smart Thief, Bad Crook", McDade describes the
capers of at least a dozen book thieves who have been stealing from rare
book repositories. Some worked as a couple, some were professors and
graduate students with access to rare book rooms and a few were even
librarians. Stephen Blumberg, perhaps the biggest book thief of the century,
stole in all 30,000 rare items, totalling more than $20 million. He served
only a five year sentence.


Extraordinary sentence 

However, says McDade, in what was one of the most extraordinary sentences in
recent federal criminal history, Judge Kaplan declared that "great research
libraries are repositories of our social, cultural, and scientific heritage.
Their rare books and manuscripts are vital to understanding the world and
often are irreplaceable objects of study for scholars who add to our
knowledge of ourselves and our environment." Kaplan then sentenced the book
thief to "60 months in prison, three years of supervised release and 300
hours of community service towards increasing adult literacy and pay
restitution to Columbia." 

McDade's intention in The Book Thief is to show us that Spiegelman's
punishment is important to deter other book thieves. And that Kaplan's
verdict has now set a court precedent for the prosecution of other book
thieves. Another heroic figure from the trial is rare manuscript librarian
Jean Ashton who spent many days in court, persuading people about the
importance of these rare manuscripts and maps. In an e-mail interview,
McDade told me that he was drawn particularly to the legal aspects of the
story: "I had thousands of pages of documents and court transcripts to sift
through, but I didn't mind doing it; it was like hunting for clues to solve
a mystery, trying to uncover neat little bits of information from the
smallest scrap. For example: There was a photocopy of a receipt that didn't
mean anything at all to me at first. I put it in the 'useless' pile and
forgot about it. Then, when I'd run out of good material to use, I went back
to the 'useless' pile to see if anything in there made any sense. That
receipt turned out to be for one of the safe deposit boxes Spiegelman used
to store some of the stolen items; it had a box number, the address of the
bank, the alias he used, when he rented the thing and how much he paid." 

McDade's next writing project will be about another book crime. He currently
teaches Legal Research at the College of Law at the University of Illinois
and hopes to soon teach a class on book and manuscript crime at the Graduate
School of Library and Information Science. What should be noted about the
crimes of Daniel Spiegelman is that it is a story of destruction and greed
and not, as in the case of Stephen Blumberg, a dark tale of bibliomania gone
wrong. Travis McDade's The Book Thief is the most intriguing, compelling,
satisfying book about books published in a long, long time. 

http://www.hindu.com/