The day that made librarians cry
The librarians walked around the Boston Public Library with their heads hung, mourning their collective loss. Some wiped away tears. Some hadn’t slept in days. More than 25 went to a grief counselor to try to cope with the losses from their collection.
It was August 1998, 17 years before the scandal that cost the head of the Boston Public Library her job on Wednesday. Amy Ryan announced she would resign in July as the library tries to recover $600,000 worth of missing artwork.
The disappearance was the latest loss for the library, and it echoed the major loss in 1998 when a more than 100-year-old water main broke in the middle of the night and destroyed an estimated 50,000 reference books, 300,000 documents, and 3 million microfiches. TheBoston Globe detailed the losses in February 1999.
At the root of both incidents are questions about how well the library protects its most valuable items.
There are more than 24 million items in the Boston Public Library’s collection, but a city-commissioned audit released last month said the library does not have a complete inventory and uses guesses to estimate its current holdings. Without a definitive list, books and pieces of art, like the Albrecht Dürer engraving and a Rembrandt sketch that are currently missing, can vanish unnoticed. The library recently said gold coins were missing, and announced Wednesday that sheet music had also disappeared.
The library has begun an item-by-item inventory of the system’s 200,000 prints and drawings and 120,000 chromolithographs.
But the latest loss might have been prevented if the library had learned its lesson 17 years ago.
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The 1998 flood caused $18 million worth of damage and devastated the library’s staff.
“Some librarians have reported waking up at 2 a.m. in a panic to save some essential book or paper, only to realize they can’t,’’ read a BostonGlobe report from a few days after the incident said. “Others have kept a vigil at the library, trying to save as much as possible.’’
But, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t save everything. Reports from days after the incident described books as so bloated and heavy from the deluge that they broke shelves.
Dürer’s “Adam and Eve’’ (also known as “The Fall of Man’’) that was stolen.
Among the destroyed items was a collection of U.S. patents dating to 1872, several art books, government court decisions, and rare topographical maps. Library officials said in a Globe story from August 1999 that, while only a few of the books were considered rare, many were irreplaceable because they‘re out of print.
One such book was the Census Catalog 1790-1972, an out-of-print, hand-annotated book that lists all Census Bureau publications for 200 years. The library’s copy, which lived on the second shelf in the Government Documents room, was destroyed. The U.S. Census Bureau wasn’t able to locate another copy until more than a year later, according to a Globe report. The copy was found in a storage closet in Suitland, Maryland, and then transferred to the Boston Public Library, though, according to a Globe report, was placed in a different location.
Boston.com spoke to a former library employee (we’ll call him Steve), who worked at the library during the time of the flood. Steve asked to remain anonymous because he is still connected to the library today, but Boston.com verified that he was previously employed by the library full-time.
Steve said that even though the library’s basement underwent a $20 million renovation in 1995 to update its reference rooms and computers, employees were wary of having the government documents stored in the basement. If there were a flood, they said, the documents would be destroyed. But he said the library insisted the documents move to the basement so there would be space for cafes and displays on the first floor, where the documents once lived.
The documents moved. The basement flooded.
Rembrandt’s “Self Portrait with Plumed Cap and Lowered Sabre’’ sketch.
Although he doesn’t work at the library anymore, Steve believes the flooding problem and stolen artwork both show the library’s disregard for their valuable items. He also said the library has a poor recordkeeping system. The audit confirmed this, and said staff levels weren’t sufficient to care for older items.
“Storage is not suited to maintaining required environmental conditions,’’ the audit said. “Security is insufficient to protect against internal theft.’’
Rosemary Lavery, the library’s spokesperson, said the public library maintains an appropriate staffing level to deal with the public during its service hours.
“Within the last year, and prior to the report of these missing items, the Boston Public Library had been working with an outside consultant to organize, catalogue, inventory, and recommend processes to allow better security and control over the print collection,’’ she said. “As a result of the missing artwork, we are working more aggressively to complete the work in a thorough and expeditious way.’’
Lavery did not comment on whether the paintings were taken by an inside source, as the investigation is ongoing.
As of Wednesday, no librarians have gone to grief counseling over the missing works. But, if the library does follow through on its new plan, perhaps no works will disappear without a trace again — or, at least, the library will know what’s missing.
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