The book thief: a true tale of bibliomania.

The house belonging to the greatest book thief in American history is a decaying red-brick Victorian that overlooks the Des Moines River in the southern Iowa city of Ottumwa. There are decorative tin caps over the upstairs windows and some good-looking gingerbread over the front porch, but all the woodwork is rotting. The day I visited a year ago, pigeons flew from the eaves with a frightening clap.

Jimmy Hall, a seventy-nine-year-old widower with watery blue eyes who lives in the basement, let me in, and I went up to the second floor to see the bookcases. The house was warm, heated to seventy-two degrees or so for the Iowa winter, though no one was living above the ground floor. The book thief comes from a well-to-do family; his father was probably paying the fuel bill from St. Paul.

Pine cases lined all the rooms and hallways. Well-built and sturdy, they went from the floor to the twelve-foot-high ceiling, and every one was empty. I started counting and Mr. Hall went to get a flashlight. I counted eighty-six bookcases on the second floor before I gave up. There were bookcases carpentered into the back closet, there were bookcases along the bathroom walls, there were two-foot-tall bookcases running above the doorways.

"Boy, he had this son of a bitch stacked from floor to ceiling," Mr. Hall said.

The only book left in the house was a 1984 Ottumwa High School yearbook. The book thief sometimes looked at it to identify boys' names. He was a fagin. Many of his friendships were with adolescent boys. He gave them money to help him unload his truck and sometimes to steal things. They bought beer and hung out on his porch.

In the front room, we came to the giant glass-fronted cases in which the thief kept his most prized books - rare books on Indians, the 1480 Corburger Bible, a fifteenth-century world history that was the last not to mention Columbus. On paper tabs stuck to the edge of a case, I saw his spidery, stilted handwriting. "Business Government Morals," said one shelf. "Science. Physical and Applied," said another. The handwriting gave me a slight thrill of recognition; I'd seen it in a letter he'd sent me from a federal prison in South Dakota.

I lifted an old quilt from a bed in the front room and Mr. Hall said, "Poor Steve, he lived like a dog."

"He did?"

"Oh, hell yeah." Mr. Hall shut his eyes and shook his head.

The bed wasn't actually a bed; it was a rotting leather recamier sofa from the late nineteenth century. Stephen Blumberg had surrounded himself with Victorian artifacts. The boys who had come to the house heard the wobbly sound of Victrolas playing 78s - Jelly Roll Morton, the Waldorf Astoria band. When the FBI went in four years ago this March and pulled out all the books, they also took several nineteenth-century paintings and eight Victrolas. Now everything that was left was slowly falling apart. The bedroom windows were still hung with braid-edged green velvet curtains from a century back. Their must got up my nose.

The book thief had tried to re-create a world long since past, a time when, as he later said to me, "there was still quality." Aside from such books as the ones on library security systems, his books were old, and he never sold any of them. Blumberg had a generous trust fund. He eschewed paper currency. A neighbor, Harvey "Gabby" Ware, described him for me. "One time he came here and - he was always filthy, my wife used to wash his chair with Lysol after he left - he said, |Mrs. Ware, have you ever held $35,000 worth of gold in your hands?' And he reaches down into his crotch and comes out with a leather bag on a thong and poured it in her hands. Ted the carpenter wag here. He said, |Well, he doesn't have to worry about me going in after that.'"

Jimmy Hall and I went back down to his basement apartment, and he moved a box filled with dirt-encrusted potatoes so that I could sit down. Taped to the wall was a newspaper clipping from the trial in Des Moines two years before, and for the first time I saw a picture of the thief, a small man with a large forehead and watchful eyes, nondescript, the sort of person who disappears walking down the street.

Blumberg had stolen books from 327 libraries and museums in the United States and Canada, and after he was convicted many of the libraries had obtained transcripts of the trial. I'd read through them. The defendant never testified. His lawyers had mounted an insanity defense and feared that he would seem too normal if he took the stand. Still, there were glimpses in those pages of who he was.

He was then forty-one (he's forty-five now) and according to testimony had driven around the country in nomadic manner for twenty years, usually in an old Cadillac or a truck. He'd never married and his friendships were expedient, fragmentary, but he had found a kind of peace in libraries or among his books, sitting for hours, fixating on people out of the past. He was inordinately quiet. He had an acrobatic sinewyness; an associate called him Spiderman. Now and then he put on a sports jacket: to get into Harvard's libraries, where he stole some 670 books, or Claremont Colleges, where he stole approximately 780, he had masqueraded as a professor, though he had graduated only from high school. Several times he had been caught for trespassing - entering empty homes to steal cash or stained glass, things he would sell. That was what had hung him. "He had regular bouts with reality," the prosecutor, Linda R, Reade, had told the jury, as she chipped away at his insanity defense.

