Unstolen: How to Go from Hot Merchandise to a Cool Million
A newsletter supported by new arrivals at Downtown Brown Books
This newsletter is brought to you by Downtown Brown Books’s New Arrivals List 110: Ripped from the Flat Files. Highlights include abolition documents from the West Indies, original dust jacket art, and 19th-century photos of San Francisco’s Chinatown.
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Last year, a collector bought a first edition of The Gunslinger, the first book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, inscribed, “For James—welcome to the weird, weird west! Steve King 7/17/82.”
I am sure whoever bought The Gunslinger was thrilled to have the book. Copies with good inscriptions are pushing $10,000 these days, and in addition to getting a great book, the collector likely got a great deal.
Too good of a deal, as it turns out.
That copy of The Gunslinger belonged to James Strand, a horror-book collector in Portland whose multi-million-dollar library was looted last August, shortly after the coroner removed his body from his house. I ended up as the liaison between law enforcement and local booksellers during the investigation. [You can read more about that in The Oregonian newspaper.]
I tracked The Gunslinger for several weeks. First one fence tried to sell it to local stores, and then a bit later, another criminal shopped it around, both in person and in text messages to dealers.
These sellers of The Gunslinger and other stolen books always had a story. Surprisingly often, the stories involved dead uncles. One of the fellows who tried to sell The Gunslinger added a twist to the dead uncle story. He told me he didn’t get the books from his dead uncle. Instead, he said he was selling them for a dead friend who got them from a dead uncle. “I’m just trying to get some money together for his funeral,” he told me.
I am proud to say that the bookstore owners in Portland listened to these unlikely stories, considered the too-good-to-be-true books and the shifty people trying to sell them, and turned them away. Then they emailed me.
With intel from Portland’s book dealers, I sent law enforcement agents near-real time reports, yet each time the cops caught up to one of the fences, The Gunslinger had already been sold or traded to someone else.
From the criminal underground, the book passed to a more respectable class of fence. One of the sellers of stolen James Strand books works for a non-profit organization and encloses invoices with a cutesy name like “Daisy’s Dry Goods” along with her stolen books.
Another of these respectable looking fences tried to sell me James Strand’s Gunslinger. She was a nurse who I will call Amber. Amber began her efforts to sell the book at the same bookstores that her predecessors had tried. What these criminals lacked in originality, they made up for in persistence.
One store’s employee had seen the book twice already. When Amber, dressed in her work uniform, brought The Gunslinger in for the third time, the book buyer jotted down the name on her ID badge and told Amber to call me. (Selling stolen goods is rarely prosecuted and Portland’s book thieves know it. They have dropped all efforts to hide their identity. They give their real names, hand over IDs for inspection, and use their real phone numbers, email addresses, and eBay accounts.)
I acted interested in The Gunslinger and tried to stall Amber for a few days waiting for the law to catch up, but she grew tired of my delaying tactics. Next thing I knew, she had passed the book on to yet another fence, and then the trail went cold. I am pretty sure a collector finally acquired it.
Crimes like burglary and selling stolen goods have statutes of limitation, but once something is stolen, it tends to stay stolen. James Strand’s copy of The Gunslinger might not surface for years. When it does, James Strand’s estate can demand it back under the legal doctrine of replevin, an area of the law that is little understood even by most attorneys and yet it is particularly relevant to collectors and dealers.
Replevin governs the return of property that is wrongfully held, and the standard of proof in replevin cases is rather low. The person making a replevin claim only has to have a superior argument.1 They don’t have to prove ownership; they only have to prove that their facts are better than those of the person who has possession.
This issue comes up, for example, when an editor wants to sell letters written to them by one of their authors. Are the letters personal property or do they belong to the editor’s employer, the publisher? If the letters are related to the business of books, the publisher may have the superior claim because materials sent to employees usually belong to their employer.2
Stolen property is different, and simpler. If something is stolen from you, you can get it back, most of the time.3
The best defense against a claim of replevin for stolen goods is estoppel by laches, also known as the equitable defense of laches. (Oh, how lawyers love obscure terms that cost $400/hour to explain.)
Estoppel by laches is basically an argument that says, Yes, this was stolen from you and that really sucks but you didn’t try very hard to get the stolen item back so it would suck even more to take it from the innocent person who has it now.
This argument doesn’t often work in court,4 but a good lawyer has to try something. If you can afford a lawyer, that is.
