Thursday, October 14, 2004
There But for the Grace of God
Chapter 13, pp. 465-519, of Nicholas A. Basbane's A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), is entitled The Blumberg Collection. Blumberg is biblioklept Stephen Carrie Blumberg, a fellow St. Paul resident, about my age, who served four and a half years in prison in the 1990s for stealing about 20 million dollars' worth of books from academic libraries. His psychiatric evaluation revealed "overconcern with things of the past," as well as "inability to deal with what is going on in the present" (p. 497), both traits that I share in spades.
Newer› ‹Older