His book collection, which even Reade was forced to call the Blumberg collection, demonstrated intense interest in early Americana, Indian culture, the pioneers, city planning, the railroads. The defense said Blumberg was trying to save a forgotten world from a system (the libraries) that neglected it. Sometimes he penciled comments into the books' margins, praise for Indians, vituperations against authority: "Genuflect," "Eat it pig."

Librarians had made a point of preserving Blumberg's comments after they got the books back from the FBI. They'd even cited Blumberg in the books' bibliographic entries.

After Blumberg's appeals were exhausted in June 1992, I tried to get in touch with him. He was serving seventy-one months in a minimum-security federal prison in Minnesota. Prisoners called him Book Man. On the phone, a man named Bagwell, a paralegal working for the prison, warned me that Blumberg rejected interview requests, but I sent him a letter asking for a meeting.

Mostly what drew me was the creativity of Blumberg's crimes and the majestically crazy world he'd made for himself, like a drawing the draftsman gets lost inside, something with a continuous internal logic that has very little connection with reality. And then there were the books as things, nineteen tons of them he could not part with. His case seemed to throw a shadowy light on other bookish people, on a form of materialism that usually has social approval, even distinction. I liked books, and not just to read. I liked seeing them on my shelves, even smelling them. I had heard Susan Sontag saying something along these lines on public radio once, that she had 15,000 books in her apartment, and when a fire had forced her from her building the books are what she'd worried about, even though she was never going to read most of them again.

Weeks went by without a word from Blumberg, and I sent another letter. A couple of days later a seven-page letter arrived from him. It had crossed my latest in the mail and had a return address in South Dakota.

"As is customary with the Govt. Mr Bagwell lied to you," the penciled message began.

Blumberg said he'd been transferred to Yankton Federal Prison Camp, a minimum-security prison. He was vague about my prospects. "As far as more notoriety I have mixed views but really feel I don't have anything to hide. . . . As you know the millions they took from me was not a for-profit venture. . . . In that way I am different than the S+L prisidents I currently reside with."

I submitted a request for an interview. The prison sent back a form showing Blumberg had turned me down, "pending further clarification of content of interview," someone had scratched in. We corresponded more. The Book Man's spelling was original. How could he have read so much and write "victoms," "innosent," or, for area, "aria"?

Then one night in October 1992 I got a collect call and heard a nasal midwestern accent on the line. Stephen Blumberg's manner was genteel and Seventies-hippieish. "I'm trying to see what questions you have, where your head is at," he said. His flat monotone came out of his throat like a gear turning.

We talked aimlessly, then he said, "I had a fair number of clippings on bibliokleptomania. That's not a subject you're going to find much on."

"Is that a fair description of you?"

"Well . . . somewhat . . ." His voice trailed off. "It's kind of hard to resist."

I sent another letter. Blumberg wrote back and, using one of my favorite midwesternisms, said, "I'll visit with you." But he had a condition: "Go to Ottumwa before me." I was to visit his "mansion" and look up some people. "Also see if there are any cars in my parking lot due E of my kitchen. I own a 1960 Black Cadillac limo + a blue + white 55 Olds 4 dr."

There were no cars in the parking lot. I went on to the Lutheran church next door. "Well heres Mr. Anderson [Ralph Andersen]," Blumberg had written, "a paid employee of God . . ." The letter made Andersen out to be uncharitable.

The pastor's wife opened the door. She was making pies. In her kitchen, an empty bottle of dark corn syrup was upended on the mouth of an identical bottle so that she could get every last drop. The pastor came from another part of the house. He had a square jaw and thinning blond hair. We sat down in the front room.

He said he hadn't had much to do with Blumberg. "I would say hello, sort of, across the fence, though there's no fence there." The city had towed the cars last summer. They were falling apart. Andersen had seen high school kids kick out the windows.

Following the letter's instructions, I walked three blocks to the Ottumwa Public Library, a stately domed building" to look for Jerry Geib, the librarian.

