Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It, by Travis McDade
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Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It, by Travis McDade
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No one had ever tried a caper like this before. The goods were kept in a secure room under constant scrutiny, deep inside a crowded building with guards at the exits. The team picked for the job included two old hands known only as Paul and Swede, but all depended on a fresh face, a kid from Pinetown, North Carolina. In the Depression, some fellows were willing to try anything -- even a heist in the rare book room of the New York Public Library.In Thieves of Book Row, Travis McDade tells the gripping tale of the worst book-theft ring in American history, and the intrepid detective who brought it down. Author of The Book Thief and a curator of rare books, McDade transforms painstaking research into a rich portrait of Manhattan's Book Row in the 1920s and '30s, where organized crime met America's cultural treasures in dark and crowded shops along gritty Fourth Avenue. Dealers such as Harry Gold, a tough native of the Lower East Side, became experts in recognizing the value of books and recruiting a pool of thieves to steal them -- many of them unemployed men who drifted up the Bowery or huddled around fires in Central Park's shantytowns. When Paul and Swede brought a new recruit into his shop, Gold trained him for the biggest score yet: a first edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems. Gold's recruit cased the rare-book room for weeks, searching for a weakness. When he found one, he struck, leading to a breathtaking game of wits between Gold and NYPL special investigator G. William Bergquist. Both a fast-paced, true-life thriller, Thieves of Book Row provides a fascinating look at the history of crime and literary culture.
Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It, by Travis McDade - Amazon Sales Rank: #786557 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.10" h x .70" w x 7.90" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 pages
Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It, by Travis McDade Review "Thieves is an engaging cat-and-mouse account of porous libraries, scouts armed with 'gall, confidence, and oversized coats,' complicit salesmen and of G. William Bergquist, the dogged New York Public Library investigator who cracked the gang's most audacious caper: the theft in 1931 of first editions of The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick and a rare Edgar Allan Poe collection." --New York Times
"McDade does a superb job of drawing a complete picture of the environment in which the Romm Gang operated. McDade makes a smart choice to spin his tale around the mostly forgotten individuals who participated in a widespread scheme to steal library books." --Los Angeles Times
"McDade's account is a better-informed account of [thief Harry] Gold than those in other sometimes misty-eyed and less hard-nosed portraits of Book Row. By concentrating on just a few men, McDade not only avoids many pitfalls in writing about the trade more generally, but also manages to bring this tale chronologically to a conclusion. It is not a very satisfactory conclusion, for this book raises larger questions: pointing a moral as well as adorning a tale." --Times Literary Supplement
"Definitive history.... a fantastically colorful cast of characters and rich period detail will hook book lovers and historians of N.Y.C." --Publishers Weekly
"A compelling history. Rich in characterization and vividly set, this tale of Manhattan's Fourth Avenue, known then as 'Book Row,' and its bookleggers makes for grand reading." --Library Journal
"With wit, erudition, and a nice sense of timing, McDade recreates the seamy side of the antiquarian book business in Depression-era New York and Boston. This immensely engaging story will appeal to cultural historians, literary scholars, bibliophiles, and true-crime lovers alike." --Joan Shelley Rubin, Professor of History, University of Rochester and author of Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America
"Thieves of Book Row chronicles a fascinating chapter in the history of the book trade, libraries, and organized crime. In a highly engaging narrative, McDade provides a wonderful portrait of books stolen and recovered and of many colorful characters ranging from rare book legends to petty thieves." --Thomas Hyry, Director of Special Collections, UCLA Library
About the Author Travis McDade is the author of The Book Thief: The True Crimes of Daniel Spiegelman and the curator of rare books at the University of Illinois College of Law. He teaches a class at the University of Illinois called "Rare Books, Crime & Punishment."