As with any area of the law, winning a replevin case can take a lot of time and will cost a lot of money. Usually, these disputes settle out of court, and I have two case studies that offer instructive examples of how they get handled. They involve millions of dollars, but the mechanics probably won’t be too different when James Strand’s copy of The Gunslinger finally turns up at auction or in the hands of a first edition dealer.
Spoiler Alert: This newsletter is in two parts. The second part will go out next Monday.
The Captain America Caper
In 2019, Heritage Auctions offered one of the most famous copies of one of the most famous comics, Captain America Comics #1 with the San Francisco pedigree (A “pedigree” in comic-book collecting is what book collectors would call provenance. Pedigrees often have geographical nicknames, in this case San Francisco even though the comic books surfaced in the East Bay).5
The stories that have been told about the “San Francisco” pedigree collection are as fanciful as any tale found in a superhero comic so I’ll just relate what I know with any certainty.
In May 1973 someone came to the Berkeley Comic Convention with a quantity of Golden Age comics dating from the late 1930s to about 1945. Two of the Berkeley Con organizers, Nick Marcus and Mike Manyak, happened to be sitting at the ticket desk when the comics came in. Nick and Mike bought and sold comic books in a loose partnership, and they immediately worked out a deal with the sellers for a clutch of the best comics. They went through the boxes and pulled out all of the books from Timely Publications, the predecessor to Marvel Comics. The highlight of their purchase was the debut issue of Captain America, which even fifty years ago was a legendary rarity.
When I talked to him recently, Nick recalled paying $10 each for the comics (other accounts of the transaction put the figure lower), which he now concedes was “a little bit of a rip off.”
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I asked Nick why he and Mike didn’t try to get the whole San Francisco collection, since they had first shot at it. His answer revealed the two opposite poles that both dealers and collectors gravitate towards, quantity or quality?
Nick said he told Mike, “We need to buy them all.” Mike answered, “No, we just need to buy these.” And so they did.
Cap 1, as it is affectionately known in the comics world, introduced the title superhero, an enduring character in popular culture. The cover, showing Captain America punching Adolf Hitler, hit newsstands in early 1941, nearly a year before the US joined the Second World War.
Heritage, the leading comic book auctioneer, described the San Francisco copy of Cap 1 in its 2019 catalog as “among the most desirable comic books Heritage has auctioned to date.” The distinctive markings on the covers, their description noted, “identify this as being from the storied San Francisco pedigree collection.” The auction estimate was $750,000+, but the book was sold without reserve.
This copy of Cap 1 arrived at Heritage raw, “in just a Mylar and a board.” Heritage had it slabbed, or sealed in hard plastic with a condition grade and the San Francisco pedigree displayed prominently at the top.
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The catalog copy continued, “Many a Golden Age collector ranks this pedigree near the top…and the story of the collection being brought into a show in Berkeley, California, in 1973 has entered collecting lore. However, this Captain America #1 has not been seen by the hobby at large since that day.”
That last part wasn’t exactly true, which the folks at Heritage well knew.
Propelled in part by the profits from the San Francisco collection, Mike and Nick opened Shazam Comic Art Shop, in Walnut Creek, California.
Nick ran Shazam Comics day-to-day. He liked to give presentations around town promoting comics and publicizing Shazam’s rare comics. One article alerted readers that three key Timely comics, “first editions of Captain America, Human Torch, and Submariner” could be found at Nick and Mike’s store.6
The publicity attracted more than customers.
On Saturday, December 29, 1973, a man that Nick recalls was a lawyer came into Shazam. He’d been in a few times before; on that Saturday he asked to use the restroom. Cap 1 and other rare comics were lying out in the open in the back of the shop, on the way to the bathroom. In hindsight, Nick said that wasn’t so smart. He thinks the lawyer took the comics.
Nick filed a police report and an article appeared in the local newspaper7 detailing the theft of six comic books worth $2,000—a substantial sum in 1973, when comic book collecting had yet to hit the mainstream. The Walnut Creek police did not crack the case—either the lawyer wasn’t the thief or the detectives didn’t have enough evidence to charge him.
Nick told the newspaper reporter that Cap 1 was worth $1,000 and that he was aware of a copy that had sold for twice that amount.
