More thieves benefiting from ebay...

These thieves are apparently not even bothering to be sneaky (or careful)...just ripping out the textblocks and leaving the debris in dark corners of the library. Annoyed by title, as they are not really vandals, they are thieves. I wager you can (or could have) found the stolen plates on ebay. I wonder how many loose plates sold on ebay are *not* stolen...very few these days, I wager.

Book thief's sentence halved...

The Iranian/Brit who stole leaves from an untold number of books at the British Library and the Bodleian Library has had his sentence cut in half by the Appellate Court...and his deportation order was reversed.  

Mr Justice Blake, giving the court's judgement, said: "This was not a case of someone stealing to improve his library then preventing scholars from accessing those books in the future. All the books have been recovered and so have the pages.

Apparently, the court was swayed by his "charitable work". Sad commentary...good thing he did not steal beer from the market, the penalty would undoubtedly be harsher.

For other elements of this tale, please see this and that.

Interesting article on "silence helping tome raiders"

The Guardian article's basic argument is that nearly all players in the book world, collectors, dealers and libraries/special collections all tend to be as quiet as possible regarding losses. This, added to the tendency toward personal fiefdoms and the strong aversion to sharing data, allows miscreants and thieves a much "safer" playground within which to work. 

This is a very interesting issue and one that deserves deeper thought and, possibly, an attempt at a data[base] driven solution. I lack the time to run with this at the moment...but we shall return to it in the future. 

Thanks to JG for the heads up.

Yet another reason to look at ebay books with extreme skepticism...

A Reading, PA man has been indicted on Federal charges of forgery/fraud charges. According to the charges, he has made over $300,000 over the last several years foisting "signed" books to buyers on Ebay. The only upside here is that he apparently would buy a genuine inscribed copy and then have a company MAKE A RUBBER STAMP of the signature and use that to "inscribe" copies that he would then foist on buyers on ebay...the silver lining being that his bogus crap books should be easier to spot than "better" forgeries.

That is the real problem with this thief (can you really be a forger if all you do is rubber-stamp books?) and others like him. I do not have much...or any...sympathy for those who buy forgeries from sellers on ebay. Unless you know the seller to be reputable (this does *not* count ebays own "I am not a crook" system) personally and/or professionally, I think you have to *presume* that what you see listed on ebay is fraudulent. If, as here, you pay real money for a book from "bev103162smith," you deserve whatever arrives at your door.

The *problem* is that now and into the untold future, these bits of garbage are going to be polluting the secondary market. Even if you would never think about buying an inscribed work from ebay, you are going to have them offered to you in years to come by "innocent" buyers and/or their families. Rubber-stamp copies, one hopes, should be reasonably easy to spot...but I wager there are better (and worse) examples out there... I'd go so far as to suggest that unless you know the provenance of a given inscribed copy, it is not unreasonable to presume it is forged. 

Worse still, the growth of this kind of fraud poisons the well...driving potential collectors out of the field either because they have been burned or because they read articles like the above and decide it is just not worth the risk/headache. I know at least three of my clients started working with me only after they had been buying on their own on ebay and been burned more than once...I wonder how many knew they'd been burned, but lost the desire to pursue books altogether. As it stands now, I actively try to guide my clients away from inscribed modern lit and into "safer" (and more client-specific) areas. 

Ebay, of course, "has no comment"...as they steadfastly hold that they simply provide an infrastructure for the transactions and have no responsibility to police their cesspool for stolen property, fraud or forgeries. To paraphrase the good Dr., if you want to avoid forgeries, retain a book(wo)man you trust.

No, I can not ever forgive you....

So Lee Isreal's book, Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger is out. No link, it is not worthy. I am have a soft-spot for literary crime [when it does not involve...er...me]. There are some great stories of brilliant forgeries, elegant frauds and clever manipulations. Of course the punch line is that, in order for the stories to be "known", the evil-doers have been caught and the work/inscription/letter has been relegated to the "forgery files" (mind you, a collectible area in and of itself).

