Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It by Travis McDade

Abstract

Reviewed by: Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It by Travis McDade Thomas D. Beal Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It. By Travis McDade. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 240 pages, $19.95 Paper. For two years, I spent three days a week in the New York Public Library's Rose Main Reading Room or in the Reading Room of the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division. The Library's vast collection of rare books and manuscripts from the nineteenth century introduced me to New York City's history. In this, I am not alone; many young scholars have been inspired by the intellectual treasures kept safe in the library's closed stacks or in its manuscript vaults. Eager to learn something from their contents, I never considered the monetary value of those printed volumes or manuscript pages spread before me. In the 1930s, the library attracted a very different type of patron: the book thief. Today's libraries have observation cameras and electronic sensors to protect their collections, but these are recent developments. In the past, a patron could visit a library, request a book, secret it away in a coat pocket, and stroll out the entrance. More often than not, the successful thief's journey ended at the door of a dealer in used or rare books. Part book retailer, part fence for stolen goods, these men purchased stolen books at a steep discount, removed all library markings and offered them for sale to collectors. In New York City, this was a profitable enterprise. Travis McDade's The Thieves of Book Row details the activities of one group of thieves who stole hundreds of books from the New York Public Library. McDade begins his study of the stolen book trade with a brief history of two institutions that made it possible: "book row" and the New York [End Page 103] Public Library (NYPL). In the first half of the twentieth century, book row stretched along Fourth Avenue from Astor Place to Union Square. Visitors to this part of the city found, McDade writes, "books everywhere—stacked in the windows, painted on the awnings, in the very air people breathed" (7). The sellers offered new books, used books, pornographic books and rare books. By the late 1920s, everyone knew that they could find great bargains in Fourth Avenue bookshops. When the Great Depression took hold of the city's economy after 1929, this cluster of retailers had to employ new strategies to keep their doors open and their businesses profitable. McDade's research demonstrates that many of them hired men to purloin books from the NYPL. Opened in 1911, the library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (often referred to as the Main Branch) was immediately a target for book thieves. In 1913, the director, Edwin Anderson, told the library's board the branch library simply could not protect its collection. Extra security patrols, better methods used to mark each book, and rewards to book sellers who helped apprehend book thieves had failed to keep the library's books safe; as a result, Anderson called on the state legislature to provide funds for a "special investigator." The investigator would work in and outside the library to track down thieves and reclaim stolen items. The NYPL's first investigator, Edwin White Gaillard, helped stop employees and patrons from stealing books. For instance, one Italian newspaper correspondent, Franco Frusci, had over 400 of the library's books in his private collection; Gaillard called this the "most serious case of book stealing in the history of the Library" (51). The second half of McDade's study is a carefully researched and engagingly written examination of the notorious book thief Samuel Raynor Dupree. Driven from North Carolina by poverty in 1930, Dupree landed in New York City and soon fell in with a small gang of book thieves. Outfitted in a shabby overcoat, with several pockets sewn into its lining, he stole hundreds of books from libraries and book stores across the city. After the group developed a working relationship...