The Black Market in Old Books (1939–1950): Journey of a Book Without Provenance

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Olympe Marcelet, inspector of platforms, emphatic keywords and the priced miracles of the bibliophilic digital market.

As a rule I inspect screens: the listings on eBay, Catawiki and Drouot Live, and the gap, sometimes startling, between what an advertisement promises and what a book really is. But there is one line in those listings whose origin almost nobody asks about: provenance. To understand why the market demands it today with such insistence, one has to leave the screens and go down to the source: to the years 1939-1950, the darkest territory in the history of the book, its black market. Allow me to follow one volume.

This morning, on a bookseller’s table, lies a quarto that nobody is asking for. Tired binding, first flyleaf marked with a pale trace: a torn-out bookplate. The dealer bought it in good faith; he will resell it in the same spirit. And yet this book has travelled more than any of us: night trains, customs cellars, nameless suitcases. Its story is not unique; it is that of thousands of others.

Before the war our volume slept in a private library in Paris. Not an institution, not a famous great collection: the library of an amateur, one of those quiet men who spent their Sundays comparing editions and noted in pencil, on the flyleaf, the date and price of each purchase. A library that bore a family name, and it is precisely that name that people would soon work to erase.

The disorder came first from our own side. From September 1939, France moved its books in haste: Versailles sent part of its holdings to Autun, Strasbourg evacuated to Aubusson, Lille and Dunkirk piled their crates into improvised depots. Convoys were poorly guarded: the archives of the Instruction publique [the French ministry of public education] report the disappearance of entire crates in the marshalling yards of Dijon, Nevers and Tours. Even before the occupier, chaos was manufacturing trade, and old books were already circulating without control.

Then came the Germans, and with them method. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (the ERR, after Alfred Rosenberg) combed Paris. At the Dienststelle Westen, Kurt von Behr organised; Gerhard Utikal directed, and Hermann Bunjes acted as the interface for books and archives. The seizures were methodical, and counted: the Turgenev Russian library left in the autumn of 1940, a hundred thousand or so volumes in over three hundred crates, of which only a tenth would remain; the Rothschild libraries alone yielded four hundred and fifty-eight crates of books in the weeks of August and September 1940 alone. To these were added the great Masonic collections of the Grande Loge and the Grand Orient, the library of the Alliance israélite universelle, the archives of the Fischl bookshop, and countless private collections confiscated from individuals, ours among them. The remarkable pieces took the train for Frankfurt, to the institute that Rosenberg dreamed of founding. Our volume was part of the journey, at least in theory.

But not everything took the road to Frankfurt, or the one to Switzerland. A share was sold in the open, in Paris itself, in the most respectable of institutions: the Hôtel Drouot, the main Paris auction house. The salerooms had reopened in September 1940; from 17 July 1941 a sign forbade Jews to enter, while inside the hammer fell on the goods of those whom the sign banned. The figures are staggering: between 1941 and 1942, close to a million spoliated objects passed through Drouot; in 1942 alone, there were about five hundred sales of “Jewish property”, nearly 8% of the house’s activity, before the pace fell by half in 1943 and then to thirty-five sales in 1944.

For these sales had men’s names. Some fifty auctioneers took turns there (Étienne Ader, Henri Baudoin, Robert Bignon, Roger Glandaz), assisted by experts who were most often dealers. Alphonse Bellier alone declared six sales of “Jewish property” out of some twenty for the single year 1942, seconded by the expert André Schoeller or by Jules Mathay, who on 13 May 1942 orchestrated one of these liquidations in the saleroom itself.

Books were no exception. In October 1942 the accessions register of the Bibliothèque nationale (the national library) recorded nearly four hundred works whose origin came down to three words: “saisis Hôtel Drouot” [seized, Hôtel Drouot]. Titles in Hebrew and in Cyrillic characters, pamphlets on the Bund and on Birobidzhan, travel guides to capitals, even children’s picture books: an entire library, made anonymous with one stamp, and poured without ceremony into a public collection. Our volume might have ended like that: knocked down for a few francs to a passing amateur. For the market in stolen books did not always need the dark; sometimes a well-lit room, an auctioneer and a catalogue were enough.

For those who preferred the dark, everything was played out between the round-up and the wagon. There lay the intermediate crates, and little was needed: an underpaid porter, an inquisitive non-commissioned officer, a badly closed crate in a badly kept warehouse. Our book then leaves official history, that of inventories and reports, and slides into the other kind, the parallel economy, with no register, where a rare volume is suddenly worth enough to live on for a few months.

So it takes the road. The most frequented runs south: Paris, Lyon, Annemasse, and the Swiss border a stone’s throw away, on the Geneva side. Other lots, those the ERR had entered as “lost”, slip through Dijon and then Bregenz, and from there to St. Gallen and Zurich; after 1943, the seized Italian private libraries would come down through Turin and Lugano. At the border posts the Swiss customs officers sometimes opened crates in which incunabula, Hebrew manuscripts, mystical works and correspondence slept pell-mell, and some still bore, stencilled, the name of the library they had been taken from.

