Transcript - Theft from Collecting Institutions: An Australian History

Date: 9 July 2019

Speaker: Maryanne McCubbin

Event description: Thefts from cultural institutions can be the focus of intense scrutiny and sensational reporting, but can then also be quickly forgotten. Join one of our experts to hear about astonishing histories of thefts from major Australian cultural institutions that have occurred across their histories, including thefts of valuable rare books. The talk will also identify patterns and trends in Australian cases. This talk was presented as part of Melbourne Rare Book Week 2019.

Transcript

Maryanne: I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we’re gathered, the Boon wurrung and Woiwurrung, and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.

Internationally, some recent major thefts from collecting institutions have received significant public attention, including their presence in mainstream popular culture forums.

In 2018 Gregory Priore, an ex-archivist in charge of the rare books collection at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, was arrested on charges that over two decades, he stole about 300 rare books and other items worth over $8 million and in cahoots with a rare book dealer, sold them, including via the web. Just maybe this case will make it into the pantheon of the biggest-scale thefts in modern history, and we’ll return to it later.

One evening in 2009, internationally-prominent flautist Edwin Rist, 20 years old, broke into the Tring Museum, a branch of the British Museum of Natural History with one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, and stole some 300 bird skins - some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of [Charles] Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace. Notwithstanding his young age, Rist was also an international champion tyer of nineteenth-century fishing fly-ties, and while he used some of the feathers for his own ties, he sold the vast majority to an international group of men who shared his purist interest in the arcane art of nineteenth-century fly-tying.

In 2018 a non-fiction book was published about this theft, while the incident also formed an episode on the massively popular This American Life podcast series.

In 2003 four young men stole two of four volumes of John James Audubon's The Birds of America, a first edition Charles Darwin, and several illuminated manuscripts from the rare books department of Transylvania University library in Lexington, Kentucky.

In 2018 the film American Animals, based on the theft, was released, its title riffing on the Audubon books the men stole.

Travis McDade, an international expert on rare book theft, declares the film “a load of hooey”, and says these men were “the stupidest thieves in the history of rare book crime”. He singles out this theft as atypical of rare book theft in virtually all its aspects, and he especially identifies the physical assault committed on the rare books librarian as unusual. Most rare book theft, or any library or archival theft, for that matter, isn’t associated with any direct bodily violence whatsoever.

McDade says, “If rare book theft had a manual, committing the crime quietly, alone, and after years of training would be the entire first chapter”, a profile we’ll return to later.

In March 1990, thieves dressed as police officers stole 13 works of art including Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Manet and sketches by Degas from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The art has still not been recovered, nor has anyone been charged with the crime. It is still lauded in many art theft forums as one of the most significant art thefts in modern history. In 2018 Last Seen, a 10-episode podcast covering the crime and its history, was released.

And what of Australia? Do we have our own history of significant thefts from collecting institutions?

Relatively recent thefts on the public record would suggest that indeed we do.

Perhaps the theft of The Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria in 1986 remains one of Australia's most well-known art thefts. It had been purchased by the gallery the year before for AUD $1.6 million—at the time the highest price paid by an Australian art gallery for an artwork. A group calling itself the "Australian Cultural Terrorists" claimed responsibility, making a number of demands including increased funding for the arts; threats were made that the painting would be destroyed. Three weeks later the painting was found undamaged in a locker at Spencer Street station. The theft still remains unsolved.

The theft has inspired two novels: Anson Cameron’s Stealing Picasso in 2009, and Chris Womersley’s Cairo in 2013.

Between 1997 and 2002, in what may be one of the two biggest thefts from Australian museums, a staff member stole more than 2000 animal specimens from the Australian Museum for his personal collection at home, and was subsequently jailed.

We'll return to this theft later.

In June 2007, A Cavalier, by Dutch Master Frans Van Mieris, a small self-portrait valued at over $1 million, was stolen from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It remains unsolved, and remains in the FBI’s list of top ten art crimes.

After twelve years of internal investigation and auditing, in 2012 the National Gallery of Victoria reported the painting Low Tide at Boulogne by Richard Parkes Bonington as in all probability stolen.

While on the public record, this theft has tended to go under the radar due to the circumstances of its theft and of its reporting.

