Thirteen books found at auction house but many more are missing

By Neal Ascherson
London Observer Service

LONDON — Some of the world's rarest and most precious books have been stolen in what could prove to be Europe's most catastrophic literary theft since World War II.

A court at Konigstein, Germany, has ordered the confiscation of 13 rare books from a local auction house after a tip to police. The books almost certainly come from the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow, Poland. But they add up to only a fraction of what appears to be missing from the ancient books and manuscripts of the country's most famous library, founded in 1364 to serve the city's university.

The seized books were found on the premises of a respected firm of antique dealers and booksellers. They included a copy of the early printed version of Ptolemy's "Cosmographia," the father of all atlases, dated 1482. A tip led a Polish journalist to the shop, where he pretended to be a potential buyer.

At first, the bookseller — who had set an auction starting price of $600,000 on the "Cosmographia" — claimed there was nothing to prove the book had come from Poland. But a photograph of a page with a section cut out of it jogged the memory of a Warsaw reader who had photographed the Cracow copy long ago.

The missing patch on the page matched her photograph of the ownership mark penned in by a 16th century Jagiellonian Library official. The public prosecutor in Cracow then lodged a formal request for the German auction to be delayed.

The Jagiellonian Library has been under reconstruction since 1995, and security appears to be almost nonexistent. No one seems to know what is missing from the 130,000 maps and manuscripts. The Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza said last week: "Poland's public collections of old printed books and manuscripts are scandalously badly protected."

The last proper cataloging of the library was in 1906. A new American computer system was not ready when the theft was noticed in April. The thieves jumbled up the contents of hundreds of cardboard manuscript boxes, expecting that when the confusion had been sorted out, their loot would have been long sold.

Ironically, some of the missing treasures may be German. At the end of World War II, the Prussian State Library sent many collections out of Berlin to be sheltered in Silesia. From there the Poles secretly took them to Cracow and lodged them in the Jagiellonian collections. Their presence was admitted in 1977. Two years ago, the Polish government considered returning them to Germany.

Among the papers which may also have been stolen are the manuscript of Martin Luther's translation of the Old Testament, one of the first texts of the epic "Nibelungenlied" and scores by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.