“Organized crime” usually refers to illegal activity as a collaborative enterprise, involving large networks of people and undertaken for profit or power. That’s too damned bad, really, because there is no better turn of phrase to lean on when discussing the wild work of the Guinness World Record holder for Most Prolific Book Thief: Ottumwa’s Stephen Blumberg.
The 23,600 volumes he accumulated between the 1970s and his arrest in March of 1990 were all stashed in his 17-room home — wall to wall, floor to ceiling, in hallways, closets and bathrooms. But the FBI didn’t walk into a scene from Hoarders, says a 2023 article from Creighton University. The stolen goods were carefully arranged, primarily geographically.
Some of the notable works that Blumberg liberated included first editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Paradise Lost, as well as a handprinted Bible from 1480. Many of his hundreds of targets weren’t even aware their items were missing, or didn’t understand the extent of his heists. His stash was estimated to be worth anywhere from $5 million to $20 million — perhaps even as high as $40 million — in 1990 dollars. (That’s $13, $48 and $97 million, adjusted for inflation.)
The Omaha college got involved with Blumberg as part of the FBI’s efforts to return the stolen manuscripts and rare books to their museums and libraries. Referred to as the Omaha Project, the information science proving ground involved four weeks, 44 cataloguers and reference librarians and 600 volunteer hours, centered around deploying the database of the Online Computer Library Center (the Ohio-based nonprofit responsible for WorldCat) to determine who might be the rightful owners. Creighton’s Reinert-Alumni Memorial Library provided nearly a quarter of the team for the project.
It’s appropriate that librarians are the heroes of this tale, because Blumberg’s contempt for them and their work was a large factor in his thievery. Forensic psychiatrist William S. Logan testified at the 1991 trial that Blumberg, who had been hospitalized multiple times in his youth for diagnoses including delusion and paranoia, was stealing the materials to thwart what he believed was a government plot to prevent the public from accessing them.
In a 1994 interview with Harper’s Magazine, Blumberg bemoaned what he felt was the arbitrary nature of library collections. “Let’s say you have a time machine and you’re living back in 1890, and these beautiful periodicals come out,” he said to journalist Philip Weiss. “Well, 1920s, the style changes, and you’ve got all these magazines and a limited amount of space. So stuff gets thrown out then, 60, 70 years later.”
Later in that article, he queried, “Who really has the right to possess knowledge?”
Blumberg was methodical in his eradication of evidence: He removed identifying stamps and other markers from the volumes by any means necessary, including razor blades, sandpaper, even licking off stickers with his tongue. Luckily for the librarian-detectives, he kept scrapbooks with many of the bookplates and catalog pockets he’d removed.
His first arrest for library theft was in 1974, but despite several others subsequent, the case against him ultimately rested on the testimony of a friend and former accomplice who turned him in for a negotiated $56,000 bounty.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2024 issue.
