I had a chapter in my memoir called "Crooks and Cranks," which dealt with some of my experiences with theft and thieves and other fraud and chicanery in bookselling, things all small businessmen experience and must devise defenses against.

In fact, I could have filled a book, not a chapter, with my experiences with thieves, including the young man I caught red-handed in our cash drawer, who threatened to throw me down the stairs if! didn't get out of his way. While I froze in a typical liberal stance, wondering how to respond, he ran around me and out the door. In the meantime, my assistant had called 911 yelling we were being robbed. Five minutes later two cops charged in the door, their guns drawn in response to the word
"robbery." The thief being gone, they pointed them at me, the obvious suspect. My assistant had to rescue me. And then there was the lecture I got from police about interfering with the thief who threatened me with a knife after I caught him stealing a coat from a neighbour's rack. The easy ones were the thieves who attempted to sell me books stolen from fellow booksellers, which, for a period on Queen Street, would occur several times a day. In all, an incessant variety of criminal occurrences.

No matter our experience and the sophisticated tricks we use to ascertain facts before buying books, however, we still get outwitted by the smart ones. An experienced bookseller will have an arsenal of tricks in their repertoire, similar to those of the seasoned police interrogator, for a thief with some knowledge of books and book collecting is the hardest to recognize. Unfortunately, it is these professional fraud artists who, even when caught, cause the most financial damage. The last big one was found to have stolen close to $100,000 worth of books from most of the used bookshops in Toronto. This is the man who, when led out from Steven Temple's store in handcuffs by two detectives, informed all the booksellers who had befriended him, spent time instructing him, extended him endless credit and their honest friendliness, "I just want you all to know I only ever stole books."

But even those types are insignificant in relation to the most sinister of all book predators: those who steal the book because they want to own it. Against them we are pretty much entirely helpless. Books get written about some of these people, the most famous in recent years being Stephen Blumberg, who was discovered to have a house full of books stolen from most of the rare-book libraries in North America. To give a succinct demonstration of both the extent of Blumberg's crimes and an indication of the mental state of such people, the police also liberated from Blumberg's house his collection of 30,000 stolen doorknobs.

We heard many amusing stories of librarians who, after boasting that Blumberg had failed to penetrate the defenses of their library, were forced to change their tune after recalling how they'd arrived at work to find doorknobs missing from their doors in their libraries. Smugness quickly disappeared into chagrin.

We booksellers already knew much about clever thieves, but our losses are personal, so our chagrin was mixed with real financial pain. Over my fifty years dealing with thieves, booksellers and librarians have developed clever worldwide systems to keep each other informed. Even the police have begun to take book theft seriously. And in spite of the irony of our trusted thief informing the booksellers he betrayed that they shouldn't think ill of him-it was only books-he inadvertently hit the nail on the proverbial head: to many people, even the police, stealing books isn't really stealing.

When I was president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Canada many years ago, I received, from time to time, a list on blank, unheaded paper, with no explanatory or descriptive matter on it at all. It was in fact two lists: one in bold, black type, the other in ordinary type. Both lists contained only names. Sometimes a name would be followed in brackets by other names. It was understood that these further names were aliases, AKAs, as the police refer to them. These lists were circulated by a group as anonymous as the paper they were printed on. They were unacknowledged,
anonymous, and untrackable.

It was also understood that every name on these lists was there for very good reasons. There were no errors possible, for each name had been the basis of many substantiated complaints. The multiple grievances consisted of booksellers, book collectors, libraries, and various branches of law-enforcement agencies. All names related to complaints regarding books. Book theft, book fraud, multiple complaints relating to non-payment or excessive periods of tardiness in paying book bills, all those various crimes and sins which booksellers have to deal with constantly.

The lists had two distinct functions. The list in ordinary type named people that dealers should only deal with using great caution, at their own peril. The names in bold black type were persons that dealers should not deal with in any manner, under any circumstances. The list was sent only to the president of each country's professional association, and it was understood that each country's president was to alert the dealers of that country about the dangers associated with the people named. It was also understood that this list should not be discussed outside the trade, and within the trade only with circumspection. In fact, it was stressed to each incoming president that its very existence be denied.

In my early days it was common for booksellers, once they'd established a collector's credentials-usually by personal contact or references from fellow dealers-to ship books, sometimes very valuable books, all over the world without receiving payment first, and often to people we had never met. We booksellers were often proud of the extent to which we trusted people in an increasingly crooked and sordid world, and it is truly surprising how little our system suffered from crooks and sleazebags. The network meant that undesirable and questionable people were quickly exposed and halted before they could do much damage. The same with those slippery people who had accrued reputations for slow payment. There are many people who consider it clever to keep people waiting a long time for payment for goods and services rendered. What these people seldom know is that the bookshop they enter in Tasmania or Outer Mongolia could be fully aware of their unpaid bills in Paris or San Francisco.

Many of the names on the lists I received in those ancient times bore titles: dukes, earls, counts, no doubt the clue to time-honoured attitudes amongst aristocracy everywhere, where it was seldom thought necessary to settle accounts with tradesmen in less than several years.

Most disconcerting for me was to find-in the bold type list, the incorrigible list-the name of a writer I revered. A man legendary for his literary criticism, for his wit and his style and his literary insights. This man became, amongst us booksellers, someone renowned for cheating and stealing. I still read his work, but always with that bold type in my mind. And always with a deep sense of shame and embarrassment one feels on behalf of fellow writers when an admired colleague proves no better than any other weak, despicable mortal. Like those great but askew writers, Pound and Celine and Knut Hamsun, whose work is so brilliant but whose moral codes were so abysmal. For he wouldn't have been on The List if he hadn't cheated and robbed quite a few people; in this case, booksellers. But from gossip in the years since, I've learned that his depredations included other collectors and his writer friends.

This man I almost never mention by name, out of embarrassment for all writers. But it's not my embarrassment, it's a shame I feel at his betrayals. That a man so important to modern literature acted so shoddily as to break an honourable code of conduct and steal from booksellers who had trusted him. And, more important, people he would know to be vulnerable because of their veneration for him, based on his brilliant work. Booksellers had supplied him with important things via that trust, things key to our central passion. He knew that. He also would have known that his actions would financially damage several who had befriended and honoured him. When we read of
him now in the biographies and studies of the period, we find many hints of his laziness, indolence, and freeloading amongst his rich and titled friends. But it's one thing to cadge, quite another to steal and cheat. The known vices we might excuse, especially for one with such literary gifts. But a thief? A sleazy cheat? From his friends?

Now, you'd like to know who it is, wouldn't you? There was a time when I wouldn't name him, out of respect for other writers-our dream providers -- but I no longer feel any respect is due. This man, Cyril Connolly, cheated and defrauded booksellers the way despicable conmen prey on elderly innocents, with no regard for basic decency. So, the author of Palinurus' The Unquiet Grave, and Enemies of Promise, friend of Orwell, Waugh, and others whose style and brilliant literary insights are studied by many serious writers I know, was in person a cheap fraud artist and a thief.

I suspect that he would depart from drunken literary evenings with the cream of the British literati with stolen signed first editions in his pockets. Based on his known habits, he would no doubt have felt that those valuable books better belonged with him than with their merely famous owners, who
neither knew of nor cared about book collecting.

I've just been rereading about his unlikely friendships with Orwell and Waugh and yet again dipping into The Unquiet Grave. The brilliance is tainted now. With melancholy, for we learn that the great writer, so adept at showing us men's iniquities, could suffer those defects himself.



-David Mason