It was Saturday, but luckily for me Geib had come in to go over records. A part-time farmer, he wore a felt hat whose brim and peak were broken. He had hooded blue eyes, a torn right ear, and a dryly comic manner. Geib said that the $50,000 to $80,000 a year Blumberg received - from his trust fund and a partnership set up by his father - was double what people were used to making around there.

"He's imbued with his importance - overly. I don't know quite how - to phrase this. He thinks he's done something of great merit here."

What did that mean? Geib wordlessly pushed a file across the desk. Blumberg had been sending him letters and Christmas cards, trying to get under his skin. In one of them, the prisoner proposed the formation of a committee to raise money to put up a bronze statue in Ottumwa Park, right outside the libary. The figure would be Stephen Blumberg wearing a coat that had been mentioned during his trial, one with oversized pockets sewn,inside for slipping books into.

"I'd have my arm outstretched and the inscription will read |Seek and ye shall find knowledge.'"

It was dark when I got outside and headed for the north side of town. "Now asend the hill and you'll find on the right a delapitated grey 2-story house with a piece of plastic pushed into the front door paine. The garage doors will he wide open with an inoperable car inside . . . "

A tall young Indian man opened the door. Carl Thrasher's hair fell past his shoulders, and his T-shirt, too short by several inches, showed his long flat stomach.

He let me in. He sat on the floor and kept at his work, making traditional jewelry. On the floor were several bear claws, and as we talked he rubbed stone disks in mineral colors against a sort of emery board, shaping them.

After I said my piece, Thrasher got a foul expression.

"I want nothing to do with him," he said. "He sent me this many letters and I wrote |Return to sender' on them. He's a genius - he could steal Fort Knox, just about. But he's where he belongs."

A sign outside of Meckling, South Dakota, calls the area the hay capital of the world, and going into Yankton, two towns farther west, you see field after field of hay stacked in high, institutional-seeming walls. Then there are the stockyards and the road begins to curve, paralleling the Missouri River a few blocks south. It's a pretty old town, though bleak in December, when I visited.

In 1988 the federal government bought the abandoned Yankton College campus for use as a prison camp. The campus dates to the 1880s; some of its brick buildings are landmarked. It's in a residential neighborhood, and though prisoners cross city sidewalks to go to chow hall, they're forbidden to have contact with the townspeople. The townspeople seem to like it that way. They avert their eyes, walking past the five-foot, jumpable iron fence.

I'd set up two days of interviews. I got to the prison before nine o'clock and checked in at the Lloyd building, a low modern structure. A woman seated in a motorized wheelchair counted my tapes to make sure I didn't leave any with the prisoner. Past her was a long cinder-block visiting room containing wooden chairs with large vinyl cushions.

A guard brought Blumberg in.,he was small, about five seven, and his posture was droopy, like a truant's. He had on a green Army surplus coat over his khakis. The guard patted him down, then Blumberg stepped around the metal detector because his black steel-capped boots would set it off.

We sat down in the east end of the room. He had a calm staring expression, and his arms looked pale, effete - bookish. His eyes were round like a child's but also had crows-feet.

I started in by talking about all the bookcases, and he warned to the subject.

"Did you notice on the alley side, I put plywood on the inside of the windows and painted it black?" he said.

"No."

"I didn't want the place to look unsightly. I pulled the shades partway down." Of course, the windows were unusable - they were covered over by bookcases.

He sat perfectly still. Sometimes he crossed his legs, but he left his hands in his lap and looked at me. He had a salt-and-pepper mustache with white wires of hair coming from it. His graying hair looked to have the consistency of straw. A webbed military belt with a steel clamp buckle was squinched tight around his narrow waist. I don't think I've met someone so dry before. His eyes didn't glint, his wide mouth was dry.

I'd heard Blumberg could talk for hours about books in.an academic way, and before long he got going. He talked about Henry Raup Wagner, whose works he had stolen from Claremont Colleges..

"He was a splendid individual. He wrote the cartography of the Spanish Southwest, which is one of the foremost bibliographies of books published on.old Mexico. He was a mining engineer, I believe, like Herbert Hoover, but he became engrossed in writing bibliographies. He was at Berkeley for a while, taught there, moved down to San Marino, the Huntington Library. He was a little younger than Henry Huntington. If you want to read a good biography of him, read Ruth Frye Axe. She was his secretary. Read her biography."

I moved the conversation to libraries. Blumberg grew a little impatient; he had to explain their function to me. They were time machines, he said, and they were often arbitrary.