The book Nick still misses from the theft is Human Torch #5, which he estimated at the time was worth $250.8 The highest graded copy of that issue has sold for just over $10,000, which shows how much Cap 1 has appreciated compared to the rest of the early Timely books. Other than Cap 1, none of the other comics that were stolen that day have ever surfaced on the open market. Some or all of them have the distinctive markings that unambiguously identify books from the San Francisco collection.
The loss of Cap 1 broke up Nick and Mike’s partnership, and Shazam Comics closed a year or so later. Mike still collects, but Nick left comics behind and moved to Texas to work for oil exploration companies. Nick said that the theft really “took it out” of him and that afterwards comics were “not much fun anymore.”
When the missing copy of Captain America surfaced in 1999, Heritage did not mention that it had been stolen in its catalog description. I’ve asked Golden Age collectors, dealers, and a few old-timers who were active in comics back in 1973 and while everyone knew about the San Francisco copy of Cap 1 only a couple of people had vague memories that it had been stolen.
Somehow Heritage also knew that it was stolen and from whom. There is a reason that they are at the top of their field.
I don’t know what exactly happened. I suspect there are non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) involved because neither Nick or Mike would talk to me about it at all.
More than 40 years had passed between the theft and Cap 1 resurfacing at auction. When it was consigned to Heritage, a deal needed to be worked out; it was a classic case of replevin.
On the surface, it looks to me like Nick and Mike had a pretty good claim to get the comic back. Even though no one kept records from the shop, everyone in comics knew they owned the San Francisco Cap 1, there was the newspaper article, and people who remember hearing about the theft at the time.
Perhaps faced with the cost of litigation—compelling Heritage to reveal the identity of its consignor would have been no easy task, I suspect—Nick and Mike settled. I have no idea how much the settlement came to. Heritage would only say, “All parties involved entered into an agreement that cleared title and allowed for the auction.” I don’t think it was very much compared to the $915,000 that Heritage got for the purloined comic. And I certainly hope that the consignor was an innocent third party and not the thief or his heirs. Crime shouldn’t pay.
The well-heeled buyer of Cap 1 in 2019 made one of the best buys in comics history. As Mark Hime of Biblioctopus likes to say, the real bargains are at the top of the market. The San Francisco Cap 1 returned to Heritage Auctions just three years later. Often, reselling so quickly is a sure-fire recipe for losing money. Instead, during the Covid-era boom in comic prices it sold for $3,120,000.
I’d really like to know if this comic book now travels with a copy of the agreement that cleared up the title, or does the owner of a $3 million comic just have to take in on faith that Cap 1 is officially unstolen?
Next week I’ll compare the Cap 1 caper with the case of John Lennon’s missing guitar. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.
—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books
Further Watching
The documentary The Thief Collector untangles the story of a stolen Willem de Kooning painting that turned up in the estate of two retired school teachers who appear to have been art thieves for the thrill of it.
In order to keep this essay to a manageable length—and I already had to split it in two—I am completely ignoring the question of government documents, which are governed by a different part of common law.
The bookseller Rick Gekoski devotes two chapters of his book, Guarded by Dragons: Encounters with Rare Books and Rare People to questions of disputed ownership.
For example, earlier this year, a painting stolen more than 50 years ago was returned to its owner when it turned up in a mobster’s estate.
One recent case, Republic of Turkey v. Christies, litigated ownership of a 6,000-year-old statue. The trial judge ruled that Turkey did not prove ownership; the appeals court rejected this decision because the court applied the wrong standard. The “ultimate burden” of proving ownership lands on the “possessor” if the theft victim has an “arguable claim.” In short, the superior claim wins. However, the court also ruled that Turkey waited decades to lodge its claim of ownership, by which time most of the witnesses had died. Turkey lost on the doctrine of laches.
Comic collectors like pedigreed comics and pay premiums for them. However, the dealers who bought them originally, usually from estates, frequently paid so little for these very valuable collections that they make every effort to obfuscate the origins of the books. Several dealers split the San Francisco collection, one of the most profitable deals in comics history, yet to a one, they all claim not to be able to remember who they bought them from. It’s as if Superman used his mind-control powers to make everyone forget.
Contra Costa Times, Wednesday, October 10, 1973, p. 30.
Contra Costa Times, Thursday, January 3, 1974, p. 10.
The other books stolen that day were Marvel Mystery #2 and #13, All Winners #1, and Detective Comics #7 (a Platinum Age book).
Looking forward to “Chapter Two”. As always, an entertaining and educational read. Thanks Scott.
I love this