Between 2009 and 2015, some 200 items, including diaries, letters, photos, uniform badges, a fob watch and a compass, were stolen from the State Library of South Australia. These items were in storage, and the Director suggested that the thefts were probably by an internal person.

In 2013, two pistols were stolen from Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.

In the same year, a former employee of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery was charged with 21 counts of stealing historic photos, toys, jewellery and other items from the Makree collection, owned by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and selling the items online.

In August 2014, a thief stole twelve coins worth $1 million, including a holey dollar, from a display case during opening hours at the State Library of NSW.

In 2018, rare animal skeletons dating back to 1880, including a full dog skeleton, a Hawksbill sea turtle, a slow loris, and a hippo skull, were stolen from a Sydney University teaching collection.

I wonder how many of these recent examples of quite substantial, significant thefts, will be remembered when professionals are developing approaches and systems for preventing theft at our collecting institutions?

What does this Cook’s tour of relatively recent, mostly prominent thefts from collecting institutions in Australian and elsewhere tell us?

It tells us many things, including:

Thefts and attempted thefts from collecting institutions happen at a scale and frequency that might surprise many

Australia has its own history of thefts from collecting institutions

Thefts happen across a variety of institutional settings and contexts

Collecting institution insiders commit theft

Outsiders commit theft from collecting institutions

A wide range of collection material might be targeted for theft

Much of that material may have a level of re-sale value, and one of the main motives for thefts may be to make money by on-selling the material

Sometimes suspects are charged and convicted, sometimes they are not

The consequence of theft is as extensive as can be – the physical item and its associated public values have disappeared, and although recovery is possible, it is not necessarily probable

Better to try to prevent thefts in the first instance, and to do that, we need to know what we’re dealing with….

In keeping with the theme of [Melbourne] Rare Book Week, for the purposes of this talk I’ve studied thefts from Australian libraries through the latter half of the 19th century through to the 1950s, only where they have been covered in newspaper reports (thanks Trove) at some point or points in the life-cycle of the crime and its aftermath. This research has revealed at least hundreds, if not up to a thousand incidents of theft in newspaper reports. I’ve developed an historical profile of theft from Australian libraries, based exclusively on these public information sources. Not entirely incidentally, I have also studied thefts from Australian museums using this methodology, and will be referring to some of the findings in this talk also. However, this talk isn’t about art thefts, not the least reason being that art theft is already researched to a much greater extent than library, archive and museum thefts.

All crime is under-reported, and research suggests that thefts from collecting institutions have and continue to occur at a far greater rate than is reported, perhaps by as much as 90%. I suspect that the rate might be even higher for archives and libraries.

Theft of books and manuscripts from libraries and archives is an age-old issue – as Travis McDade evocatively puts it, “It’s a crime about one day less old than libraries themselves.” 

Thus, as might be expected, we find the annual reports of libraries, almost endlessly bemoaning the scale and intractability of the problem of theft of books and associated material. Furthermore, newspaper reports on book thefts often reference other historical incidents about which I can find no further data. Other newspaper commentary identifies many books from libraries for sale in second-hand bookshops, suggesting that they were probably stolen. Indeed, several present-day surveys suggest an average library stock loss rate tends to be about 4-5%. So clearly, theft is a widespread problem, and public reporting of it merely represents the tip of the ice-berg.

There may be very particular reasons why theft from collecting institutions is particularly under-reported, including:

The theft may not be discovered for decades or even ever – this may be especially the case for archival collections and institutions

It may not be suspected as a case of theft but rather as institutional misplacement of items, like the National Gallery of Victoria case we saw above, and this may be particularly pertinent to libraries and archives

Collecting institutions may see the incidents as far too ‘petty’ and/or far too numerous and over-whelming to bother, most particularly for libraries where the vast majority of thefts might be of very commonly-available books

They may feel that the chances of identifying the perpetrator are next to zero

They may feel it is not a good investment of the resources to pursue crimes, and/or may believe that any penalties will not fit the criminal act

They may fear potential insurance penalties

They may be concerned about damage to their reputation as responsible custodians

There may be an even greater reluctance of cultural institutions to report theft if they suspect it is by an insider

We perhaps want to think of our industry as too nice, and too full of nice people, to even perceive thefts as thefts

This under-reporting doesn’t help us to accurately know the depth nor the profile of library theft, because we don’t know what we don’t know.