"What libraries are . . . they're in the information business," he said. "Let's say you have a time machine and you're living back in 1890, and these beautiful periodicals come out. Well, 1920s the style changes, and you've got all these magazines and a limited amount of space. So stuff gets thrown out then, sixty, seventy years later."

I'd come across the hatred of libraries before in reading about bibliomaniacs (in the library, of course). Libraries couldn't be counted on. A library had "supplied the hot baths of Alexandria with fuel for six months," the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin had written in Bibliomania, or Book-Madness (1809).

Blumberg explained how his own library was organized. The front room was California and the back of the house was New England. You walked through Minnesota, Illinois, and so on. The bathroom was a sorting area ("and, Of course, it's always nice to have something to grab to read on the crapper") and the head of the stairs was Ohio. In the closet there were books printed and collected by Robert Clarke, the nineteenth-century historian and publisher.

It would have been, if he'd come up there and been looking at the books himself, he would have had his books in that area, you see -"

"But Robert Clarke is dead, isn't he?"

"Right . . ." Blumberg nodded his head. "But isn't it nice we can talk about him? Most of the librarians wouldn't even know who he was or what significance he had. We haven't forgot about him."

He got up to go to the bathroom, and I wondered how anything could come out of him, he was such a dry little stick. I remembered a passage from the trial transcript, when an elderly antiques dealer was asked to describe Blumberg at twelve.

"A skinny little guy, dirty," she said. "When I say dirty, like dry old soot. I can remember his eyes. His eyes were very prominent. A gentleman, a very gentle young boy. . . . Can you imagine a twelve-year-old boy being interested in the design of hardware on a door, door hinges, window openings? . . . At that point he could see the beauty. I think it was just pure instinct."

The boy came from a well-off family. He had grown up in a St. Paul suburb, and his father had made a point of living modestly. The trial transcript said that Blumberg's great-grandfather Moses Zimmerman, a German-Jewish immigrant, had made his fortune by provisioning the Allies during World War I, selling horses and horse collars. He was a collector too, of a kind: he'd collected tracts of real estate as far away as Montana that had proved lucrative to his descendants. Blumberg's father had gradually left his work as a doctor to go into the family real estate business.

When Blumberg came back from the bathroom he said, "Did you see Geib?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"He holds your crimes against you."

"That's all right. That's his problem. He doesn't want to send me a Christmas card, does he?" He gave a dry mischievous laugh.

"He said you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth."

Blumberg got a cross look. "If I was I would have had to eat cod-liver oil with it," he said. "Yeah, you can use the spoon, but you got to eat cod-liver oil with it, so what good is it."

It was lunchtime. Out the window, prisoners in khakis and dull green coats were walking to lunch. I went to the vending machines, which had a sign saying only visitors were to handle money. I got the prisoner a ham sandwich and a can of seltzer, and he started in on the sandwich, a bite every three minutes.

We began talking about stealing books. Blumberg didn't use the word "stealing." He said he was building a collection - American history, with the "high spots" of literature thrown in, too. Another time he said, "I'm in for having books that had been borrowed from the library, overdue library books."

On the phone he'd said that he wouldn't tell me how he'd "compromised systems," but soon that prohibition dissolved. He seemed proud. His methods had been the cat burglar's. He was five seven, 125 pounds (prison had fattened him' to 145), and anything he could grab with his hands he could pull himself up on, anything he could get his shoulders through he could get the rest of his body through. He would avoid alarm systems, or set them off a couple of times and observe the security response. He'd squirmed through ventilation ducts and the eight-inch gap between the top of a caged enclosure and the ceiling. At some libraries he had shinnied up the cable of the book dumbwaiter to get from open areas to restricted ones. "I'm pretty sharp about that," he said.

One time he removed a panel on a service-elevator shaft to get into the shaft and had begun climbing when the elevator started up. He had had to press himself into an inspection bay in the wall to avoid being crushed.

The prisoner's language was a mixture of genteel discussions about this or that book studded with lines that might have come from a 1940s gangster movie. "I seen it was an easy shot, so I worked it for a week. . . . I was up to my stuff. . . . They rekeyed it, so I knew that place had gone sour.

