Wednesday 25 November 2020

Cambridge University Library and those Missing Darwin Notebooks

CUL, looking secure

Astonishing news reaches us that Cambridge University (CUL) has lost two valuable Darwin notebooks.  Even more astonishingly they vanished 20 years ago.  The assumption was that they had been misshelved, and they were only reported missing to the police last month.  A pundit was on the Radio 4 lunchtime news yesterday opining on what he thinks happened.  This is in essence what he suggested:

Regular readers become familiar faces to librarians.  Said librarians are so used to those readers that security becomes less stringent than it should.  Some readers become heavily invested in their research materials to the extent that they develop a proprietorial attitude towards them.  With relaxed security, opportunities arise to make off with said research materials.  Librarians don’t notice.  If they do realise something is not where it should be, they assume it has merely been misplaced and no alarm bells are raised.

What a load of tosh.

I would be amazed if this scenario had occurred.  The following procedure has been in place for many years.  When ordering from the stacks in a CUL reading room, a request slip on carbonless paper is filled in, and it is retained by the librarians while the item is with the reader.  When it is returned to the librarians’ desk, a receipt is handed to the reader and a copy kept for CUL’s records, enabling them to track who has had what.  If someone walked out with material it would quickly become apparent because the sheet to be given back to the reader would still be attached to the library’s copy.  I cannot imagine a librarian dishing out anything without obtaining a filled-in slip, much less valuable Darwin manuscripts.  It is a system designed precisely to prevent theft.

The administrators back in 2000 were unquestionably slack by failing to maintain the requisite vigilance.  According to a Guardian report of 24 November 2020, the notebooks were taken out of storage to be photographed in November 2000 (the photographic unit is in the same building so they did not have to leave the premises), and a routine check in January 2021 noted the box containing them was not in its correct place.  Plainly there was inadequate oversight, but with no indication the manuscripts were requested by a reader in the intervening period.

The librarians complacently assumed they were somewhere about and instituted ‘extensive’ searches for them over the ensuing two decades, a new management team only now, after a final look, conceding they are nowhere to be found.  ‘Extensive building work’ in 2000 has been propounded as a potential scapegoat, hinting at outsiders being responsible, but it seems most unlikely a hod carrier targeted these particular items in an opportunistic theft while nobody was around, or a cat burglar shimmied up scaffolding and prised open a window in the dead of night.

It is worth bearing in mind that a similar situation to the Darwin scandal has arisen before.  In 1989 the archive and rare books of the Society for Psychical Research were transferred from the SPR’s premises at Adam & Eve Mews in London to CUL, because of security concerns.  Rare SPR books were categorised ‘Z’, and I remember long-serving Council member Tony Cornell walking into the building waving a Z book and saying he had stolen it – in order to demonstrate how easy it was to remove them without detection.  This situation led to negotiations for the permanent loan of the SPR’s paper archive (the audio-visual component is housed elsewhere) and Z books to CUL, where they remain today.

Unfortunately, a short time later red-faced CUL officials informed the SPR that several of its rare books had been stolen, though thankfully it didn’t take 20 years to find out.  To their credit they did make efforts to replace the missing volumes as best they could, and following a lengthy internal investigation it was concluded the theft had been an inside job.  The affair was hushed up because it looked bad to have to confess that a member of staff had walked off with valuable property (and in this case belonging to someone else).  No lackadaisical librarian had unwittingly allowed them to be removed by a cunning reader, they were lifted directly from the stacks.  My money is on the Darwin notebooks having gone in a similar manner, the perpetrator taking advantage of their trip to reprographics.

The ‘expert’ on Radio 4 thought they would turn up eventually because their fame makes them instantly recognisable, which is to be hoped for, but he had already argued that readers can become greatly attached to their research objects (though not usually to the extent of taking them home), so they could be sitting in a private library being gloated over.  They may come to light as the result of a sale or be voluntarily returned to CUL, but perhaps only on the death of the holder, a possibility floated by the deputy director of Research Collections who was interviewed by the Guardian.  If that is the case, we could be in for a long wait.

Though I am not an authority on international crime, it seems doubtful they are being used as collateral by organised crime interests because, unlike an old master painting, they will not look obviously hugely valuable to the untutored eye; but I could be wrong.  Let’s just hope they do not suffer the same fate as those rare books boosted from a warehouse while waiting to be shipped off to auction which were found in a damp hole, or have not been seized by disgruntled creationists who consider Darwin to have been Satan’s catspaw and destroyed.  The only positive note in this sorry tale is that the manuscripts have been put online, so at least the contents are still available, even though they do not possess the aura of the missing originals.