Allison Bartlett - The Man Who Loved Books Too Much - The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

This spell is made even more potent by stories of discovery that collectors share. One of my favorites happened on a spring day in 1988. 15That morning, a Massachusetts man who collected books about local history was rummaging through a bin in a New Hampshire antiques barn when something caught his eye. Beneath texts on fertilizers and farm machines lay a slim, worn pamphlet with tea-colored paper covers, titled Tamerlane and Other Poems , by an unnamed author identified simply as “a Bostonian.” He was fairly certain he had found something exceptional, paid the $15 price, and headed home, where Tamerlane would spend only one night. The next day, he contacted Sotheby’s, and they confirmed his suspicion that he had just made one of the most exciting book discoveries in years. The pamphlet was a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s first text, written when he was only fourteen years old, a find that fortune-seeking collectors have imagined happening upon probably more often than they’d like to admit. The humble-looking, forty-page pamphlet was published in 1827 by Calvin F. S. Thomas, a relatively unknown Boston printer who specialized in apothecary labels, and its original price was about twelve cents. But this copy, looking good for its 161 years, most of which were probably spent languishing in one dusty attic box after another, would soon be auctioned for a staggering $198,000. The value of Tamerlane , which caused no stir when it was first published and was never even reviewed, has nothing to do with its literary merit, but rather its association with a seminal author, and every time a copy has been unearthed, the price has skyrocketed. Estimates of how many copies of Tamerlane were printed range from fifty to five hundred, but so far only fourteen known copies have surfaced, most of which are held in public institutions. In the 1890s, a dealer in Boston spied it on another dealer’s ten-cent table, and later sold it for $1,000. In the 1950s, the unassuming text was found by two postmen at the bottom of a trunk of books they had picked up at a yard sale. Six months later, they sold it for $10,000. There may still be a few more on the loose, which is enough to entice any dedicated collector, and now me, toward a box of books in the back of an antiques barn or on a lawn at a yard sale or in a forgotten corner of a thrift shop, through which we will carefully dig in hopes that luck might show her face behind tea-colored paper covers.

At another booth, a dealer told me the story of a famous prank. There was a pair of books, one by Hemingway, another by Thomas Wolfe. Each had written a long inscription to the other. A knowledgeable dealer had to inform the unfortunate owner who had just paid a pretty penny for them that the inscriptions were not authentic, and that the value was not what he had hoped. Later, another dealer discovered that they were spectacular forgeries: Wolfe had written Hemingway’s inscription, and Hemingway, Wolfe’s. 16

As I made my way through the fair, I heard many stories of another kind—tales of theft—that whetted my appetite for meeting Sanders. Bruce McKittrick, the dealer who’d told me about the “fake of a fake” Aretino, directed me to a curly-haired man he said was “a very good guy.”

The very good guy was Alain Moirandat, a tall, slender, articulate dealer from Switzerland. Even in a crowd of erudite, bookish people, he stood out. In the first few minutes of our conversation, he mentioned Nietzsche, Goethe, and Florentine architects. From a glass case, he retrieved a manuscript, unbound, in a shallow box. He had acquired it at auction in 2004, where it had been described simply as “a full work of Flaubert, 254 pages.” It had been priced “idiotically low,” said Moirandat. “I was desperate. Like many in this business, I’m undercapitalized, but it was so ridiculously cheap. I think people must have misread the description, maybe thought it was only twenty-five pages. I decided to put in a bid. . . . I got it at half the price.”

He opened the box and, to my surprise, invited me to leaf through the slightly yellowed pages. They were written in brown ink, which had faded somewhat, as had the drips and splatters, and many lines had been aggressively crossed out. Moirandat said it was a piece Flaubert supposedly wrote while traveling, although he doubted it.

“I’m convinced he didn’t write it on the trip. It’s too well formed.”

He read a passage aloud in French, then translated it roughly for me.

“I will abstain from every declamation and I will not allow myself more than six times per page to use the word ‘picturesque’ and only a dozen times the word ‘admirable.’ I want my sentences to smell of the leather of my traveling shoes . . .”

“It is like peeking in the workshop,” sighed Moirandat, looking over my shoulder at the manuscript.

I had to agree. Its unfinished state, with words scratched out and ink spilled, gave it an immediate, intimate quality. Moirandat left me with the manuscript for a few minutes while he helped a customer. I touched the pages and realized how much I would love to own something like it. This is how it happens, I thought. I could slip these sheets under my sweater and make a dash for the door. As I waited for Moirandat to return, I noticed other handsome items he had left on the counter. He was not acting carelessly. Almost every dealer I’d visited so far had done this. When Moirandat returned, I had to stop myself from suggesting he not be so trusting. I might as well suggest to a Japanese host that guests keep their shoes on. Trust was clearly part of the rare book trade’s culture, and who was I to suggest resisting it?

When I asked Moirandat if he had ever suffered a theft, he told me how he once traveled to Germany in pursuit of a thief who had taken a volume from his store in Basel. When Moirandat caught up with him, the thief denied he had been in Basel at the time of the theft. But Moirandat knew his books’ physical markings as intimately as a parent knows a child’s freckles and scars. In court, he told the judge, who held the book in question, to turn to page 28. “You will find three small holes there, and if you go to the last page, you will find my predecessor’s entry mark.” The judge did, and the suspect, a public school teacher, was convicted.

Moirandat also told me about a man who had used the “wet string” method.

“He went one day to the library with a length of wool yarn hidden in his cheek. He placed the wet yarn inside a book, along the spine,” he said. “He put the book back on the shelf and came back a few weeks later. As the yarn dried, it grew shorter, which made a clean cut.”

The thief didn’t have to smuggle a razor in. A length of wet yarn was all he needed to walk away with one valuable page: an original Manet print. Later, he went to Moirandat’s shop and tried to sell him a book. “It was the absolute rarest Goethe first edition that there is on the cathedral in Salzburg. It’s one of the really, really great texts by Goethe, seminal to the development of romanticism. It had a round library stamp, eighteen millimeters in diameter, which he had tried to erase. I could see the stamp, but couldn’t tell which library it was from. I called up every Swiss library until I found where it was from.” The police were notified, and the man, thief of Manet and Goethe, was caught.

I walked away thinking it’s a wonder this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time.

I passed McKittrick’s booth again, and he motioned for me to wait a moment while he quickly crossed the aisle to speak with dealer Sebastiaan Hesselink of the Netherlands. When McKittrick had told me earlier about the pirated fake Aretino, I had asked him about other crimes in the trade, like theft. He hadn’t had any stories for me, which is why he was now talking to Hesselink. McKittrick asked him if he would speak to me about, he whispered, the theft . He would, so McKittrick introduced us. I guessed that not all dealers might be willing to share a story of theft, so I felt fortunate that Hesselink had agreed to it. While his son manned their booth, Hesselink and I left the fair floor and sat on folding chairs in a dark, quiet hallway off the foyer.