Once he was inside a library, Blumberg's m.o. was to get keys so that he could have the run of the place. He knew locks inside out; he had been taking them apart since he was a boy. At Harvard, using a false faculty I.D., he paid for a ninety-day stack pass, then went in one day with a pair of horseshoe-nail-pullers inside his massive overcoat. Blumberg used the tool to remove a lock cylinder, replaced the cylinder with a blank he'd brought with him, then took the boosted cylinder around to locksmiths.

"It was a Russell and Irwin lock. This key series was restricted in Boston, and I had to go all the way to Montreal before I could get it. I'd tell them I had an apartment building and I wanted to master it. I talked about rentals and problems." When he finally found the master, he went back to Harvard and replaced his blank. "After that I went wherever the staff went in - the key worked in all the offices and everything."

The marble-floored stacks of Widener Library had enraptured many people before Blumberg. It has been said that Thomas Wolfe, for instance, once set out to read every book in it but gave up after a shelf. The book thief idled on Level 4 - "I used to sit in the Roosevelt Alcove. It was kind of a little plusher than the rest. I'd sit there and look out the window on Mass Ave." - but developed the strongest feeling for a collection on D, the lowest level, that struck him as unjustly neglected, the Daniel Fearing collection. Fearing was the mayor of Newport Rhode island, in the 1890s; he collected books on trout fishing that he bound in green morocco covers and green marble endpapers.

"I got interested in Fearing as a person," Blumberg told me. "I don't suppose Harvard even cared about Fearing. Widener is like a huge warehouse full of books. They were sort of just down in the basement in the corner and nobody even used them. The paper was acidifying."

Blumberg's talk was salted with bitterness, but there was never any profanity, and there were glints of refinement.

"He wasn't anything for culture, he said of one former associate.

And now and then when Blumberg's eyes found me, they seemed both dull and frightened.

"Your magazine, why are they so interested in all this?" he said. "It's not like I had much impact on society or other people."

He was fishing. I said, "Because it was unusual."

"But more as a freak or a moralist - what's their interest?"

"Well, not as a moralist."

He hummed to himself. "Yeah, pointed commentary cheapens a magazine."

Librarians supplied the moral outrage. Blumberg's acts devastated librarians, and their feelings helped to ensure his conviction.

Librarians are slightly monastic, charged with duties the outside world doesn't fully understand. In fact, their duties conflict: on the one hand, they must conserve books for future scholars; on the other, they're bound to serve today's public, people who often handle books carelessly. "We all remember our first experience of a librarian - shushing you," Fraser Cocks, the former curator of special collections at the University of Oregon, told me. This gives rise to the stereotype of librarians as humorless and repressed. "Librarians and their ideas of order can be the butt of jokes, because we admit that the issue is basic, serious," Roger Stoddard, the curator of rare books at Harvard College Library, wrote in Bulletin du Bibliophile, a French journal, in an article about the Blumberg case.

Blumberg subverted those holy orders. When in July 1987 librarians at Claremont Colleges' Honnold Library discovered that many rare books, including Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, were missing, the news hit the staff like the death of a family member. Susan M. Allen, then the assistant to the director of libraries, told me in a phone interview, "There was disbelief. A great but very quiet search of the entire premises began in the hopes that this awful discovery was not true." But, of course, it was true. The administration was alerted but, to make matters worse, did not appear to take the losses seriously. Six weeks into the disaster the head of special collections resigned. "I became department head [a month later] in an atmosphere of depression and paranoia," Allen later wrote in AB Bookman's Weekly, a journal for booksellers.

Similar grief struck the University of Oregon later in 1987, when the staff of the manuscripts room realized that twenty linear feet of papers from Oregon's territorial days - the diaries of pioneers and writings about Indians - were missing. At first, they undertook the painstaking process of "reading the shelves," going from one volume to the next to see what was still in its place. When at last they reported the theft, the librarians themselves were placed under suspicion. "They even asked if we would take a lie-detector test," says Hilary Cummings, then the curator of manuscripts.

"It destroyed these people emotionally," says a librarian familiar with the Oregon situation. Within two years the four staffers in the collection had abandoned their positions, one for retirement. Hilary Cummings left the profession entirely. She now teaches preschoolers. "I didn't want to go to work," she says. "I never felt I had regained the trust of the administration."

Stephen Blumberg told me of his West Coast pickings. "Oh, I was getting some gems," he said. At Claremont he had used a popsicle stick to open a library door - "I would always improvise tools" - then stole a key ring.