A criminological theory that has been commonly applied to other types of cultural heritage crime, and which has withstood the test of time, is the Routine Activities Theory (RAT) of crime, developed from 1979, and which specifically understands all crime in its local and particular contexts. As a “…direct-contact predatory violation”, theft requires the existence of three ingredients to be committed: a “motivated” offender, who identifies both a “suitable target” – “…any…thing that draws the offender toward a crime…” – and an “absence of capable guardians”. I have ordered the talk to explore each of these elements in sequence.

The vast majority of library thefts were outright removal of whole items – mostly books, and some single manuscripts and pictures.

However, in an unusual but definitely not unprecedented case in Launceston Tasmania in 1946, the unidentified thief went to greater lengths than usual to conceal the crime: the thief originally stole three valuable volumes, and – quote - “later returned to the library with some books of little value and placed them in the gaps from which the library books were taken. When the substituted books were discovered they had all the markings of the originals on them – the label on the front cover, cardboard pocket on the inside of the front cover with title card inserted, and the various numbers used by library staff. The labels and pockets were probably steamed off the originals and re-gummed”. Such substitution of material has been a feature of some bigger international book theft cases, and has also happened in the art and museum worlds too, and it can often be a sign of insider theft, about which we’ll come back to later.

Another frequent but less common form of theft was cutting or slashing pages out of books.

A 1906 article about book slashing at the Adelaide Public Library commented, “occasionally it has been found that some indolent student has excised a paragraph from a scholastic work in preference to undertaking the more honest, if tedious, work of copying it…”

However it then commented on a different sort of case that had happened recently: “evidence of mean vandalism perpetrated, evidently by some inveterate follower of the manly sport of cricket, who, apparently to fill the gaps in a collection of literature on the bat and ball, has used the knife on the Library collection with reckless indifference to the rights of the reading public. Up to the present an examination of the damage done by this individual has resulted in the discovery that five volumes have been mutilated. In two instances the whole-of-the–printed matter has been abstracted from cover to cover. …probably only a few copies are now in existence… Besides the theft of the books named, numerous plates have been abstracted from three other works…”

In May 1927 the Melbourne Herald wrote “…there are vandals among the higher ranks who make the public library a hunting ground. They are the book slashers who do irreparable damage to books not merely for the love of mischief, but to get possession of something they value”

The article described the detection of a crime: “The watcher in the dais in the centre of the reading room saw the man draw a razor blade and cut coloured plates from a book. He worked cunningly, for he cut away the Library stamp and other means of identification. This man had done a great deal of damage before he was detected.” The article also went on to comment that “all kinds of literary works attract the book slashers.”

Why did people steal material from libraries?

There are many reasons this chart can only provide a rough projected rather than precise ratio for various motivations for library theft. From my research, I have concluded that the vast majority of the thefts from libraries seem to be motivated by either intent to re-sell, or intent to keep. Indeed, Travis McDade, who we’ve heard from before, confirms that the vast majority of rare book thefts are motivated by intent to sell. And the vast majority of the intent to keep is for very practical, prosaic reference or reading purposes and probably not on a voluminous scale, rather than to build the notorious libraries of bibliokleptomanes (as they have been referred to) – a point to which I’ll return.

Possibly typical of some of the mundanity of some theft, in 1905 “a tall, sturdily built young man, who called himself a labourer, was fined for stealing a book from the Geelong Public Library – “he told the story which did not impress the Bench much to the effect that having become interested in the book he kept possession of it…”

There is a close relationship between motive for theft and the types of material pursued; depending on the motive, certain types of material become suitable targets, or in property theft terms, “hot products”. The subject focus of the stolen material was extremely wide-ranging, and in many instances, very specific, such as ballet or poetry. And I’m sure librarians can attest to the astonishing and unpredictable range of interests library patrons might have. However, some themes did predominate: maps, war, the navy and the military, and technical, scientific reference and engineering works, and interestingly enough, cricket, as well as illustrative plates and lithographs.

While most of the items may not necessarily have qualified as rare, many of them might have qualified as hard to come by, and many of them would qualify as expensive reference works. On the other hand, others, such as newspapers, would neither qualify as rare nor expensive, but the library would offer outstanding, sustained runs of facts and figures on some subjects, such as horse-racing or cricket results.