At each stage, men. In Paris, dealers very active under the Occupation: the American OSS reports link the names of Martin Fabiani and Raphaël Gérard to private libraries and archives “of Jewish origin” resold in Switzerland. On the other side of the border the brokers waited: August Laube in Zurich, a dealer in autographs, acquired political correspondence coming from France; the orbit of Theodor Fischer in Lucerne, already known for sales of spoliated works of art, saw printed books and manuscripts pass through. Walter Andreas Hofer himself, the man from Göring’s art office, bought books. None of these names is a rumour: they appear in the reports of the ALIU [the Allied Art Looting Investigation Unit] and the OSS, and in the historiography that took decades to reconstruct the network.

What remained, in order to sell, was to erase the memory of the book. The bookplate was torn out (hence the pale trace on our flyleaf), the stamp rubbed away, a new origin invented. Between 1946 and 1949, Swiss sales were full of Hebrew incunabula “without provenance”, of runs of French correspondence, of Masonic works with mutilated bookplates, of manuscripts vaguely described as “from Central Europe”. In Munich, in Stuttgart, in Hamburg, dealers disposed of spoliated holdings under reconstructed provenances: “anonymous estate”, “vanished private library”, “southern German provenance”. American institutions then bought in good faith. The great bookseller Hans Peter Kraus, himself a refugee from Vienna, would admit in his memoirs to having acquired in Switzerland, between 1946 and 1950, books “whose exact provenance remained confused”.

When peace came, people wanted to give back. From 1947 to 1952 the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction worked to redistribute volumes that had no owner: it recovered incunabula, Talmudic works, Yiddish manuscripts, and found, powerless, that thousands of others had dissolved into the black market. Our book did not come home. It was already sleeping on a foreign shelf, under a false name, waiting for the table where it would one day reappear.

From this wound a discipline was born. Before 1940, provenance was merely a scholar’s pleasantry, an optional line in the catalogue. After 1950 it became a suspicion, then a requirement: any rare book without an origin is suspect. It is exactly there that the reflex I inspect today on the platforms was born, that “provenance” line which good listings display and bad ones slip away. When an advertisement stays silent on the origin of a fine copy, it is not always carelessness: it is sometimes the very long shadow of the wagons of 1942.

That is why, when a volume without provenance reappears, on a bookseller’s table or in the column of a platform, I do not see only a book. I see an extinguished library, a scattered family, a name that was scratched out. The black market did not only scatter volumes: it scattered memories, addresses, names. And it is up to us, bibliophiles, to recognise their trace when it rises to the surface, and to have the courage to name it.

By Olympe Marcelet, inspector of platforms, for the Guild of Bibliopolicés.

Going further: Martine Poulain, Livres pillés, lectures surveillées. Les bibliothèques françaises sous l’Occupation, Paris, Gallimard, 2008; Emmanuelle Polack, Le Marché de l’art sous l’Occupation, 1940-1944, Paris, Tallandier, 2019.

GUILDE · OM/PROVENANCES

Document classified: restricted circulation.

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IGLI Clinical Files: The Bibliophile Lost for 24 Hours on a Classifieds Site

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Dr. Achille Dandillot, physician-inspector in the clinical section of the IGLI, holder of a chair he created himself and that nobody thought of disputing. File no. 2, reference IGLI-DC-2/207.

The patient’s sister telephoned at ten past seven, and she spoke low. Her brother had gone onto the classifieds site the evening before just to look, and since then, nothing more. He had not dined, he had not slept. He could be heard, from time to time, repeating prices with no sentences around them: ninety euros, a thousand euros, fourteen euros eighty. Around five in the morning he had said aloud, to himself, “this one might be the one.” His sister waited two hours before calling, out of consideration for him.

I record the symptom under the name of price palilalia. The patient no longer repeats words, he repeats prices, and the price is the only element that survives from a listing stripped of its description. We had not yet met this stage in so practiced a subject.

Mr. R. is fifty-two and owns 2,000 volumes, a good part of them in period bindings. He has frequented public sales for twenty years, he reads printers’ Latin, he knows how to collate. Our services already knew him: file IGLI-DC-1/193, gallicanosis in a benign form, resolved without treatment. I add, because the diagnosis depends on it entirely, that he has never in his life bought a Jean de Bonnot.

The place where we found him has no name in our nomenclature. A plain. Or a dump; the word comes to me and I keep it.

Under the two words livre ancien (“old book”), the site’s Books section declares 545,417 listings. The same two words, entered in Antiques, give 2,859, and the first on the list is a marble clock with its urns, €130.