The University of Oregon required greater cunning. The rare.books rooms were secured by double doors with a lock at waist level and also a dead bolt going into the floor. Blumberg had found a dolly in the library and, wheeling it over, wedged its platform under the center of the doors. He used the dolly as a lever, putting all his weight on one side, thereby forcing the doors up high enough for the dead bolt to clear the floor. Then, still perched on the dolly, Blumberg had kicked the lock, causing the doors to spring apart. Dolly and thief clattered to the floor.

"I sat for a couple of hours reading the bibliography [the library's list of holdings] by flashlight, then I went on a little shopping trip," he said. "See, I was interested in the settlement of the West. I got a whole box of Applegate. And Isaac Stevens. Eva Emery Dye, the 1900 manuscript of McLoughlin, an Oregon Chronicle. [The actual title is McLoughlin and Old Oregon: a Chronicle.] I already had the first edition of that but they had the original manuscript. I put it in my house with the first edition."

"Did you read it?"

"I just read a couple of chapters."

The West Coast thefts had the effect of bringing into the Blumberg case its most, approachable figure, a rangy, good-looking Washington State University campus police detective named J. Stephen Huntsberry. In February 1988, librarians at WSU discovered that precious Mexican manuscripts were missing. Sergeant Huntsberry was sent over to investigate. When a librarian used the term "incunabula," Huntsberry frowned. The librarian explained that it referred to the infancy of printing, and to demonstrate handed him a book printed in 1493. It occurred to Huntsberry, as he turned its pages and smelled the mold of ages, that Columbus could have read that book.

"That's when I got hooked," he told me.

Huntsberry is a former lounge singer, Navy man, and drywall contractor. By turns he explained to me that he's a "weirdo," that he works "in the sticks," and that he doesn't like the picture people have of campus cops as "key janglers." He said he "went overboard" trying to find out who'd stolen the books. To this day people in federal law enforcement make fun of him as a small-timer. That Huntsberry is, but he also outperformed the feds. He was the only cop who treated the theft seriously without having to be pumped up with estimates of the stolen books' value.

He thought he'd broken the case when library records established a pattern of suspicious visits by a Matthew McGue and Huntsberry learned there was a University of Minnesota professor with that name. But McGue was able to convince police that there had to be an impostor. In fact, Blumberg had gotten hold of McGue's university identification in the mid-Eighties. "I found it," he told me blankly. He'd forged birth certificates with McGue's name on them and said he'd gotten five different driver's licenses.

Huntsberry helped put together a flyer that libraries on the West Coast circulated. The flyer recounted the few sightings of "McGue" reported by librarians. Some library employees said they had seen "a transient-looking individual, standing before the expensive Shakespearean" collection, an individual whose manner was somewhat eccentric and his dress somewhat shabby . . . [but he] appeared very knowledgeable about books."

Then Huntsberry got a break. At 11:40 p.m. one night in April 1988, a custodian at a library at the University of California at Riverside stopped Blumberg in a restricted area that was to have closed at 5:00. He brought Blumberg to the desk, and a librarian who had one of the flyers called the police. After they found a satchel containing dental tools, Blumberg - processed by the police as Matthew McGue - was charged with trespass and possession of burglary tools, then released on his own recognizance.

Blumberg felt lucky. While in custody, he'd been able to secretly swallow the rubber UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA stamp he'd used to falsely label books from other libraries. And. the Riverside County police had failed to discover his car, which was parked outside the library and filled with stolen books. He left Riverside and never showed up for his court appearance.

But Riverside police now had "McGue"'s fingerprints, and Huntsberry, who'd been informed of the arrest, sent them to the FBI and Minnesota state authorities. "The FBI still haven't gotten back to me," he says. But thanks to Blumberg's record of trespassing arrests over the years, Minnesota was able to make a positive identification: Stephen Carrie Blumberg. Convinced this was his man, Huntsberry passed the I.D. on to the FBI.

And there the case died. An agent in Minneapolis interviewed Blumberg's father, Henry B. Blumberg. But the doctor responded evasively to questions about his son's activities. "I wanted to be spared the responsibility of being blamed for ratting on my son," Dr. Blumberg told me. "But any idiot could have caught Stephen with a house full of books."

David Oxler, an FBI agent who later arrested Blumberg, concedes that more could have been done to unearth Blumberg's collection. "But the pieces didn't fall into place," he says. It's true that Huntsberry's case against Blumberg was largely circumstantial. Perhaps the FBI would have needed stronger evidence before proceeding with a search of Blumberg's house. But how hard would that have been to obtain?

