Thirty Years & Two Metres Under
A shy girl hiding fairy books behind the encyclopedias, a man with 23,600 stolen volumes, and the two metre gap where a book can vanish for thirty years.
She first caught my eye in the school library gliding between the shelves, an almost angelic little being, an airy sprite with a dreamy gaze, holding a hand out touching the books gently. Her mouth curved in a little absent-minded smile and I felt like I knew her even though I only started yesterday. It turned out that I did and I most definitely did not.
True Crime is not in itself a new genre but the name is and I'm still waiting for the book that tells this story; when "Book Bandit" Stephen Blumberg was arrested on March 20, 1990, FBI agents searched his 17-room Iowa home. They found roughly 23,600 books stacked floor to ceiling in every room, hallway, closet, and bathroom. What unfolded was thefts carried out between the 1970s and 1990 where he stole rare books from at least 268 libraries and museums across the US and Canada, worth an estimated $5.3 million. He never sold a single one. He kept them all. Probably one of the reasons why he could remain undiscovered for so many years. Let me get back to the other.
He saw himself as a "caretaker," not a thief. Blumberg believed that modern society had lost its ability to appreciate beauty and quality, and that it was his personal duty to protect the artifacts of earlier, more refined eras from what he considered careless, indifferent modern custodians, including specifically librarians, reportedly he really despised us!
There's a word for loving books — bibliophilia✦, the ordinary, healthy kind of devotion most of us in this profession quietly admit to. There's also a word for loving them past the point of reason: bibliomania✦✦, the compulsion to acquire rather than read, to own rather than lend. But Blumberg was neither of those, not really. So he was a thief for sure, but his drive wasn't greed.
He was something rarer: a bibliotaph✦✦✦.
Back to my angelic little troublemaker who genuinely was the sweetest and kindest little shy girl you could imagine - but she also had a thing - she was more or less obsessed with everything that had to do with elves and fairies. It took me a while to realise that in her wake all books related to the topic disappeared without a trace and it was purely by chance that I discovered one of her stashes behind some big dictionaries and encyclopedias. Nothing ever left the library as she just didn't want anyone else to check them out and she wanted to be the only one who knew where they were.
I found her out purely by chance; in the end, it was the same way the FBI found Blumberg as he was turned in by an accomplice. Thirty years of thefts, and the reason he got away with it for so long was almost absurdly simple: 95% of what he'd stolen had never even been flagged as missing.
It was chance, plain and simple — and without it, her stash would have gone unnoticed the same way Blumberg's did for thirty years. That's the dual truth sitting underneath both stories. When we open a library's doors to anyone, we're extending a kind of trust: that a book taken off a shelf will find its way back to roughly the same spot. That's the whole structure. That's the entire agreement. And it takes so little to break it; a book doesn't need to leave the building, or cross state lines, or get smuggled past security. It just needs to land two metres from where it belongs, and it can vanish for thirty years, hiding in plain sight the entire time.
That was then and this is now. Even with modern tech, a full physical inventory is still described in current library-science literature as "a tedious and time-consuming manual task that takes place a few times per year", not continuous, not even monthly in most cases.
"Digitalized" hasn't meant "solved."
Maybe not until now as it turns out that two-metre gap has a closing time these days, and it's measured in minutes, not months.
More time to spend with little angelic introverts finding their voice — like her, if she'd only realized that letting someone else in on the fairies wouldn't have meant losing them. She wouldn't have had to be so alone in Tír na nÓg✦✦✦✦
Notes
- Footnote 1.✦ Bibliophilia — the love of books. Genuine, healthy, mostly harmless. Most of my colleagues, and I dare say most readers of this post, qualify. ↩
- Footnote 2.✦✦ Bibliomania — an excessive, sometimes obsessive drive to acquire books: rare editions, uncut pages, multiple copies of the same title, more for the owning than the reading. Coined in the late 1600s. Impressive collections. Slightly concerning motives. ↩
- Footnote 3.✦✦✦ Bibliotaph — from the Greek biblion (book) and taphos (tomb): literally, one who entombs books. A rarer, stranger relative of the bibliomaniac, whose instinct for ownership has curdled into something else entirely — not collecting to read or even to admire, but to withhold. A bibliotaph doesn't necessarily want a book destroyed, or even hidden from the world. Just hidden from you ↩
- Footnote 4.✦✦✦✦ Tír na nÓg — "Land of the Young" in Irish mythology: an otherworld realm of eternal youth, often associated with fairies and the Aos Sí. ↩
Filed under
- Field Notes
- library theft
- book bandit
- bibliomania
- rare books
- library science
- book inventory
- library inventory
- bibliotaph
- inventory
- bibliophilia
Librarian
A librarian who wrote her dissertation on integrated library systems, and now helps build one. She is making sure the shift to AI is threaded with care, so it works for librarians and the communities they serve, not in place of them.