I have said previously that one of the main motivations for theft from libraries, borne out by many of the incidents I came across, was to make money by re-selling the books.

The types of much of the stolen material had some sort of immediate re-sale value – perhaps up to ten percent – even with illicit origins, in re-sale or “second-class goods” or “collectors” markets. Where the fate of the stolen library items could be traced, many of them were sold (or attempts were made to sell them) either directly to a new owner, to fences, or to a second-hand dealer or pawnbroker, mostly locally. While an historical picture, it places much Australian library theft, and like much museum theft, within the more general, local stolen property market, with its characteristic prevalence of second-hand dealers and brokers.

In Melbourne, the second-hand Department of the famous and voluminous Coles Book Arcade was a very common site for both book theft (in many instances more common than public libraries), and for attempts to sell stolen books to its second-hand Department. In the first decade of the twentieth-century, there were a large number of cases of attempts to sell stolen law books, including a whole tranche from the Melbourne Public Library, to second-hand dealers including Coles Book Arcade.

Some items were stolen for the purposes of earning the thief money, but in a more indirect way. In 1925 a plan of the Sepik River in New Guinea was cut out of a book and stolen from the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and the motivation was believed to be “very valuable for anyone desiring to explore that locality for gold”.

Most, but not all, of the thieves I came across were young males, mostly acting alone, and were mostly outsiders to libraries – certainly not staff nor privileged researchers or experts, but rather tradesmen, semi-skilled or unskilled workers, or unemployed. However, few of them, it would seem, had undertaken particularly sustained or large-scale library theft. Most of them seemed to have been involved in what can only be called relatively small-scale theft, where they’ve stolen a few books, and the vast majority had attempted to sell them in second-hand markets. So many of the convicted thieves asked for their substantial financial difficulties to be taken into account as their reason for library theft.

In 1950 a 25 year-old student, married with two children, pleaded guilty to stealing £130 of books and briefcases from the Fisher Library at Sydney University over a month. He claimed that he was financially “desperately in need”, and pawned them in local pawnshops. Indeed, one thief who stole and attempted to sell a tranche of law books claimed he barely had enough money to keep himself fed and he was suffering starvation.

Many of the thieves were probably amateur at library theft, and libraries and books may have been just another hot product target for many of them. While an historical picture, these sorts of thieves and thefts lend further weight to the idea that many thefts from libraries were really an unexceptional part of the local stolen property market, with its characteristic youngish offenders attempting to off-loads the goods.

What of major cases of book theft, distinguished by the quantity of material stolen, the length of the period over which the material was stolen, and the value of the material stolen? Internationally, there are truly hundreds of examples over the past two centuries that would qualify as major by any standards.

This table is a super selective summary of some of the more major cases of rare book theft across the last two centuries (and needless to say, it’s both a culturally limited list and excludes theft of cultural property including from public libraries during war, which can be of a stupendous scale).

Note two things about these cases: that the motive for the majority of them was to make money by selling the material, and that for over half of these cases, the theft was perpetrated by staff.

This takes us back to Travis McDade’s profile of major library thieves: “There is only one way to steal enormous amounts of rare and antiquarian books without getting caught. Here it is, first, graduate from college. Second, take an advanced degree…Third, get a Masters of Library Science degree while working as a graduate assistant in university Special Collections. You will then be in a pretty good position to get hired at a place where you will have access to all the old books and manuscripts you could ever steal. You will also know what books to take that no-one will miss, how to cover your tracks, and who in the field might be interested in buying them”.

So does Australia have any thefts that fit into this notorious pantheon?

Insider theft has been characterised as occurring “almost constantly” at collecting institutions. It’s been estimated to constitute 83 percent of art thefts, 75 percent of library and archive thefts, and possibly as happening ten times more than external theft in museums. The high estimates usually include possibilities of insider collusion as well as direct theft. The term ‘insider’ tends to refer to internal staff, and can also refer to associated people who have a more privileged, direct and easier access to collection material than outsiders. They probably know their way around collections, and access to collections may be granted because they are trusted, even at a deeply implicit rather than explicit level. It is probably impossible to know to what extent insider culpability or collusion has been part of thefts from collecting institutions, but we do know of many instances of it internationally.