Law enforcement's lackadaisical attitude only made the library community feel isolated. "The case was never regarded as big enough," says Fraser Cocks. "Just a bunch of librarians getting upset about some overdue books."

It was getting on to three o'clock, the end of the day, and Blumberg was still nursing the same can of blackberry seltzer I'd gotten him three hours before. Usually when you spend a couple of hours with someone you begin to feel closer. But Blumberg's face bore little expression. Sometimes he laughed, a boyish snicker mixed with an old man's chuckle.

He told me about the days after the first FBI investigation, when he got out of Minneapolis and took all his books with him, first to a warehouse in Amarillo, Texas. A boy named David Olson helped him load his truck. He spoke of their Texas days in a way that reminded me of American road movies, an anti-idyll, outside civilization.

They caught tarantulas on the side of the road and brushed them into a coffee can.

"We were driving out Boys Ranch road. I found a black widow under a board and [Olson put it in with the tarantula] to see which would fight the other one. There was a door between our two rooms and every morning I'd go in his room and take inventory; I'd say, |Now where are the spiders?'"

"Did they fight?" I asked.

"No. He'd shake them together and they'd, like, separate from ond another. The black widow would get up in the corner of the can under the lid and weave."

Then the rent at the Amarillo warehouse went up and a neighboring tenant got bitten by a brown recluse spider (not one of Olson's pets). The man's arm swelled up, and Blumberg decided to move north. With his father, who says he tried to remain ignorant about what his son was up to, he scouted locations in Iowa not far from the interstate. He bought the Victorian on North Jefferson Street in Ottumwa as temporary shelter, for $16,000, and then settled uncomfortably into the town. He set to work building his bookcases.

I asked Blumberg if he had read the books before he lost the collection. He said he had dipped into the histories, not the fiction. He was sorry he had not read his first edition of Leaves of Grass. But he remembered the portrait on the frontispiece; he liked the fact that Whitman was casual, not wearing a suit.

Blumberg hadn't had much time to read. He was too busy moving around the country, driving for hours on end in one direction because he liked the coffee they served at a certain truck stop, or suddenly remembering a library he meant to hit. "A little here, a little there," he said. "I knew in my head which libraries have what." It was not enough to have one book, either. He had to have multiple copies. He had several first editions of The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. "A couple in green cloth, another in orange or red. One, I think, was in a slipcase."

This is a classic sign of bibliomania. "Above all his anxiety [is] to have two or three different editions of the same work in his possession," a Scottish pamphlet called "Bibliomania" warned in 1867. The literature of bibliomania is largely nineteenth-century. Books mattered then more than they do today: it was a time when books were at the center of cultural expression, when they were worn apart simply by being read so many times. Today we worry about people who watch seven hours of television a day; then, bibliomania was a popular term and a subject of concern. It had an aura of madness. "He who is affected by this mania knows books only by their titles and dates, and is rather seduced by the exterior than the interior," a French scholar is quoted as saying in the Reverend Dibdin's Bibliomania. Gustave Flaubert was drawn to the subject. In 1836, when he was in his teens, he wrote a short story called "Bibliomania," about Giacomo, a mad Spaniard who would kill for a book. "It was not learning that he loved, it was its expression," Flaubert wrote. "He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title."

I asked Blumberg why he had stolen so many books.

"You know, I figured I was the mere custodian of those books. I would keep them, share them, pass them on to somebody else..." He looked up at me. "Who really has the right to possess knowledge?"

He fell back into Seventies phrasings, as he voiced his hatred of the establishment. And something else kept coming up, something he'd mentioned in his first letter to me: the mansion he'd once owned in Minneapolis's inner city. You can see it from the freeway there, on Elliot Avenue, a magnificent turreted brick building now used as a day-care center. Blumberg had coveted the place. Built in 1888 by a leading flour miller, it was a relic of the era of quality. He'd bought it in 1976 for $76,000, $30,000 of which he delivered in a brown paper bag. Then he'd rented out parts of it. The tenants and building inspectors were all endless source of grief. Testimony at the trial indicated that Blumberg's father had colluded with a tenant and

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Title Annotation:	Stephen Blumberg case
Author:	Weiss, Philip
Publication:	Harper's Magazine
Article Type:	Cover Story
Date:	Jan 1, 1994
Words:	6399
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Topics:	Bibliomania Case studies Book thefts Cases Libraries Crimes against