FBI Finds 10,000 Rare Books

At least some of more than 10,000 allegedly stolen books and manuscripts recovered from the home of an Iowa antique dealer appear to be from Harvard collections, law enforcement officials said yesterday.

The antique collector, Stephen C. Blumberg, 41, was arrested in Ottumwa, Iowa early Tuesday morning and charged with interstate transportation of stolen goods, a Federal Bureau of Investigation spokesperson said.

"FBI agents have recovered an estimated $10 million to $20 million in rare books and manuscripts, allegedly stolen from university libraries and rare book collectors," said Larry Holmquist, spokesperson for the Omaha, Neb. office of the FBI.

Holmquist said FBI agents found a chest full of labels and seals which had apparently been removed from the books.

"Checks of those cards revealed various universities, one of which was Harvard," Holmquist said. He said he could not estimate the number of books that came from Harvard.

According to Holmquist, the FBI has been overwhelmed by the size of the apparently ill-gotten collection. "It has taken until today to get those items into moving vans and out of the residence," he said.

The books have been moved to a warehouse where clerks will try to determine their rightful owners, Holmquist said, adding that the process could take up to a year to complete.

Harvard librarians said yesterday that they had received no official word about any missing Harvard books which turned up in Iowa.

Associate Librarian of Harvard College for Public Services Lawrence Dowler said that he expected it would be some time before any of the newly-recovered books are returned to Harvard.

"The problem is trying to identify ones that belong to you as opposed to someone else," Dowler said.

Dowler said the University moves most rare and expensive books from Widener Library to Houghton Library. Tighter security precautions at Houghton mean that there is less risk of theft, he said. Unlike most other libraries, Houghton rules do not allow public access to the stacks and require that books stay in the reading room.

According to Dowler, there are no statistics on how many books are stolen from Harvard libraries each year. To get such figures, the library would have to do an expensive survey of books on the shelf and compare it to circulation records, he said.

"We don't think [theft] is huge in terms of numbers," Dowler said. "What we have is anecdotes about particular items. For example, we know we lost some items on the occult."

For his part, Dowler said that he occasionally receives long lost books from different parts of the world.

"We recently got two or three cartons of books from Canada, over 100 books they had proably borrowed 20 years ago. They must have felt guilty or something," Dowler said.

Ottuwa, Iowa, which has a population of about 27,000 and is home to a meat'packing plant and several factories, has long been fabled as the hometown of MASH's Walter "Radar" O'Reilly.