I’m gratified to report that I haven’t come across any clear insider library thefts in my Australian research. What does this mean? Are Australian librarians and archivists a particularly honest bunch? Have the thefts not been discovered? Are our internal preventative systems so good that they have foiled any attempts? Have cases occurred, but never been publicly reported? Are we just lucky? The answer to the last question just may be yes.

So what is the biggest Australian library theft I’ve come across, and what are we to make of it?

In 1913, Alexander Bonett, a middle-aged man employed as a draftsman by the Commonwealth Railways Department, was arrested and charged with having 82 "standard technical works on engineering, surveying, and metallurgy, concrete and concrete construction”, from the Melbourne Public Library, as well as 158 books stolen from Coles Book Arcade. So, over 250 books – a fair collection. When he was arrested, in denying this particular attempt at theft, he said he didn’t need to steal books, as he already had a collection worth £300 at his home. So, was this man a bibliokleptomaniac who stole hundreds of books for personal possession, as is often assumed to be the case with major book thieves but which, as we have seen, is the exception rather than the rule, even of major thieves. We also know that he made regular attempts to sell (presumably stolen) books to the second-hand department at Coles Book Arcade, and did his immediate, unprompted statement about the value of his collection suggest that he was on-selling his stolen loot? Or did he both maintain some of his loot as a particularly big, valuable specialised reference collection befitting his special interest, and sell other stolen books? We may never know – I have been able to find scant further information about this case.

Tantalisingly, in 1908 La Touche Armstong, the Melbourne Public Librarian “recalled the case of a thief who had stolen £100 worth of books, but had only disposed of one of them” (again, I could find no further information about this one in my sources).

On the other hand, my study of museum theft in Australia has indeed revealed that perhaps two of the largest-scale cases I’ve come across on the public record were indeed by thieves who only wanted to develop their personal collections, and who never even attempted to make money from their thefts.

Between at least 1945 and 1946, Colin Wyatt, “…a learned [amateur] entomologist…”, stole well over 3000 butterfly specimens across a number of major Australian museums, and shipped them back to his native England for his own collection of some 40,000 items, “…the best private collection [British Museum entomologists] had ever seen” . While not a staff member, Colin talked his way in to a whole number of major museums and was given privileged access to the collections, although in the case of the S.A. [South Australian] Museum, it’s thought that he hid in the building overnight.

And we saw earlier perhaps the other big theft from Australian museums, when a staff member from the Australian Museum stole more than 2000 animal specimens over a five-year period in the late 1980s for his personal collection at home.

We can see here that these cases do and might happen, and are often committed by insiders. When these rarer types of theft happen, their scale and impact is significant indeed.

Was it the case that certain libraries suffered a greater or lesser degree of thefts compared with their counterparts elsewhere?

I did find a preponderance of cases arising from the Melbourne Public Library. However, rather than suggesting that this library simply suffered a greater number of thefts than its inter-state counterparts, it may be explained by a whole number of other factors.

One ingredient might be changes in legislation that make public library theft a more explicit and serious crime, and therefore perhaps thought to be worth prosecuting. In 1891 Victoria’s Crimes Act was amended to make stealing from public and university libraries a specific and serious offence punishable by up to twelve months imprisonment. And indeed, in that same year, a recipient of a library book stolen from the Melbourne Public Library was reported to police and charged when he attempted to return the book to the Library: the case was ultimately thrown out of court. But not before the prosecutor had noted that “so many books were lost out of the library by theft that the trustees have determined to thoroughly inquire into every case of theft or supposed theft that presented itself”.

So it seems that the Melbourne Public Library, at least for a time, was prosecuting each case with vigour to try to combat the problem.

On occasion, annual reports from the major state libraries would acknowledge that while they certainly suffered thefts, their interstate counterparts were suffering higher rates of theft, perhaps with the implication that thieves were more common per capita interstate than in the home state.

Indeed, at one point a Brisbane newspaper was able to proudly publish as news that “Brisbane People are not Book Thieves.”

Despite contemporary claims one way or another, it is probably the case that where libraries were alike in all other respects, they probably suffered similar numbers of the more common types of thefts, with a standard range of numerical variation, over time, and that there may be other factors at work to give an impression that some institutions suffered more thefts than others.

