The great £6million book heist
Innocent London dealers caught in 20-year saga of US librarian who plundered world’s rarest volumes
TO HIS colleagues, librarian Gregory Priore was a model employee: unassuming, dutiful, dedicated.
But in one of the biggest heists of its kind, he is alleged to have plundered £6million of rare books and maps from one of the world’s most prestigious libraries.
Over a 20-year period he plucked them from shelves, before tucking them under his arm and walking out of the building. He then passed them to John Schulman, who owned a rare bookshop nearby.
Police say that Schulman was Priore’s partner in crime and sold the books, belonging to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, on to unsuspecting dealers.
Now The Mail on Sunday has learned that, among others, the deception ensnared two of London’s leading antiquarian bookstores.
Pom Harrington, of Peter Harrington in Mayfair, bought an early 19th Century copy of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica for £72,500 five years ago and sold it to a private collector for £145,000.
Harrington has now recovered the book, returned it to the library and refunded the customer. Another London bookshop, Maggs Bros, was similarly cheated.
There was no reason to question the books’ provenance. Libraries sell thousands of rare books every year to raise funds and Schulman was a respected dealer, a member of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers who appeared as an expert on the US version of Antiques Roadshow.
It was only when the library carried out an appraisal of its contents last year – its first since 1991 – that it discovered hundreds of books were missing.
Priore was the sole archivist of the library’s third-floor special collections room, stocked with 30,000 items. In addition to maintaining its contents, he controlled access. Visitors were required to deposit their belongings in lockers before perusing tracts and treaties by writers including John Calvin, the French theologian, and AngloIrish statesman Edmund Burke.
Priore, 61, and Schulman, 54 – who will face a court hearing next month – are accused of theft, conspiracy, forgery and receiving stolen property. In all, some 320 items were stolen.
Together the two men ‘cannibalised’ the collection, according to documents filed with the district attorney’s office.
Priore told detectives that he first approached Schulman in the early Nineties. They ‘began working together to surreptitiously remove and sell items’. Sometimes Priore cut maps from books with a knife and put them in a manila envelope. ‘With books he would just carry them out,’ say the papers.
Priore dropped the stolen items at Schulman’s shop, Caliban, a minute’s walk from the library, and was paid up front, usually between £400 and £2,500.
‘Occasionally Schulman would text or call Priore at work and make requests for specific items,’ the documents say. ‘Sometimes Schulman would tell him he needed a specific subject because he was going to a book fair.’
Priore, a father-of-four, is said to have told detectives that he needed the money for school fees and to ‘stay afloat’. He told them: ‘I should never have done this. I loved that room, my whole working life, and greed came over me. I did it but Schulman spurred me on.’
Mr Harrington said: ‘The police and district attorney came over to London because a number of booksellers inadvertently bought books.
‘It’s a good news story from a recovery point of view but profoundly sad that it happened and a lot of people will be out of pocket.
‘The library needs to look after its books better. An appraisal once every 26 years is not good enough for a rare book library like that.’