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One of our duties as booksellers is to hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards. Temptations can be found in our profession as they can in any other, and sometimes greed can make us "overlook" the obvious and sometimes not so obvious. I'm talking about books and paper that turn up for sale that seem just too good to be true. Chances are, it is.
Two problems that we may encounter are stolen books for sale and fake signatures or documents. There are many organizations that send messages to their members, warnings about stolen books that may turn up for sale. But how does a small time entrepreneur know when something is a fake? These are separate issues that have the same result - hurting innocent people.
My own experience with grand theft comes from an episode several years ago when a bookseller sharing space with my husband had about $15,000 worth of rare books go missing. I put out an email plea to CT booksellers for help locating these volumes and I got quite a few responses. The kind of responses pretty much summed up the kinds of sellers that are out there and illustrated that not everyone adheres to the same code of ethics.
Some responses were promises to look for the books and there were a few follow-up messages to see how things were going. Two responses led to the recovery of books. The first was from a seller who bought a few and he allowed us to buy them back. The detective investigating this theft visited the bookman the following day to get a description of the man who brought the books to sell. He was surprised at the bookseller's reaction. The bookman "couldn't remember" what the man looked like, and if having to talk to the police was the thanks he got for his trouble, he wouldn't have returned the books in the first place.
The second response that proved fruitful came from the owner of a book consignment shop. He took the list I emailed and searched his shop immediately. Lo and behold, some of the books were up for sale on a dealer's shelf. The shop owner removed the books, called us to pick them up and informed the dealer who had them for sale that stolen goods were not allowed in the shop and that stolen property had to be returned to its rightful owner. (The original owner's markings were still on the endpaper.)
Our detective paid a visit to the unhappy dealer who lost his newly acquired merchandise. Again, poor memory protected the thief. The end result was that we learned a lot about our industry that week. We learned most people were sympathetic to our plight and offered good wishes. But those that could help sometimes did not. Two out of three booksellers did not want to risk losing a potential source of books and were willing to do business with a known thief. A third bookman overcame the greed associated with theft and did the right thing.
Perhaps none of us truly know what we would do in a similar situation, but it is something each of us should consider. Perhaps the knowledge that we will lose money if we buy stolen books will help us to turn down that "too good to be true" offer that may come our way. If we can do this, we will have gone a long way to protect our profession.
Forgeries are more difficult to deal with. Tests that determine authenticity are time-consuming and expensive, well out of the range for a small seller to accomplish. The options are to buy an item and resell it without documenting authenticity, implementing a buyer-beware kind of approach. The seller becomes part of the provenance and inadvertently lends credence to the item and participates in defrauding someone down the line. This is not recommended.
Another approach is to alert other sellers to suspicious items on the market.
All in all, however, it is not an easy problem to overcome. There is an intrigue to forgery, an underlying fascination with the forger's skills and the art of duplicity that allow the general public to overlook the ramifications of the crime. If you doubt it, take a look at the mystery section of your larger bookstores; crime does pay for the authors and bookstore. Most of those stories, however, do not address the financial hurt and damage done to the reputation of booksellers and buyers.
Forgery also creates damage to history. Letting forgeries get "into the system" diminishes the truth about who we are and how we came to be. It perpetuates a lie. For those booksellers who overcome temptation and who work to reveal fakes, they have our commendation. I am including a couple of stories about forgeries to give you a bit of an inside look at some of the pitfalls of our profession and to introduce you to some of those booksellers who go the extra mile to uncover crime.
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