Archival Outlook • March/April 2019 • The Greatest Theft in the Archives: Recalling the Book Bandit 30 Years Later

On a chilly December day thirty-one years ago, I received a crash course on archives and the legal system. I didn’t know it at the time, but the University of Oregon had become one of the many victims of Stephen Carrie Blumberg, aka the Book Bandit. What started as an investigation by the local police would later involve the FBI. An account of Blumberg’s trial in 1991, by Oregon’s then curator of Special Collections, was published in the SAA Newsletter.¹ Additional accounts of Blumberg’s thefts would be published in newspapers across the country, in popular magazine such as Harper’s² and Reader’s Digest,³ and, most famously, in a book by Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness.⁴

Since that experience in Oregon in 1987, my career has taken me through Maryland, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Throughout the years I have transported to my offices a growing box of newspaper clippings, journal articles, correspondence, conference talks, and notes—all pertaining to the greatest library and archives thief of all time. These documents piece together the story of Blumberg’s pilfering of more than 23,000 books and manuscripts valued at millions of dollars from forty-five states, two Canadian provinces, and the District of Columbia.⁵ At one point I naively thought I would write the history of his exploits, but the stories in Harper’s and by Basbanes give more thorough and emotionally removed accounts.

Purely coincidental, Blumberg robbed two of the schools for which I worked: Duke University and the University of Oregon—although I would not learn of the Duke theft until after his trial in 1991. I actually think I met Blumberg while working at Duke as an assistant in the Rare Book Collection in the mid-1980s. One of the disguises he would use to gain access to restricted collections was to dress as a visiting faculty member from another school.

Eerily enough, I recall an encounter in the Rare Book Reading Room with an eccentric man in a worn tweed jacket who had disheveled hair and was slightly smelly (Blumberg was known for poor hygiene). We didn’t ask for photo IDs then, so I took him at his word that he was a visiting faculty member. I’ve since wondered if it was indeed Blumberg and if he was casing our security. At the time, Duke experienced a number of “false” alarms, most of them occurring between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. Blumberg later told Duke curator John Sharpe he was testing our response time while stealing more than 300 volumes from the Rare Book Collection.⁶

Blumberg struck a second time when I worked as the rare book librarian in Special Collections at the University of Oregon. This was my first job after graduate school and I shared an office with the manuscripts curator, Hilary Cummings. On December 7, 1987, I discovered several items missing from our processing room: early Oregon almanacs as well as a custom-bound and autographed copy of Noel Loomis’ novel Wells Fargo.

The head of Special Collections, Ken Duckett, was on sabbatical, so Hilary and I called the university librarian’s office for help. The campus police arrived and, later that day, a detective from the Eugene Police Department, Richard Hansen, who was assigned to the case and inspected the site. December 7 was a Monday and Sgt. Hansen hypothesized that the theft had occurred over the weekend when we were mostly closed except for a few hours on Sunday. Although we alerted area book dealers and shared information about the missing books as best we could, we figured our materials were long gone.

The mistake we made on December 7 is that we did not look further than the processing room to see if anything else was missing. On December 29, Special Collections was open with a skeleton staff of two during the holiday break. A visiting researcher requested to see the papers of an early Oregon pioneer family, the Applegates. When my colleague could not locate them, she asked me to look. I also couldn’t find them and called Hilary, who knew of no reason for the papers to be off the shelf. In the meantime, my colleague discovered several other boxes out of place in the stacks.

Upon further investigation, our worst fears were realized. A number of collections, mostly documenting Oregon pioneers, were missing. This time we knew what to do and Sgt. Hansen came back to investigate. Because the pioneer accounts were used relatively often, we were able to determine a window of time when the theft might have happened. November 10 was the last time one of the missing collections had been used.

We continued inventorying collections and discovered that more than 9,000 letters, diaries, and other early Oregon documents were missing as well as 13 early Oregon imprints. We were lucky in one sense—all of the manuscript collections had been processed at the item level and several of the collections had been microfilmed. Later, this would prove to be extremely valuable to the FBI when they raided Blumberg’s storehouse in Ottumwa, Iowa. While there can be more than one copy of a rare book, manuscripts are unique, and our list was evidence of theft for the search warrant.

Aside from notifying rare book and manuscript dealers, the theft was kept quiet for a few weeks as Sgt. Hansen set a trap in hopes our thief would return. When it became clear he would not, Sgt. Hansen urged the library to go public. On January 21, 1988, we held a press conference in the reading room with local media present; shortly afterward we were contacted by Washington State University, which had experienced a similar theft. The officer in charge of its investigation, Steven Huntsberry,⁷ played a key role in helping the FBI find Blumberg. It would be Huntsberry who would make the connection that an individual caught breaking into the University of California–Riverside’s Special Collections was Stephen Blumberg and tie him to the Washington State and other regional thefts. His capture finally happened after one of Blumberg’s associates, Kenny Rhodes, turned him in. Blumberg’s house in Ottumwa, Iowa, was raided on March 20, 1990.⁸

The Blumberg theft had profound effect on both Hilary Cummings and me. In 1988 I left Oregon for a job in Maryland and shortly afterward Hilary left the profession altogether. While Hilary and I were never official suspects, we were at one point asked if we would be willing to take a lie detector test. We both left the university with unresolved questions and a feeling of failure. In August 1990, Hilary interviewed Sgt. Hansen as a port-mortem to the theft, and he confirmed we were never suspects.

I contacted Special Agent W. Dennis Aiken who oversaw the FBI raid and helped with the return of the stolen books and manuscripts. That conversation led to Aiken giving a talk at the 1991 spring meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC), in which he told the audience that Blumberg was a determined thief and that maybe to dig “a fifty-foot hole in the ground and encase everything in concrete” might stop him.⁹ That I was not at fault provided a modicum of comfort but also made me realize how vulnerable our collections are. Blumberg would not be the last person to rob the special collections where I was on staff. In 1995, Gilbert Bland¹⁰ stole from a number of libraries and archives including the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina where I was employed at the time.

It was initially estimated that Blumberg had more than $20 million in stolen books and manuscripts at his Iowa house. The penalty for his crime? The prosecution recommended ten years in prison, but the judge sentenced him in 1991 to seventy-one months with a $200,000 fine.¹¹ While the sentence seemed light to those of us who were robbed, for the judicial system it was a simple interstate possession of stolen goods with no weapons or personal injury involved.

There was concern by many that Blumberg would try to rebuild his collection. Since his release from prison in December 1995, he has been arrested for stealing antiques and violating probation, but no record of additional library theft has come to light.

¹ Cocks, Fraser, “Witness for the Prosecution: The Trial of Stephen Cary Blumberg,” SAA Newsletter (July 1991): 16–7, 22–3.

² Weiss, Philip, “The Book Thief,” Harper’s Magazine (January 1994): 37–56.

³ Ziegler, Edward, “Case of the Rare-Book Phantom,” Reader’s Digest (November 1991): 92–96.

⁴ Basbanes, Nicholas A., A Gentle Madness (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995): 465–519.

⁷ The Society of American Archivists honored Steven Huntsberry with a certificate of appreciation at its 1990 Annual Meeting.

⁹ Basbanes, 481. (Special Agent Aiken gave the same quote to Basbanes for his book when describing Blumberg’s determination and ability.)