The vocabulary of the site comes down to four adjectives that trade places without anyone losing by it: “old” (ancien), “old” (vieux), “rare,” “collectible.” One therefore finds, on the first screen of every query and without having had to look for them, a Larousse encyclopedia set sold as old books for €10, a lot of rare old books advertised with “over 100 years old” in parentheses for €15, a rare old book of 1862 at €1,000 whose title and author are both withheld, an old book at €8 about which nothing whatever is given, and a rare old book entitled L’Éléphant rose at €14.80. Another listing offers old Victor Hugo books, sold on account of a death, without saying whose, and a pair of Art Deco bookends appears in the same category, where, admittedly, it holds something up. The patient was looking for a book printed before 1700.

The prices have no scale. A Bible in Latin, a Vulgate printed at Lyon in 1732, €90. Three lines higher, a sentimental novel of 1920, €89. Under the word incunable (“incunabulum”), 154 listings mix Gutenberg facsimiles at €100 with a Bartholomaeus Anglicus of 1525 at €2,200; university essays on incunabula appear there too, at €15, with nothing to distinguish them from the objects. Under the word bibliophilie, the very first listing, shown at €8,000, is not a sale: a bookseller is buying there, and he filled in the box because it was compulsory.

The photographs remain. Always the same one: the closed volume, laid on a flowered duvet, shot from three-quarters. Never the title page. Never the spine. The description comes down to two words, “see photos,” and there is nothing to see in the photos. I add, to no purpose, that it is often the same flowers, big pink peonies on a cream ground, and that I ended up wondering which home-linen manufacturer has equipped a whole generation of sellers.

The history had been left open. The patient first searched for an Elzevier and obtained eleven results, four of them for a twentieth-century Dutch scientific publishing house and one for a cat to give away. He then refined, reliure plein veau XVIIe (“17th-century full calf binding”), and received the pair of bookends and an arithmetic textbook of 1883. Precision degrades the result: the engine seems not to know what full calf is, and to retain the listings that share the most letters with the query. He finally typed incunable, the highest word in the vocabulary, and received a Gutenberg facsimile and an essay on woodcut engraving.

He then gave up all querying, typed livre ancien, and stopped reading. I propose to call this state scrolling acedia. Slack jaw, high breathing, thumb descending at regular intervals, loss of the sense of time, critical intelligence intact: questioned the next day, Mr. R. knew perfectly well that the last three hundred listings were worth nothing. We found him at page forty-one, between a lot of Bibliothèque verte (a children’s series) and the arithmetic textbook of 1883, returned there by a path I cannot explain.

We did not speak to the patient and we refrained from telling him he was wasting his time, since he knows it and it is the only thing he still knows. My assistant read aloud, slowly, the complete entry for one book. A real one. Full title, place, printer, date, format, collation, pagination, condition of the binding, nature of the endpapers, accidents, provenances with the names of their bearers. After two minutes, Mr. R. looked up.

The protocol stops there. The cure by catalogue entry, a heavy variant of the gentle bibliographic electrotherapy administered in the previous file, takes three minutes of exact description and requires no apparatus. One does not get a bibliophile off the site by showing him the door; one gets him off by making him hear a described book. The patient asked the time, took a long while to admit that a whole day was missing, and said he had found nothing.

Neither greed nor laziness holds a man that deep in the listings. Hope holds him. Among 545,417 badly named and undescribed listings, there is the 17th-century full calf sold for forty euros by someone who does not know what he holds; I had one in my hands a long time ago, picked up off a sidewalk by a colleague who knew nothing about it and who showed it to me that same evening, delighted. The patient is therefore right, and a man who is right does not get treated. We have no long-term treatment to offer.

The bookseller’s catalogue entry serves first to make it possible to say no. Its collation and its list of defects make the day finishable, and a catalogue makes a passion habitable. The site never delivers its verdict. A man who never obtains a verdict stops only from exhaustion, and exhaustion came, in Mr. R., at the twenty-fourth hour.

Prognosis guarded. The patient slept eleven hours and resumed his work. For practiced subjects, I recommend that a third party call the subject by name, aloud, in the room, after forty minutes of presence on the site, and by the surname, not the first name, the first name waking no one. The other measures I had planned to propose do not stand up against hope, and I withdraw them.

It remains to be seen whether the site has anything to do with it. The Institute draws up no indictment and I impute no intention to a company I do not know, but I note the state of the boxes. A seller must choose a category, state a price and post a photograph.

He may leave the description empty, and many do. No field demands a printing date, a format, a binding condition, whereas the patient never bought anything else than that. The same category takes in a marble clock, a pair of bookends, a lot of Bibliothèque verte and a Bartholomaeus Anglicus of 1525.

The engine appears to rank by shared letters, and the company appears to sell visibility options that can carry listings that say nothing to the head of the list. The price box cannot be left empty.

I looked at the site for twenty minutes on my way home, for the needs of the file. I bought nothing. His sister writes that he no longer wants to hear anything about anything.

He went back Thursday. So did I.

GUILDE · AD/BONCOIN