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Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. Plus another half-star By Steve Schwartz A page-turning book on an abstruse subject -- big-time library theft. From the early 1900s, thieves regularly plied their trade at various libraries, particularly in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and smaller libraries in their respective states. Public libraries, university libraries -- neither were immune. One thief alone stole thousands of volumes, including important items of Americana. First editions of Moby Dick, The Scarlett Letter, Poe's Al-Aaraaf, original author manuscripts, books of maps and exploration all went missing. However, as bad as that was, the situation became an order of magnitude worse in the 1920s, with the sale of songwriter Jerome Kern's library for the fabulous sum of 1.7 million bucks (a lot of first-edition Burns, Shelley, Swift, Dickens; manuscripts by Pope, Thomas Hardy -- including an personal note by the author to Kern -- etc.) and a rise in prices, particularly in Americana. Organized gangs of book thieves increased and became more organized. Many of them had to buy warehouses to store the loot. Sadly, often libraries didn't even know the books were missing.How most of these felons were caught and the precautions that libraries began to take -- including the creation of Rare Book Rooms, special marking techniques, even thief-resistant architecture, and the rise of anti-theft specialists and the bare-bones beginnings of investigative techniques -- takes up a lot of the book. All of it fascinates. Librarians would invent some special marking method -- stamps, embossed seals -- only to have thieves come up with special eradication methods. Or they would simply rip out the incriminating pages.One of the more unbelievable things I found was the difficulty libraries had of getting the criminal justice system to care. One of the biggest thieves -- with several buildings of stolen material -- spent a grand total of six months in jail. Furthermore, the common wisdom was that biblioklepts were insane. Many of the better ones were plenty odd, but not because they stole books. Books were easy to steal and easy to fence, usually for a pittance, compared to the items' worth, while risk of capture and imprisonment was low. You could get more jail time for stealing a bicycle than for making off with a first-edition Huckleberry Finn. In pursuance of their criminal career, many of the better thieves became quite knowledgeable about availability and current values of material.Nevertheless, most of the thieves who did the actual stealing made at most a modest living. The heads of these gangs, almost always second-hand book dealers, got fat. Sometimes, they would "find" missing volumes for the victimized libraries and sell back to those institutions the books they had stolen. At least two of the three biggest bosses enjoyed very nice retirements. It's hard avoid the conclusion that any of these bookshop owners actually liked books for themselves or saw them as something other than a source of income.Of course, it's harder to steal a really valuable book or manuscript these days, but it still happens and pretty much for the same reasons. I remember rogue academics getting caught either trying to spirit a book away or cutting pages out of manuscripts (a thought which makes me sick), always for the cash. Prosecutions and the destruction of careers followed, as they should have. At any rate, the available supply of rare books has dwindled. Collectors increasingly have donated their collections to libraries (which means that most attempts at theft now happen in libraries, rather than in rare bookshops). Furthermore, even a legitimate dealer at one time counted on buying back book collections that he had helped assemble, particularly from heirs, and on reselling the books to different clients.I realize I've written a lot, but I haven't revealed the details that make the book so fascinating. Who was the mysterious "Hilderwald?" Exactly *how* odd was Harry Borden Clarke? Find out. These people are Hiaasen-bizarre.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. A thriller for academics! (But make sure you have your reading glasses!) By Lauryn Angel As other reviewers have observed, the print in this book is tiny! Even with my reading glasses, I had to read this in shorter bursts than usual to prevent a headache. Which is a shame, because this book is engrossing. McDade explains the minutiae of the book trade, and why book theft was such a big problem in the early part of the twentieth century. It seems strange in this day and age to think of organized gangs of book thieves stealing from public libraries and selling the books to collectors, but these book rings were notorious, and the New York Public Library in particular was constantly trying to figure out ways to thwart them.The tone is dry enough to discourage the casual reader looking for a historical thriller in the vein of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, but it is definitely a worthwhile read for anyone who loves books and is interested in collecting them. I learned a lot more about what makes a book valuable from reading about how the thieves would take pieces of various copies of the same book to create one fine edition that they would pass off as a first edition. The section about library markings alone made me think about creating my own unique stamp for my books.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. A classic tale of sleuthing By Michael J. Edelman There are two sorts of true crime books. One, which is more popular today, stresses the crime itself, with the emphasis on violence, shock, and horror. The other type looks at the problem of solving crimes, and tends to be slower paced, and more cerebral than action oriented. I favor the latter sort of book, especially when it deals with clever criminals and the theft of out-of-the-ordinary items.All those factors are well represented in the book, which tells the story of a clever Depression-era criminal who came to the realizations that (1) there were thousands of rare and valuable books being kept in public and university libraries with no security whatsoever, and (2) there was a large market of book dealers and collectors, neither of whom asked too many questions when a desirable volume came their way. Best of all, in those days before computerized cataloging and high speed electronic communication, it would take a very long time before these libraries realized that large scale thievery was going on all around them- if they noticed at all.Eventually some libraries did take notice, and the job of recovering the stolen books was given to the New York Library's first special investigator, G. William Bergquist. Trained by the NYPD and given police powers, Bergquist began what became a mission to stop the thieves, and to eventually recover the missing books, including what was, at the time, the most valuable book in America: A first edition of Edgar Allen Poe's "Al Araaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems."This is of course a must-read for all librarians, but it's also a treat for those who enjoy a good story of deduction or historical crime studies.
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Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It, by Travis McDade
