A man and his dog find a stash of rare books on the sidewalk; 8 months later, the library solves the mystery

CHICAGO – During an evening walk in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood in early March, Sparky – Robert Miller’s golden-brown mutt who weighs 35 pounds and has a hunting dog in his DNA – appeared to have picked up a scent.

“She’s a creature of habit,” said Miller, a retired 75-year-old who has lived in the neighborhood for about a dozen years. “She likes to stay on one side of the street and for some reason she wanted to cross the street.”

Half a block later, the duo came across a pile of scattered books.

“It was about 8 p.m. at night. It was dark. It was winter. And I looked around and there wasn’t another soul around,” Miller said.

Luckily, Miller studied history in college and knew what he was looking for: German books from the Renaissance and early modern periods. The oldest, as he later learned, was from 1525. Three were written in Latin, three in German and one in French.

Horrified that the books would become damaged, dirty, damp, and left near a city street all night, Miller picked them up for safekeeping.

He couldn’t imagine how the delicate vessels of knowledge could end up stranded on the sidewalk. He wondered if they had been thrown away by thieves who had failed to make a profit from them, with no indication of provenance – history of ownership of valuable objects. Perhaps a disgruntled lover, in a moment of passion after a domestic argument, took a partner’s books and threw them outside.

Eight months later, a clue unearthed by a curator at the Newberry Library left fatal holes in Miller’s hypotheses. Miller had contacted the library for advice, and a little research by curator Suzanne Karr Schmidt led to a neighbor of Miller’s who collects rare books.

The neighbor, a non-retired octogenarian, “was cleaning up a few old archival boxes and also accidentally trashed one with the books in it,” said Karr Schmidt, who explained the mysterious appearance of the books in an article for Newberry -Magazine.

“It appears that the box fell to the floor and spilled its contents,” Karr Schmidt wrote. Before he had the idea to return and look for them, she wrote, “His relatively close neighbors, Miller and Sparky, had come to protect the books.”

In the mysterious darkness on an unfamiliar side of the street, Miller stuffed the smaller books into his pockets and dragged the heavy books away in his arms. At one point, Miller managed to pick up Sparky’s feces without dropping the entire bundle.

When Miller returned home, he and his wife began looking through the find on his dining room table. He said he knew enough Latin to figure out that one of the books contained arguments against the teachings of Martin Luther, the German priest who launched the Protestant Reformation.

The next morning, Miller took one of the books to the local police station, but they were unable to help Miller locate the books’ owner. So Miller contacted the University of Chicago and the Newberry Library and asked if they were missing the books.

“That wasn’t the case, but they wanted to find out where they came from,” Miller said.

In photos of the books that Miller sent to Karr Schmidt, she saw traces of their owners from the 16th century, but no newer institutional markings. That told her that the books probably belonged to “an unknown bookseller or private collector” and not another library. After this round of efforts to find an owner, according to Karr Schmidt, Miller offered to give the books to the Newberry Library.

“I felt like they belonged in a place where they would be valued and properly cared for,” Miller said.

It is considered unethical for a library to accept books with non-existent provenances – proof of ownership – without making further attempts to identify the most recent owners. The library has fulfilled its duty of care. Karr Schmidt learned that two Midwestern collections each had one of the books, but never the complete set. She also distributed details of the find to the international antiquarian community, to no avail.

The library decided that if anyone ever came forward and claimed to be the owner, it would dutifully investigate the claim and return the books if the evidence was deemed convincing.

Then, on November 1, while editing the magazine article about the books, Karr Schmidt came across a photo of one of them on the website of the Austrian bookseller Antiquariat Inlibris. The dealer would inform Karr Schmidt that he had sold the book in 2021 and tell her the Chicagoan who bought it.

On Nov. 5, the owner — who could not be reached for comment — stopped by the Newberry Library, where he was reunited with his lost books, Karr Schmidt said. He even decided to donate two of them to the library – a text supporting Luther written in the vernacular German, and a text attacking the great reformer in Latin.

Karr Schmidt said someone accessing the holdings of the Newberry Library — which has historically collected more French and Italian books from before 1800 than German books — wants to see the texts for several reasons.

“You might be interested in the political animosity that exists between the two. “A lot of pamphlets were written at that time, pro-Luther and anti-Luther,” Karr Schmidt said. “There are (also) a lot of visual images.”

On the German-language pages of the book, the text is surrounded by artistic woodcut or metalcut borders, some of which show Luther’s face with a surprised expression.