More than 350 books and documents, most of them about the Civil War, have been stolen from the Vermont Department of Libraries in Montpelier, the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus reported November 30.
The theft was discovered after an employee noticed empty shelves in a section of the department’s State Street library where rope-driven hand hoists are still used to move books from floor to floor. “We just came down and noticed a blank space in the stacks and said, ‘Gee whiz, we don’t remember that,’” said Paul Donovan, the department’s law librarian.
An inventory revealed that many of the missing items are small 19th-century publications—a 10-volume pictorial history of the Civil War, for example, plus unit diaries and regimental histories—that are “not particularly valuable,” Donovan said. All of the library’s valuable volumes and papers are “under lock and key,” he added.
Montpelier Police Officer David Martin said the works were probably smuggled out of the library a few volumes at a time. Since the books are marked with the state library seal, they can’t easily be sold, he said. “It’s more or less something that a Civil War buff would be into taking,” he said.
Posted December 4, 2000.