Earlier today, the Manhattan DA’s office announced that it will formally return 17 stolen books to their rightful owners: the Whitneys. And yes, I do mean those Whitneys.
The rare books in question were lifted from the family compound nearly 40 years ago, and originally belonged to Helen Hay Whitney, the poet, socialite, bibliophile, and matriarch of the famous dynasty. At its fighting weight, Helen’s rare book collection was hundreds of volumes strong, and worth millions of dollars.
Some well-read houseguest apparently took note. In 1989, 28 of Mrs. Whitney’s titles were reported stolen from Greentree, the Whitneys’ 400 acre Manhasset estate. The two dozen-ish missing titles have a combined estimated worth of $2 million. It’s all very Gatsby-coded.
As Vittoria Benzine at Artnet reported, the stolen haul suggests eccentric taste. The recovered cache includes some of Oscar Wilde’s papers, and first editions of both Finnegan’s Wake and Aleister Crowley’s erotic poetry anthology.
But the biggest get was a portfolio containing eight handwritten love letters from John Keats to Fanny Brawne.
Though the missing books have been on the DA’s radar since the last century, no one’s had a lead on the thief lo these many decades. That is, until “an unnamed individual” attempted to sell certain titles to two different rare book dealers in Manhattan last January. Alarm bells were raised, and the book police went in.
Though no perp has been named publicly, the quest for justice—and the last 11 missing titles—is ongoing.
Meanwhile, the heirs to one of the first American venture capitalists plan to auction the returned books and donate the proceeds—perhaps back to Greentree, which has been owned and operated by the philanthropic Greentree Foundation since 1982.
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