No accurate record of how many times Stephen Blumberg was escorted from Richard Detanza's business exists. The sheriff's office stopped sending patrol cars to 622 13th Avenue after the thirtieth call in two months. Blumberg, Detanza reported, "ran down the street after I chased him with an endiron. I know he'll come back. He is unable to control himself. For me collecting is a business. For him it is a psychosis."

Mr. Blumberg was sentenced to "71 months in jail in 1991 for 'four counts of possessing and transporting stolen property-more than 20,000 rare books and 10,000 manuscripts from 140 or more universities in 45 states and Canada.'"1

March 1993--The FBI donates to Creighton University 3,000 items that remained unclaimed of the 22,000 stolen from libraries across the country by Stephen C. Blumberg. In what came to be called the "Omaha Project," OCLC helped inventory the stolen books and other materials by providing catalogers, workstations and access to OCLC's cataloging and database services. OCLC also coordinated the efforts of the OCLC and volunteer catalogers and created a database on the OCLC EPIC service called "The Book Return," that helped libraries identify and reclaim missing materials.

Among the items unclaimed were several sealed wooden boxes

Fine Books
502 Folsom
San Francisco, CA 94105

The contents will be shipped to

Northeast Document Conservation Center
100 Brickstone Square
Andover, MA 01810

so they may be preserved and returned to the libraries from which they were stolen. The first document in crate #001a appears to be from shortly after the Great Earthquake.

1       http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byorg/abbey/an/an15/an15-7/an15-702.html  Blumberg's cache weighed in excess of nineteen tons