A Black Morocco Binding, Two Initials, a Question of Provenance

Barthélémy d’Arcole, inspector of heritage mirages and of contemporary bibliophilic drifts.
Dear bibliophiles, good day.

There is, in every heritage library, a muffled unease that neither thick walls, nor alarms, nor procedures dispel. An old unease, almost constitutive of the institution itself: that of silent disappearance. The old book, so patiently conserved, catalogued, restored, remains a vulnerable object. Not because it is fragile, which it is, but because it is desirable. And because it circulates.

Recent news, punctuated by spectacular thefts in university, national and museum libraries, merely recalls an ancient truth: the theft of books, like that of crowns, alas, is as old as the book itself. It accompanies the history of collections like a faithful shadow, changing its face from one age to the next but keeping the same springs: covetousness, passion, greed, sometimes the private conviction of serving the heritage better than the institution that keeps it.

In the autumn of 2023, several cases brutally reminded us that heritage libraries are not inviolable sanctuaries. In Warsaw, nearly eighty rare volumes of Russian editions disappeared from the university collections, some of them replaced by facsimiles carefully set on the shelves. In Paris, at night, an intrusion targeted the stacks of the BULAC (the Paris university library for languages and civilisations), where original editions of Pushkin had been requested for consultation the day before. In Lyon, a few months earlier, other rare Russian editions had already vanished. The CCTV footage quickly established that the same individuals were moving from one institution to another.

Taken singly, these facts might seem mere news items. In reality they sketch a larger phenomenon: that of an international market in old books and heritage documents, where certain pieces circulate to order, sometimes on the scale of a state, sometimes to satisfy a discreet collector, sometimes to feed a parallel trade.

But to reduce library theft to organised crime would be a mistake. For history shows that libraries have been plundered by all kinds of actors, and often from within.

From Antiquity on, people tried to deter thieves by supernatural threat. Curse formulas, engraved or copied into manuscripts, promised the wrath of the gods on anyone who dared remove a book. In the Middle Ages these imprecations gave way to formulas of excommunication, sometimes added to the colophon. Books were chained to lecterns, cupboards were locked, readers were watched.

In the modern period, libraries made their users swear oaths. Some reading rooms still displayed, in the eighteenth century, solemn warnings that any alteration or removal would be severely punished. The famous oath required at Oxford, still in force today in a modernised form, recalls this continuity: the reader promises not to carry off, mutilate or damage the works entrusted to him.

“I hereby undertake not to remove, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame; and not to smoke in the Library. And I promise to obey all rules of the Library.”

These devices, however, never prevented thefts. They only recall that awareness of the danger is old, and that the library has never been a naive space.

Unlike the painting or the sculpture, the old book has a troubling peculiarity: it is only rarely unique. A stolen copy can be replaced by another of the same edition, sometimes without the loss being noticed at once. Worse: it can be transformed. A binding is changed, margins are trimmed, stamps are erased, a volume is recomposed from scattered leaves.

This plasticity largely explains the book’s appeal to thieves. It allows camouflage, dilution, reintegration into the market. Recent cases have shown it: some thieves do not hesitate to substitute copies for originals, delaying the discovery of the theft, sometimes by several years.

Not all book thieves are driven by gain. The history of bibliophilia is strewn with ambiguous figures in whom passion for the book turns into a justification of theft.

The case of Stephen Carrie Blumberg remains emblematic. For more than fifteen years he plundered nearly three hundred North American libraries, taking more than twenty-three thousand books and manuscripts. On his arrest he presented himself not as a criminal but as a saviour: in his view the institutions did not protect their treasures enough, and he was only putting them to safety. This rhetoric of “rescue” returns with troubling constancy in the trials of bibliomaniac thieves.

In France, the Mont Sainte-Odile affair revealed another profile: that of a solitary reader, passionate about old books, who took advantage of a secret passage to appropriate more than a thousand volumes, several of them incunabula. He sold nothing. He kept. The public library became the reservoir of his private collection.

Among certain collectors the temptation is more insidious still. They frequent libraries assiduously, note the gaps in their own copies, then cut out, leaf by leaf, what they lack.

The Farhad Hakimzadeh affair, in London, is exemplary in this respect. For years he cut pages with surgical precision from rare books of the British Library and the Bodleian Library. The stolen pages served to complete his own books. The affair could be uncovered only thanks to the minute examination of copy-specific features: stains, defects, gilding of edges, small marks invisible to the untrained eye.

Here the theft does not merely destroy the heritage: it fragments it, scatters it, makes it almost impossible to reconstitute.

Other cases belong to a more classic criminality, sometimes tinged with an almost theatrical audacity. The attempted theft of the Gutenberg Bible at Harvard, in 1969, remains one of the most famous. Hidden in the lavatories, the thief tried to escape by an improvised rope, before collapsing, gravely injured, under the weight of the volumes. Cruel irony: he was never convicted.

The same Gutenberg Bible aroused other covetousness, as far as the theft committed in Moscow by former intelligence officers, who tried to resell it several years after having filched it.

These spectacular cases hold the public’s attention, but they mask a more banal reality: most thefts are discreet, gradual, almost invisible.

One of the most disturbing dimensions of heritage theft lies in the involvement of professionals: booksellers, experts, academics, librarians. Their intimate knowledge of the collections, the procedures and the market makes them formidably effective.

In the 1920s and 1930s a network of New York booksellers organised the systematic plundering of public libraries, feeding a flourishing parallel trade. More recently, reputable dealers have been convicted of stealing maps, books or manuscripts directly in the reading room.

Academics are not exempt from this drift. Musicologists, papyrologists, historians of the book have sometimes yielded to temptation, reselling abroad documents they were supposed to be studying. The affair of the ancient papyrus fragments sold to an American museum, then recognised as stolen, illustrates the zones of shadow where research, market and private collecting mingle.

More painful still is the finding that some libraries have been plundered by the very people who had charge of them. The nineteenth century had the Guglielmo Libri scandal; the twentieth and twenty-first have not been left behind.

In Denmark, Sweden, Italy and France, curators and staff have methodically removed thousands of volumes. In Naples, the case of the Girolamini library struck minds: original editions of Galileo were replaced by fakes of such quality that they long deceived the experts.

In Paris, the affair of the Hebrew manuscript fraudulently exported showed how far an administrative signature could suffice to make a national treasure vanish.

Negligence must also be mentioned. Some thefts were discovered only decades later, on the occasion of an inheritance or a sale. Whole libraries have been amputated without anyone noticing.

Cameras, RFID, databases, mass digitisation: contemporary libraries have never been so well equipped. Yet no technology guarantees absolute protection. Chips cannot be fixed to old books without risk. Databases can be altered. Images often serve only after the theft.

Decisive, by contrast, is fine knowledge of the copies: systematic recording of copy-specific features, photographs, preservation of the old card catalogues, regular checks. Where these practices exist, thieves are unmasked more quickly.

Library theft will never disappear entirely. It is the dark reverse of the love of the book, of its symbolic and market value. Against it, no defence is infallible. The protection of heritage rests on a collective vigilance: that of professionals, researchers, booksellers, but also readers.

For the old book is not only an object to be conserved: it is an object to be understood. And it is perhaps there, in this shared understanding, that the best defence against its disappearance lies.

IGLI — DPM-XVI-PIG-PEY-1993