The Silver Lining: Coping with Theft, Vandalism, Deterioration, and Bad Press
Learning from Experience: Library Theft
Jean W. Ashton
Director, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

In the summer of 1994, the staff of Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library discovered that 23 medieval manuscripts and early Arabic texts had disappeared from the secured vault. In the following months, it became clear that many more items were missing from the stacks than had originally appeared to be the case, representing a loss to the library of $1.3 million worth of codices, early printed books, presidential letters, medieval documents, business papers, and maps. Thanks to the hard work of law enforcement agencies and the cooperation of the antiquarian book community, the thief was apprehended in Utrecht in 1994; approximately three-quarters of the stolen items were eventually retrieved.

As might be expected, news of the theft had a dramatic impact on the staff, on the library, on the university, and on the world of rare books at large. External and internal consequences were painful to live through -- and, indeed, the complex story of the event is still not complete. Ultimately, however, by deciding to cooperate fully with the authorities and take a public stand against the failure of courts to view the theft of cultural materials as a serious issue, the library was able to wrest a positive outcome from this negative experience. More than a year after the thief, Daniel Spiegelman, entered into a plea agreement that would have essentially allowed him to go free on the basis of the time he had served in Dutch jails fighting extradition, United States District judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued a landmark opinion, basing his decision to exceed the federal sentencing guidelines by five levels on the potential harm inflicted on society as a whole by the theft of "rare and unique elements of our cultural heritage."