Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
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A breach of trust
Rare materials are housed in Carnegie Library’s Oliver Room, located on the third floor of the main branch in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. WPXI in the city reported that the Oliver Room is under constant camera surveillance and only a few library employees are ever granted access. “The staff member responsible for the collection is no longer employed by the library,” Thinnes said in her statement. A report by Smithsonian.com said the room was ordered closed off in April as a crime scene. “We are deeply saddened by this breach of trust,” Thinnes said. “The theft occurred over an extended period of time by knowledgeable individual(s). The items would be of value to a limited number of collectors. For recovery purposes and due to pending litigation, we cannot provide an exact value of the missing materials.” There have been three other high-profile cases of rare book crimes since 2004. That year, the former chief of manuscripts at the National Library of Sweden was discovered to have stolen and sold 50 rare volumes from that institution. A year later, E. Forbes Smiley gained lasting notoriety in the library community. Smiley was a respected dealer in maps who was caught red-handed with an X-Acto knife at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. For several years, it was later found out, Smiley had been slicing pages out of some of the most valuable map books in the United States. The suspect was a longtime donor to the university who had easy access to the rare materials. Mario Massimo de Caro also earned a prominent spot in this library hall of thieves. De Caro was director of the renowned Girolamini Library in Naples, Italy. In April 2012, that library announced that 1,500 books were missing. Before too long, De Caro was arrested and charged with embezzlement along with four accomplices from Argentina and Ukraine. A more recent case of rare materials that turned up missing from a library turned out not to be a theft at all. In 2015, two valuable pieces of art could not be located at Boston Public Library’s (BPL) central branch. One was a Rembrandt etching, the other an Albrecht Dürer engraving from 1504. After then-BPL president Amy Ryan reported the items missing a police report was filed and an investigation followed, as well as a thorough internal review of the library’s security and collection management protocols. The items were eventually located; the artworks had been misfiled within BPL’s print stacks. Ryan, however, resigned one day before that discovery. The items missing from CLP from comprise “a major theft,” said Joyce Kosofsky, an authority on rare books and co-owner of Boston’s Brattle Book Shop, one of the country’s oldest and largest antiquarian booksellers. Having perused the list of stolen goods, she estimated the total value at “six to seven figures,” although she cautioned that much would depend on the exact condition of the materials when they were taken. Kosofsky said that in “absolute mint” condition, the Newton book alone would be worth $1.5 million. One item on the list of stolen goods intrigued Kosofsky, she said: a large folio by Edward S. Curtis called The North American Indian, published in 1907. From the list provided, she said it was unclear if the thief made off with just a single volume from the set or the entire series. The whole set, Kosofsky said, could be worth in excess of $2 million in suitably good condition. “It’s not a cohesive collection,” she said of the hundreds of missing books and items. “This runs multiple subjects. This is not for one person.” Kosofsky said there are many rare book experts across the nation eager to see the case solved and extremely curious to discover how the thief, or thieves, pulled off the crime. “Everyone wants to know the who, what, when and how,” she said.We are currently offering this content for free. Sign up now to activate your personal profile, where you can save articles for future viewing
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_TillmannPosted : Apr 11, 2018 12:11