Like many aspiring writers, David Breithaupt had money problems. But
what he also had was unsupervised access to one of the finest special
collections libraries in the country. In October 1990, Kenyon College
hired David Breithaupt as its library's part-time evening supervisor. In
April 2000 he was fired after a Georgia librarian discovered him selling
a letter by Flannery O'Connor on eBay, but that was only the tip of the
iceberg: for the past 10 years, Breithaupt had been browsing the
collection, taking from it whatever rare books, manuscripts, and
documents caught his eye - Flannery O'Connor letters, W.H. Auden
annotated typescripts, a Thomas Pynchon manuscript, and much, much more.
It was a large-scale, long-term pillaging of Kenyon College's most
precious works. After he was caught, the American justice system looked
like it was about to disappoint the college the way it had countless
rare book crime victims before - but Kenyon refused to let this happen.