We all know by now that book theft was a common, constant matter to all libraries, and indeed for one newspaper the real news was, in fact, that a library had suffered few book thefts.

In 2015 a group of eminent lawyers, librarians, booksellers and auctioneers gathered at the British Library to discuss the urgent issue of thefts of rare books, manuscripts and maps from national libraries, on the basis that it was seen to be increasing, especially due to the prices thieves could get for some of their booty.

As we saw at the beginning of the talk, there is absolutely no doubt that library thefts of all kinds are still happening, but I’m not so sure that we can confidently claim that it’s on the increase, because I think the lack of aggregate and historical study of library theft means that the scale and volume of it has always been so very hard to know.

Obviously the web provides a newer and brilliant distribution channel for rare library material, and at the tap of a few computer keys, it can start to hint to all of us the extent of illicit acquisition of some of this material. Although again, to quote Travis McDade, the web is a two-edged sword for sellers: it can offer a ready market-place for stolen goods, but it can also make it easier to expose crimes of theft. Although as we saw in the case of Edward Rist, the bird thief from the Tring Museum in the UK, saved and archived web posts selling the stolen material proved to be very elusive to locate a couple of years down the track.

Library theft is certainly not new, and we’ve seen even through this survey that it has always been an extensive, ongoing problem. We have seen thefts of major scale throughout the 150 years to the present. Perhaps our problem rather, is historical amnesia, and when we begin to notice and remember it, it leads us to think it’s bigger than it was. And it may be for the same reasons that when major cases are exposed, we all seem to get a surprise and think it’s all a bit unprecedented.

Even some contemporary accounts I came across would pronounce that theft had reduced, only to report that it was up the next year, or vice versa.

Is library theft in fact decreasing, given the growing repertoire of security measures libraries continue to put in place? Again, this is impossible to answer for the same reasons, but I wouldn't like to be the one who announces that it’s decreasing.

Of the three necessary factors for crimes to occur – motivated offenders, suitable targets, and absence of capable guardians – “…the lack of any one of these elements is sufficient to prevent the successful completion of a direct contact predatory crime…”, including property theft. However, for direct predatory crimes, absence of capable guardians, “…is probably the most important element”. Logically, this offers anyone attempting to prevent theft from collecting institutions the opportunity to, “[E]xtend guardianship to show that the asset is owned and cared for”, in order to reduce or at least try to account for the target suitability, described as having the elements of value, physical visibility, access (including that the property is portable and moveable), and the (perceived) inertia of a target.

Given that theft from libraries is one day less old than when libraries started, librarians and associated practitioners will have, from the beginning, undertaken more and more measures, probably based on close experience of thefts and intuitive understandings of how they work. Nearly always beginning with vigilant and attentive staff, which – to quote Travis McDade for the second last time - is still the most effective security measure - over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries so many libraries have added a whole gamut of other measures to their security repertoire, distinguished by layers of security, special security for special collections (or especially “hot products”, to continue our criminal metaphors, increasing and diversified use of technology, audit and stocktake practices, and so on. There are many contemporary library security standards available.

However, one element of many of these standards that I often find peculiar, and which also applies to museum preventative security standards, is that so many of the standards acknowledge the probability of staff or insider theft and the potential scale of its impact, but many of them only turn to security measures to prevent external theft, and fail to account for standards of security practice to prevent internal theft – it tends to be a blind spot for many, and yet there are a range of approaches that can be adopted that might make the likelihood of insider theft less likely than otherwise.

None of the security measures we deploy will probably be fool-proof. However, with better knowledge of the history and profile of thefts from Australian libraries, those same libraries can begin to infer the most impactful preventive measures, which may or may not include those they currently deploy.

It is incumbent upon collecting institutions entrusted with safeguarding the public’s cultural heritage to do all they can to protect the items from theft (and attempted theft), while enabling public access – a goal to which most librarians and archivist are so passionately committed. And to quote Travis McDade one last time, and to defy Nancy Pearl the librarian action figure’s urgings for us to be quiet, at least we’re now beginning to talk about the quiet crime of library theft, which begins to allow us to share our learnings.

