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		McDade, Travis,

	Subjects
		Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 -- Manuscripts.
		Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 -- Library resources.
		New York Public Library -- History -- 20th century.
		Organized crime -- Northeastern States -- History -- 20th century.
		Book thefts -- New York (State) -- New York.
		Rare books -- New York (State) -- New York.
		Rare books -- History -- 20th century.
		Art thefts -- New York (State) -- New York.

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		McDade, Travis,

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		McDade, Travis,
		Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 -- Manuscripts.
		Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 -- Library resources.
		New York Public Library -- History -- 20th century.
		Organized crime -- Northeastern States -- History -- 20th century.
		Book thefts -- New York (State) -- New York.
		Rare books -- New York (State) -- New York.
		Rare books -- History -- 20th century.
		Art thefts -- New York (State) -- New York.


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Thieves of book row : New York's most notorious rare book ring and the man who stopped It / Travis McDade.

by McDade, Travis,

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Oxford University Press, 2013.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 -- Manuscripts.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 -- Library resources.

New York Public Library -- History -- 20th century.

Organized crime -- Northeastern States -- History -- 20th century.

Book thefts -- New York (State) -- New York.

Rare books -- New York (State) -- New York.

Rare books -- History -- 20th century.

Art thefts -- New York (State) -- New York.

9780190239718 (pbk.)

xi, 216 pages : illustrations, portraits, facsimile ; 21 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s a ring of thieves, taking orders from a group of second-hand book dealers in lower Manhattan, stole from every public library within a five-state radius. That meant hundreds of institutions and hundreds of thousands of books. The thieves were so unafraid of arrest, or even the slightest resistance to their looting, that they carried out these thefts with little attempt to hide them. Very few people seemed to care at all. Travis McDade tells the story of the 1931 theft (and later recovery) of Edgar Allan Poe's 'Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and minor poems' from the New York Public Library. The book brings readers into a vivid world in which Manhattan booksellers assumed such a theft would be an insignificant event. In fact, the ultimate downfall of this large criminal enterprise was the thieves' underestimation of the libraries. Since most institutions offered no resistance to the wholesale thefts, it was assumed that all libraries were comfortable being victims. But the New York Public Library proved otherwise. The NYPL had a long history of theft detection and prevention, a history precipitated by an early rash of thefts. So by January 1931, when a young book thief ran out of the front door of the NYPL onto Fifth Avenue, having just stolen three books - 'Moby Dick', 'The scarlet letter', and the extremely rare 'Al Aaraaf' - from the fantastic rare book collection, the library was well equipped to react. From theft to conviction, McDade follows the story of NYPL special investigator William Bergquist, Book Row theft ring organizer Harry Gold, and Gold's on-the-ground thief Harold Borden Clarke, while providing rich context regarding the rare book world in early twentieth-century America. Travis McDade is the author of The Book Thief: The True Crimes of Daniel Spiegelman and the curator of rare books at the University of Illinois College of Law.

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