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.
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,
In a distinctive Dutch accent, Hesselink described how several years earlier, a man had called him and asked if he would be interested in some very rare items, including a Book of Hours and letters from several American presidents. Hesselink was interested, but as soon as he saw the books, he became suspicious. He lives in the countryside outside Amsterdam, “in the middle of nowhere,” yet here was a man from New York who had traveled that great distance to sell him books that could have been sold easily in the United States.
“This was already fishy,” said Hesselink, who said he became more cautious than usual.
He looked at all the materials and made an offer, which the man immediately accepted. This, too, was strange, he said. In order to stall, Hesselink told the man that because the banks had already closed, he could write a check, knowing that the man would prefer cash, and then suggested they meet the next day, when Hesselink would be able to offer it. Immediately after the man left, Hesselink contacted colleagues in the United States to see if they knew of any stolen books that resembled what he had just been offered. It took only hours to discover that all of the materials had been stolen from Columbia University. Hesselink contacted Interpol, the FBI, and local Dutch authorities, and they set up a sting for four o’clock the next day in the town’s public square.
The story seemed straight out of a mystery novel, and my favorite detail was yet to come: That night, Hesselink and his son cut stacks of newspaper into rectangles the size of gilder notes and put bundles of them—the “payment”—into a plastic garbage bag. At four the next day, the man arrived in Utrecht’s central square with his bag of loot. Police, in bullet-proof vests, had surrounded the area. Hesselink suggested that the man accompany him to Hesselink’s car, where the payment was. After a number of Keystone Kops-style blunders by local police, they managed to arrest him. Prosecuting him would turn out to be even more problematic.17
I asked Hesselink if he was frightened while handing over the bag of “money,” since the man could have been armed and the police might not have acted fast enough, but he said he was calm. I was impressed. This was not, after all, a seasoned detective, but a rare book dealer playing James Bond for a day. I left the hallway where we’d talked and headed back into the fair, with yet another story to add to the growing collection in my notebook. The excitement I felt hearing them, acquiring them, was akin, I guessed, to the excitement the most satisfied of collectors were feeling at the fair.
If there had been any thefts that opening day, I figured that the fair manager would have got wind of them, so I stopped by his office to find out. He assured me not only that were there no thefts that day but also that they were uncommon at fairs. I wasn’t sure I should believe him. One of the things Ken Sanders had already told me is that part of the challenge in addressing the problem of rare book theft is the reluctance of many people to publicize it. It is irrelevant how cunningly the books may have been stolen; the assumption among the trade, and perhaps even more so among rare book librarians (whose books may have been donated), is that the victim wasn’t vigilant enough. Book dealers, who have been known to conduct millions of dollars’ worth of business through handshakes, sometimes feel that announcing losses would put them at risk of being blacklisted. “Once you’re tainted by theft,” McKittrick had explained to me, “you’re toast.” Because they are often entrusted with valuable, beloved books that collectors have hired them to sell, they don’t want to risk being seen as vulnerable.
I had brought a slim notebook to the fair and already wished I’d brought a thicker one. Every dealer had a different story to tell. The only thing I heard more than once was, “Every rare book is a stolen book.” The Nazis were rampant pillagers of collections, dealers explained, as were the Romans, who stole whole libraries from the Greeks, and Queen Christina of Sweden, who collected a vast booty during the Thirty Years’ War.18 But they were referring also to thieves who act on their own behalf. Whether by the hands of conquerors or corrupt collectors, valuable books go missing, and unless a thief tries to sell a book to a reputable dealer or institution shortly after swiping it, they told me, there’s a good chance that no one will be able to track it down. Eventually, perhaps a year later, a decade later, a century later, the book is sold to someone who has no knowledge of its past, no idea of its tainted provenance. It is impossible to track the history of ownership of every book. This, I assumed, is something any clever book thief has figured out.
I turned a corner and spotted Ken Sanders’s booth. I was eager to see the face of the impressive storyteller.
