The Most Dangerous Book Thief Is a Librarian
It never looks like a crime.
He that would steal a book would steal a kingdom.
-William Camden
Dante organized Hell into nine circles, each calibrated to the specific gravity of the sin. It’s an elegant system, a convenient framework for casting stones at others. Yet for all the centuries spent refining it, theologians have never quite agreed on the finer placements—who belongs where, and how far down they fall.
It leaves something out.
Somewhere in the upper registers, well below the book burners and banners, just above the defacers, sits another category entirely: the biblioklept.
The book thief.
Guilty, to be sure. But a creature whose crime has a particular flavor, a wrong sometimes committed in the name of something that looks, from the right angle, exactly like love.
The ISBN Mercenary
Scan. Reject. Scan. Reject. Scan. Pocket. This is the rhythm of the ISBN mercenary. A middleman of the mundane, a man who wouldn’t know a first edition from a book club reprint if the algorithm didn’t tell him.
He is a common thief. A book thief only in the sense that today the object happens to be a book. Tomorrow it might be a backpack, a power tool, a stack of printer cartridges. The objects change. The intent does not.
Books are his prey because they are inventory. He is a book thief by convenience, by efficiency, by happenstance. If bicycles scanned better than paperbacks, he would be a bicycle thief. If copper wire could ship via Media Mail, he would be in the electrical aisle.
He doesn’t love the book. He loves the listing.
The book thief who wants money is not, in the end, a very interesting problem. He wants something. He takes it. The transaction is legible, the motive uncomplicated, pedestrian. It’s retail background noise, something between a nuisance and an accounting entry. A small thorn in loss prevention’s side, solved with duplicates on the shelf, a quick reorder from the publisher, and an insurance claim.
More interesting is the thief touched by what Nicholas Basbanes calls the “gentle madness,” the pathological librarian, not stealing but curating, gathering the books that deserve gathering, in whose presence the security system becomes essentially decorative.
Don't Call It Stealing
Stephen Blumberg had a language problem—or rather, a language solution.
Theft is a clean word. Transactional, directional, unambiguous. You had it. Now I have it. But Blumberg never used it, even internally. That was where his vocabulary shifted. Books were relocated. Rescued. Placed into proper custody.
All 23,600 of them.
The specifics were never revealed, but geography and distance point to Alaska and Hawaii. Common sense suggests one or both of the Dakotas. Throw in one of the lesser populated states like Wyoming or Montana and we can safely infer the five states the FBI says Blumberg didn’t steal books from over his 20-year campaign.
In total, 268 libraries lost volumes to Blumberg, all of which were taken to a drafty, nondescript farmhouse in rural Iowa where they were meticulously sorted, cataloged, and shelved with the care of the institutions he did not believe in.
Upstairs, nine rooms were fitted with plain pine shelves, rising eleven tiers high, filling up the thirteen-foot ceilings. It was a house divided into subjects and territories: a California room, an architecture room, a sorting room, a place for periodicals and photographic portfolios, and even a repair room.
His books weren’t prisoners. They were visitors on interlibrary loan. His words.
Blumberg built his own catalog system and committed it to memory. Everything had its place. Incunabula by year. Americana by region. Smaller collections nested within larger ones. “I could put my hands on anything I wanted, instantly,” he said.
When the FBI finally descended on the Iowa house, they found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Agents steeled by gunfire, narcotics raids, and forced entry were confronted with something far more disorienting: a quiet, orderly, museum-quality reading room.
They sent for Glen Dawson, a rare book dealer and appraiser, to assess the scope of the crime. His conclusion was simple: an “excellent collection of Americana.”
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Please Mind the Gap
Stealing a book rarely looks like theft. There’s no violence. No broken glass. No sprinting footsteps or shouted alarms. It is a quiet crime, committed at arm’s length, often by someone who appears to belong in the stacks.
The world does not end, the shelf merely develops a gap. A rearrangement of ownership so subtle it barely registers. The book hasn’t been destroyed, or even damaged. It’s simply been relocated. The shelf doesn’t notice. Neither did the libraries.
When the FBI began making inquiries, “Every institution we called, without exception,” one agent noted, “either had no idea what they lost, or didn’t understand the extent of their losses.”
Books keep secrets. People don’t.
Blumberg was eventually turned in by Kenneth Rhodes, a sometime accomplice with open access to the collection, who scratched out a living selling stolen doorknobs, antiques, and light fixtures. Not a bibliophile.
They're Never Yours
Institutions own books the way a landlord owns an apartment complex: by deed, by debt, and by distance. They catalog them, house them, restrict access to them, occasionally lose them to budget cuts or water damage or simple bureaucratic indifference.
When Paullus’s legions returned from the slaughter at Pydna, they brought the usual spoils—gold, slaves, the wreckage of a defeated kingdom—but they also brought the Library of Perseus. The general was convinced the scrolls were worth preservation, not plunder. Sulla did the same after sacking Athens. Lucullus after breaking Mithridates.
The biblioklept is a Roman.
Blumberg’s impulse was the same, only more intimate. A collection acquired slowly and deliberately, not wholesale. He knew his books: their conditions, their provenance, their peculiarities. He knew each by name. But intimacy is not a defense. I looked it up.
He was arrested, charged, and sentenced like any other thief. The law recognizes possession, not obsession.
The books returned to their proper shelves, legally accounted for, correctly catalogued, and filed back into the Dewey Decimal System.
The gap closed. Nobody noticed that either.
If this was worth your time, the next one will be.
Dig Deeper:
A Gentle Madness — Oak Knoll Press
Notes on Bibliokleptomania — Internet Archive
J. Stephen Huntsberry on the Blumberg theft. — YouTube
The Bibliophile: Everything you love about books — except the reviews.
