March 30, 2006

Scott Sanders, the Antioch University archivist, displaying a rare book by Frank Lloyd Wright that, until last week, had been missing from the Antioch library for 50 years.

By Lauren Heaton

Whoever left the Antioch College library in 1956 with a copy of The Disappearing City, a little-known book by Frank Lloyd Wright, didn’t have a very good sense of financial investment.

Recorded as “missing” from the college library that year, the book made its way back to the library’s stacks this week in decent shape and worth a whole lot more than it was when it was taken.

When Antioch University Archivist Scott Sanders called the Yellow Springs Police Department last month to report a book had been stolen 50 years ago, the dispatcher laughed at him, he recalled.

But Sanders, who works at Antiochiana, had done some sleuthing and was fairly certain that the description of the book found on eBay last month was Antioch library property, and that in 1956, someone had absconded the book.

Fifty years after the book’s disappearance, Andrew Steele, an area alumnus whom Sanders calls “one of my spies,” spotted the book on eBay last month. The telltale college bookplate on the inside cover linked it unmistakably to the college.

When Sanders investigated the book’s value, he said, he found that as a first edition print, Wright’s book on the utopia of model industrial towns was quite rare. Written in 1932, Wright’s work echoed some of the ideas of Antioch’s own Arthur Morgan and his crusade for small community living, Sanders said. And in the margin, someone had even highlighted a passage by Morgan.

According to Sanders’ research on Bookfinder.com, The Disappearing City was worth anywhere from $300 for an unsigned copy to $1,700 for a signed copy. The few copies he located in libraries around Ohio were uncirculated, meaning the book was too precious to be loaned out, Sanders said.

Because no one throws anything away at Antiochiana, Sanders said he found records of a complete library inventory from 1956, when the library relocated from Westin Hall to its current building, where the book was listed as “missing.”

He then went to the 1957 card catalogue and found the book had been classified as “withdrawn.” When books are withdrawn from a library’s collection, the standard is to stamp it several times to indicate it is used.

But the book for sale on eBay didn’t have a stamp on it, nor was there a record of someone checking the book out and neglecting to return it.

“That’s how I determined it was stolen,” Sanders said.

Sanders first considered approaching the seller directly to “prevail upon his better sense of judgment as a book dealer and to his strong reputation on eBay, where reputation is everything,” he said.

But eBay’s policy on stolen items is to advise traders to go to the police. Yellow Springs Police Sergeant Dennis Nipper told Sanders to rely on his first instincts and contact the seller directly.

The seller, Steve Shoemaker, a Columbus resident who deals in vintage items, was selling the lifelong collection of a man who apprenticed with Wright at the Taliesin studio in Wisconsin. According to Shoemaker, the family members, who wished to remain anonymous, did not think the book was in their possession for long because every architecture book in the collection except for Wright’s had notes in the margins. But they agreed it was the “right thing to do” to return the book to the library, he said.

On the eBay page where the book is listed, Shoemaker has printed the following: “I apologize but this auction is being cancelled. The owner (that I am selling it for) has decided to return it to the Antioch College Library where it used to belong.”

Though in Sanders’s estimation the unoriginal ideas in The Disappearing City make the book a less than thrilling read, it will be kept in the Bessie Totten rare book collection at Antiochiana.

The recovery of the book has led Sanders and archivist Nina Myatt to consider a day of amnesty for all those current and former patrons who may have held an Antioch College library book or two in their possession for a little too long and have failed to return it for fear of embarrassment or a burdensome fine.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com