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 In-23 Format Syndrome (and Its Cousin the In-7)

Doctor Achille Dandillot, medical inspector attached to the clinical section of the IGLI.

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

The case examined today belongs to that category of rare diseases that one does not always dare to report in the medical annals, for fear of seeming oneself afflicted. Yet we must carry out our mission: that of recording the most obscure bibliophilic deviations, so that science, or at least its caricature, may emerge the greater for it.

Before us is a bibliophile suffering from a formidable obsession: a devouring passion for marginal formats, above all those that do not exist, or rather should not exist. The in-23 and its lopsided brother the in-7 form for him a religion of their own, a creed printed in millimetres and fractions of an inch.

Whereas the canonical nomenclature stops sensibly at the regular formats (folio, quarto, octavo, duodecimo, 18mo, and so on), our patient has become infatuated with flaws, lacunae, grey zones. For him, any volume that escapes the official definitions becomes a metrological miracle. He sees in it not a mere accident of cutting or binding, but the tangible manifestation of a hidden bibliographic reality.

The symptoms, observed over several years, present as periodic attacks whose violence has never ceased to grow.

Compulsion to measure. The patient never goes out without his twenty-centimetre ruler, sometimes replaced by a binder’s compass or a brass rule engraved with archaic gradations. In reading rooms he is caught crouching, measuring height to the millimetre. Every divergence of a quarter-inch brings on an immediate muscular contraction, followed by a jubilant exclamation: “Here is an in-23, beyond dispute!”

Alteration of language. The subject’s conversation no longer evokes books as literary or aesthetic objects, but only as dimensional surfaces. A novel by Balzac becomes “a 203 × 134 mm,” while a treatise of theology is called “a quasi-in-7.” The friend, the publisher, the bookseller disappear: nothing remains but figures.

Aggressive behaviour. At a dinner of the Society of the Friends of the Old Book (Société des Amis du Livre ancien), he threw his glass of Chambertin in the face of a guest who was learnedly maintaining that the in-7 was merely a chimera of an absent-minded binder. The incident, recorded in our archives under the classmark IGLI-CR-187/45, illustrates the social danger of the disorder.

Pathological graphomania. The patient keeps a notebook spattered with ink in which deranged surveys appear: approximate in-23, trimmed edge, suspect binding; potential in-7, but slipping toward failed in-6. On page 47 we noted a disquieting entry: in-23½, perfect format, proof is made. This last addition betrays the passage from obsession to hallucination.

We are in the presence of an advanced case of rare formatomania, an extreme variety of the bibliometric syndrome.

Bibliographic science, since the eighteenth century, has rested on a base of conventions: format is defined by the number of folds of a printing sheet. But as subdivisions multiplied (12mo, 18mo, 24mo, 32mo, 64mo), certain minds let themselves be bewitched by these infinite hierarchies.

Where a reasonable bibliographer is content to approximate (“about a duodecimo”), our patient seeks absolute precision, even if it means inventing nonexistent categories. The in-23 becomes for him a mystical revelation, proof that official bibliography lies. As for the in-7, he raises it to a symbol of resistance: “a forbidden format,” he repeats with the eyes of a visionary, as if measuring paper were tantamount to sabotaging the Ancien Régime.

The quarrels over format are not new. Already the abbé Rive, in his bibliographic imprecations, fulminated against arbitrary subdivisions. Brunet, more moderate, preferred to speak of a “small octavo” or a “small duodecimo.” But nobody had ever dared to baptise an in-23: typographic propriety forbade it.

Yet one day a provincial catalogue of the 1870s let slip an unfortunate misprint: an in-32 became in-23 under the absent-minded pen of the typesetter. This blunder, insignificant to any reader, was for our patient a revelation. Since that day he has lived in the conviction that there exists a race of clandestine formats, carefully concealed by the official bibliographers.

The first symptoms were limited to animated conversations in neighbourhood bookshops. But very soon the disorder worsened.

Intrusive phase. At the Bibliothèque nationale, witnesses claim to have caught him slipping his own corrective slips into the drawers of the paper catalogues. These slips mentioned fanciful formats: in-23 marginalis, in-7 clandestinus.

Missionary phase. He then undertook a deranged correspondence with various scholars. To Mr. Gustave Brunet he wrote: “You have forgotten the in-23 format, shame on your Dictionary.” To a Lyon binder he put the question: “Do you know how to perform the oblique cut that leads to the in-7?” None of these savants answered him, which only increased his sense of persecution.

Paranoid phase. Today the patient is convinced that international librarians are conspiring to erase marginal formats. He claims that UNESCO has drawn up a “blacklist” forbidding any mention of the in-23.

Before asserting the presence of a formatomania, certain neighbouring pathologies must be ruled out:

Bindingomania (reliuromanie): obsession with skewed bindings, which can induce illusions of format.

Compulsive pagination: a disease in which the patient tirelessly recounts the pages, convinced that printers have always cheated.

Fold delirium: an extreme case in which the gatherings are taken apart to check physically the number of folds.

None of these pathologies suffices to explain the fixation on the in-23 and the in-7. We are indeed facing an autonomous clinical entity.

The clinical section of the IGLI recommends several protocols, adapted to the degree of severity.

1. Temporary isolation. Install the patient in a reading room without ruler, compass or decimetre. The volumes are arranged there in no apparent order, formats mixed. This brutal withdrawal first provokes convulsions, then a relative calm.

2. Graded exposure therapy. Present him with books whose binder has carefully trimmed the margins irregularly, so that the exact format becomes indeterminable. The patient, confronted with the unclassifiable, learns to tolerate uncertainty.

3. Bibliographic re-education. An intensive course recalling that format names are only approximate conventions. He is read passages from serious bibliographers explaining that the height of a duodecimo varies from 16 to 18 cm, which ruins his dogma of exactness.

4. Radical treatment. In the most recalcitrant cases the patient is handed a volume bound crooked, oscillating between a 12mo and a 13mo. The instability provokes in him first an acute panic, then, paradoxically, a form of liberation. Some begin to laugh, others to weep: a sign that cure is near.

The prognosis remains guarded. The obsession with format tends to relapse, like the hallucinations of a patient who has contemplated too many typographic concordance tables.

It is probable that the patient will manage to regain a moderately acceptable social life, provided he limits his measuring to domestic shelves. But any visit to a public library represents an almost certain relapse.

We therefore conclude that rare formatomania, and in particular its in-23/in-7 variant, must be regarded as a chronic disorder, incurable in the absolute, but sometimes stabilisable by attentive care.

At the IGLI, we recommend keeping this file as an exemplar of dimensional pathologies. For if bibliophilia is a noble passion, it can, badly supervised, turn into excess, in the literal sense of the word: démesure, a lack of measure.

Clinical Files of the IGLI, File no. 2, classmark IGLI-DC-2/193.