For every "great" forger, there are doubtless a dozen or so marginal ones, passing off Dickens' signed in ballpoint pen...a random search on ebay at any given time will doubtless offer up a wide selection of "inscribed" of dubious veracity. Somewhere between the two poles rests the likes of Ms. Isreal. She is/was, in brief, a book thief and a forger. I did not know her personally, though there are many in the book world that did/do. I have read a galley of her book and will not bother getting a copy. I was planning to review it, as I have been reading a great deal about literary forgeries of late, preparing for a presentation, but then I read Kevin MacDonnell's review on one of the ABAA listserv groups. It is better than any I would have written and he was kind enough to allow me to post it here:

It's 125pp of over-written chatty arrogance, heavily padded with facsimiles of what she considers her best forgeries, of which she is brazenly proud. She describes her forging career as "fun" and drops celebrity names faster than a flasher can drop his trousers, a simile that comes to mind because by the end of the book you feel like you've been assaulted by a forger-flasher.

Although she churned out some celebrity biographies years ago, she happily calls her forgeries "her best work." The closest she comes to explaining why she did it is that she fell on tough times, needed money, and besides, she was alive and the people whose letters she was stealing and/or forging were dead. No further reasons given. At one point she uses the phrase "screw with history" but never gets around to confronting her immorality, and many of her behaviors that she describes at length with glee are appallingly sleazy.

With the exception of Catherine Barnes she describes most dealers as greedy and stupid. The closest she comes to admitting guilt over the thefts is when she says that guilt is mitigated by her help in recovering the stolen letters of "drunken American writers." But she makes very clear that she has little or no guilt over her forgeries. She has contempt for the court system, and readily admits that she never attended AA meetings that were a requirement of her probation and calls community service "bullshit."

Her account of Alan Weiner is that he extorted her for $5,000 in return for not testifying against her, but Alan's conversations with me at the time made clear that he pressed harder than any of her victims to get her convicted, was disgusted by her, and wanted her to spend a long time in jail. I mentioned previously in this list that she left a vile message on his answering machine after his death for the sole purpose of bringing more pain to his grieving family.

Much of her account also relies heavily on what she claims Jack, her accomplice, did or did not do. Both Alan Weiner and Jack are dead, so the reader can draw his own conclusions on whether to trust this account by a convicted thief and forger. By the end of the book it's clear she doesn't want to be forgiven; she wants to be admired. But the reader will find it impossible to find anything to forgive or admire in this vulgar display of narcissism.

This sums her and the book up as well as any could... It would be interesting to find out if she is still under the terms of her probation...as she explicitly states that she has violated the terms and actually having to serve out her sentence would probably be a good thing.

If you want a good read about better forgers, read Charles Hamilton's Great Forgers and Famous Fakes (1980 or the 1996 2nd Revised). A fair number of them I can forgive...for the art of their work, the chutzpa of the attempt and/or the humor of it...but I really find no reason to forgive Ms. Isreal. While it makes a cute title, I don't think she actually wants or cares about forgiveness, nor do I think she deserves it. [Again, thanks to Kevin for his permission to reprint his review.]

Book Theft Blog...

Not too long ago Travis McDade wrote a nice book on a book thief called, aptly enough, The Book Thief. He has, I have just discovered, also been running the blog Upward Departure...subtitled, in part, "Thoughts about book crimes and punishment..."

I have skimmed it and will be returning, when the dust of the next week settles, to delve deeply...as I know there is much to read and learn and grok. Enjoy.

Arrest in thefts from NY State Library

NYTimes is reporting on a history buff who discovered items he knew to be institutionalized on ebay and assisted authorities in catching the thief. Daniel D. Lorello, who worked at the New York State Library Archives for 29 years, admitted to stealing 300-400 items in 2007 alone...and he began stealing material back in 2002. Apparently much/most of it was minor material and was sold either to local dealers or on ebay.

The local dealers who bought from him will undoubtedly do their best to assist in returning material to the Library. Ebay, of course, doesn't care at all if items sold through them are stolen or not.