Q&A

Hayley: I’ve got a question. I guess I was wondering how much of a relationship there might be between material that is censored or supressed and theft from collecting institutions, and if you came across any incidents where material that was kept out of the public realm through censorship but kept in restricted collections and if that was a target for theft?

Maryanne: That’s pretty interesting, I have read both sort of historical surveys and contemporary surveys of some of the most common material that was stolen, and some of it’s just really common popular literature, like the one I’m the only person who hasn’t read, J.K. Rowling. Her novels are stolen with huge frequency in libraries. So, it can be really popular literature. It could indeed be hard to get popular literature, like some of the ones you’re talking about, famous censored books like Lady Chatterley’s lover, and that sort of thing, and I’ve also read that pornography was actually stolen quite a lot from libraries, but, I didn’t personally come across a case. Having said that, a lot of the cases that I came across didn’t necessarily describe the type of literature that was stolen. So I imagine there would be quite high rates of theft. I think it would be an interesting study to try and look at what was stolen, and what libraries know about what has been stolen over time.

Chris: Thanks for a very interesting talk. I’d imagine there is a difference between thefts and profiles of thefts between open collections and thefts from special and sequestered collections, and that you’d imagine that the insiders are more frequently involved in the special collections side of thefts, and opportunistic public theft for, as you say, Harry Potter books are coming from perhaps more the general public on the open shelves. So does that suggest to you that, as you hinted at, you need to have a rethink about the sorts of security that are applied in both of those domains?

Maryanne: Yes, I think that that’s exactly right. And I did sort of hint of that, yes. There are particular standards developed for special collections etc. But some of those bigger thefts, a lot of those bigger thefts internationally, they’re really mostly where people, including outsiders, are able to talk their way into special collections. And a lot of the cutting and the slashing has been done in special collections and so on. But there’s still some libraries, depending on their scale and so on, whereby some of the rather precious material isn’t necessarily sequestered away specially, which can make it quite easy for people to get access to it. I’d nearly forgotten, but I was an archivist in a previous life, and, when I think of those archive collections, unlike library collections, a lot of them weren’t divided and sequestered between special material and more general material, and the opportunity for theft, on reflection, is really high. And there’s not necessarily special arrangements made for special collections.

Adrienne: How, since you have been investigating this, has this impacted on your practice, and how have you been influencing other people at the museum and with our collection of library books and objects and archives?

Maryanne: Adrienne, I regard everyone as potential thief. I am deeply suspicious. I think I look at certain people and think, they’re in particular a massive risk. I mean I say that partly in jest, but in fact with profiling it does show you, or it tends to show you, the types of people, particularly insiders who may in fact pose the greatest risk in terms of theft. And none of this is personal, because you can’t pick it, but you can profile it. But, I’ve also seen it said quite a lot of times, that with regard to insider theft, the actual positions involved can really vary in range, which they can. It can involve security, it can involve cleaners, and it can involve specialists, you know, curators and that sort of thing, and experts. But it must never be mistaken for only involving experts and so on. So, part of what it’s done for me is made me take very seriously indeed not just the possibility, but the probability of internal theft, and to try and make sure that we are doing everything we can within reason to try and set up cultures, practices, approaches and systems that will help prevent internal theft. And with regard to external theft, perhaps more so in my museum theft than library theft, I’ve identified particular types of material that tends to be stolen. Again, this is a historical profile, but much of the historical findings you do find echoes in present day thefts. And so, due to this profiling, we know or we have a pretty good idea of the types of material which might be particularly vulnerable to external theft, or attempts at external theft. Again, we take extra security arrangements for them to try and prevent thefts. Quite substantial Adrienne, and so that’s why I did the research in the first instance.

Speaker: You say that a lot of the material is taken for speculation to be sold, how much actually gets back into the original collection or to any other collection? Is there a return market?

Maryanne: Yes that’s pretty interesting. My first reading about this whole thing was in art theft, and I can’t remember the statistics now, but, then I did my museum theft research, and it was a higher rate, I found a higher rate of material that was actually returned to the institution, than with art theft. But, it’s definitely a minority. It’s 20-30%, but of course it is very hard to know the precise figure. And then with library theft, I’ve seen it said by contemporary library professionals, well most of it gets returned anyhow. I’m not sure that that’s the case. At a guess, and it would only be a guess, 50% if you are very lucky. Very lucky.