For 17 years, I worked at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. For four of those years, I worked in "Collections Improvement," a department whose job was to make the first full inventory of the General Collections' 20 million items acquired in the 200-year history of the nation's greatest cultural repository. The General Collections occupies 250 miles of shelf space in two different buildings on Capitol Hill. There was a lot of ground to cover and a lot of room where no-goodniks could hide.
During my tenure, I became aware of a systematic assault on the collection by users of the library. In fact, a ring of thieves had been razoring out prints with locust-like precision, taking advantage of the open stacks and the trust the library had implicitly extended to its patrons. Entire runs of pages of hand-tinted prints from old folios on botany, zoology, geology, maritime history and exploration were removed and snuck out of the library, later to be sold as "old prints" in area antiquarian venues. Old maps and art prints were removed and sold as well. Indeed, I once came upon the folio that had, prior to the thievery, contained a series of limited-edition signed prints by George Grosz, one of my favorite artists. Nothing remained but the shell of the book and a few grains of dust. Those prints are now hanging on the walls of "collectors" around the country.
Eventually, due in part to an, ahem, anonymous tip to the Washington Post — I knew a Post reporter who was a bibliophile and sent him an urgent detailed dispatch — the story broke. He did his homework, his devastating series hit the front page, the local TV stations got on it, then the national news, and America's antiquarian secrets were briefly revealed. The two men eventually caught and tried for the crimes — there were, no doubt, others, these were just the two caught — were let off with relative impunity, given the enormity of the crime: killing our culture. Both, it turned out, had been fixtures in the rarefied antiquarian circles for years. One of the thieves, in fact, was the accountant for a respected area auction house that dealt in old maps, prints and broadsides. A respected auction house, mind you, still plying its trade 20 years later.
I was reminded of all this by William Finnegan's piece in the Oct. 17 New Yorker, about E. Forbes Smiley III, who was recently arrested after having razored out old maps from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven. Smiley was one of the elite in the antiquarian trade. With his absurdly patrician name and presumed pedigree, he'd been extended freedom to roam among the finest collections of old books and maps in the country. In short, he was given courtesies and deference that any of the rest of us, though we may be pure as the driven snow, would not be given in 10 lifetimes. That's because, as one print and map dealer told Finnegan, the wealthy buyers of stolen goods "want to associate with old money. They're not comfortable spending $30,000 dealing with some anonymous person. They want you to be someone."
Smiley, like another fake Andover/Yale preppie with whom we've become all too familiar in the past five years, was indeed someone. Like the "someones" caught erasing our nation's cultural heritage at the Library of Congress, Smiley was thought to be an honorable person simply because he "came from money." But Smiley is also a common thief, a liar, a fraud. He is, in short, a scumbag, as low and common as a crack dealer.
Smiley's case comes on the wings of a major international art scandal involving an antiquities curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Marion True, it turns out, had been knowingly buying artifacts that had been illegally acquired and smuggled from their place of origin — in a word, "looted." She faces a trial in Rome Nov. 16 on, said the New York Times, "criminal charges of conspiring with two art dealers to acquire millions of dollars' worth of looted antiquities."
While the Getty is playing dumb about True's actions, this has been going on for years. True, in fact, was a witness for the prosecution in a 1989 case against Peg Longstreth (nee Goldberg), an Indiana dealer sued by the Republic of Cyprus over some early Christian mosaics she'd acquired that the Getty had coveted. Though ultimately exonerated, Longstreth's life was nearly destroyed.
Why? J. Paul Getty is considered "someone."
