The librarians who stole from their own collections
Sweden and United States, 1986 to 2005
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Between 1986 and 2004, the head of the manuscripts department at the National Library of Sweden removed dozens of rare books from the collection he was supposed to protect and sold them through auction houses in Germany. He confessed in 2004, when the library discovered the losses.
In 2005, in the United States, map dealer Forbes Smiley was caught at the Yale library with a utility knife blade; he admitted to cutting nearly a hundred antique maps out of atlases in American and British libraries, always close to the binding, so that the missing pages would go unnoticed.
Sources
In the game
The Torn Leaf
Kellworth College, Oxford, 9:35 pm. On his night round, the porter found the library's manuscript room open.
The game borrows the custodian who steals what he guards and the clean cut of a page, given away by a detail. Characters, crime and outcome are fiction.
