Second best religious fraud from Nebraska. Still miles behind Hubbard.
What kind of a person - what kind of an academic - would steal, sell, and profit from artefacts in their care?
I'm in the business of acquiring antiquarian items for my institution and I'm not surprised at all. It's usually an insider of some kind whether a dealer, curator, archivist, etc,
I think the Guardian article was the better written of the two, but it's nice to see how the story has progressed. I wonder if he was so thoroughly rotten when he received the Genius grant, or if that somehow tipped him over the edge.
Hey Barry, if you've read this - https://www.amazon.com/Medici-Conspiracy-Illicit-Antiquities-Greatest/dp/1586484389 - what did you think?
I read it years ago, and it concludes that pretty much all major museum and most minor ones more or less knowingly traffic in looted artifacts. I'm not familiar enough with that world to evaluate the claim.
We're going to steal the Declaration of Independence.
if you're looking for gullible people, extremely religious people are your playground
I sometimes think back on the televangelist scandals of the late 80's or early 90's and marvel that behavior that once shocked a nation, at least performatively, is now just accepted, even lauded.
I should go into antiquities forgery. It seems like a glamorous lifestyle. I could be an eccentric antiquities forger.
That guy who sold fake wine to the one Koch is a role model.
Selling expensive things to dumb rich people seems like it could be a lucrative thing.
Note that he didn't steal from a library.
4 I've not read it but in my experience I'd say most major museums, not all. I know the recent head of acquisitions at a major museum of Islamic art here and she is scrupulous. But many are not and look the other way. I've talked about issues like that at my institution that drove me up the wall. Also, I'll make a distinction between antiquities and antiquarian books and maps. I believe it's the consensus of most experts who deal with art theft (I count a couple as friends) that there are practically no antiquities on the market with good provenance. Rare books and maps it's a mix, there are more of them, they may be rare but not unique (manuscripts including manuscript maps are another issue). There are quite a few on the market that are looted, stolen, or improperly deaccessioned to be sold. Also a few forgeries too. One recent case were these Waldseemuller globe gores, the first mention of America on a map, that had to be pulled from auction at Christie's. Turns out they were forged by some French paper conservator in the 1930s. When the Bavarian State library looked at their copy they noticed the same tell-tale signs, so they've had a forgery in their collection for decades.
One thing about the market that those who buy such looted items don't realize. The vendors all know. Information is currency. Also, they may have super rare and expensive items among their wares but they're not very liquid. As soon as they make a sale they buy more stock. So they go in together to buy at auction or from other vendors. There might be as many as 6-10 parties who go in on some rare and expensive item. And they all know.
I meant to write that the recent head of acq I referenced left her post about a month or so ago and is opening up her own consultancy advising museums and libraries about these issues.
Let me acquaint you with the sorry tale of Forbes Smiley III who stole a lot more than the 96 maps mentioned in that entry. The head of special collections at Sterling Memorial Library at Yale lost their job because they hadn't cataloged a great deal of the collection so they had no idea what he stole. He stole from an institution I worked at though that was before my time. And when I was tasked with clearing up some files in file cabinets I found a ton of correspondence between him and our former head of the division. It was unbelievably embarrassingly chummy.
He definitely should appear on a list of WASPiest names ever.
This is a fascinating story. First of all, the appeal of thinking "what if there is something in the cartonnage? There's so much of it!"
And looking at Obbinck's career it looks exactly like the classic guy who has been working hard for 25 years to be an expert in a niche, and realizes he doesn't feel fulfilled because he still has no recognition outside that niche, and no respect in the niche because of his personality, and turns to cashing in.
Combined especially with him working on these Oxyrhynchus fragments, where at current rates it will take hundreds of years to catalog it all, with the number of people able to comprehend the significance of the Oxyrhynchus fragments shrinking steadily over the last hundred years. and you can imagine just deciding "what's the bloody point" one day.
11-14: Thanks.
All told, I find it more entertaining to assume that the rare book world is pretty much exactly as portrayed in The Ninth Gate. Although now I think that Johnny Depp's character should have been named Forbes Smiley.
When they picked him up he had a custom tailored blazor that had really deep pockets that you could stick a rolled up map or print in.
I think Johnny Depp's character already had a pretty cool name ("Dean Corso"). If you make him a Forbes Smiley he'd have to lose the facial hair, smoke a pipe instead of cigarettes, and get a new wardrobe for starters.
On forgeries I had a close brush with one, an exquisite portolan, just gorgeous. Asking price was 10 million USD. I got it down to 8 just toying with it, I hadn't been authorized to buy it yet though I was working it hard and I was feeling out the vendor. But the damned thing didn't say "Arrakis" on it so my people would go for it. It went to a new prestigious art museum in another Gulf state. Then they suspected something, must have found out, and pulled it from exhibition.
Far too many cultural institutions take the approach of "let's get important stuff far enough into the building to be able to announce we have it but not far enough to know what we have, where it is, and if we still have it."
We have one of the largest collections of Chinese Qur'ans outside of China. Most of them came into the collection in the 1980s when it was a private library owned by one of the ruling family. I found out recently that that was when a lot of them came onto the market, they'd originally been looted during the Cultural Revolution.
21: And now they're safer in Arrakis than they would be in China. As they were when looted.
Yes you should! Use this as a model.
Or the Benin bronzes. I mean build the museum by all means, but what's the plan to stop the sons of ISWAP or whoever from making another Palmyra of the place in 20 years' time?
What kind of a person - what kind of an academic - would steal, sell, and profit from artefacts in their care?
I suppose the Indiana Jones joke is too obvious.
He mostly stole things not in his care until he stole them.
Plus, stealing from Nazis isn't really stealing.
22: Doooooo ittttttttt nooooooowwwwww. (This goes for ALL OF YOU who want to write books. It takes time to write a book and we're all gonna die. Start writing! Keep writing! Comment through your writer's block!)
That is indeed a satisfying conclusion to the previous story.
Not yet, but it sounds like the trajectory of events is pointing that way at least for Obbink himself.
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."
Yes. Modern standards demand concrete and steel.
This wall divides us, we're on two different sides
But this wall is not real, how can it be real?
It's only made of concrete and barbed wire
It's really a delightful touch that Obbink was a Christ Church. It is in the throes of a peculiarly vicious and nasty intrigue in which a group of elderly dons who used to run the place have been trying to drive out the Dean, and have so far spent upwards of £2m on lawyers without anything to show for it except the impending threat of a visitation from the Charity Commission who would like to know how this advances charitable purposes.
An "Oxyrhynchus" is a dinosaur and you will never convince me otherwise. Ever. I have been digging for that buried lede all day.
17: Of course he did and I bet it was fucking fantastic. In English tailoring there's a thing called a poacher's pocket, which is a big inside pocket in the lower half of a coat, where you might conceal an illegal brace of pheasant or whatever, but this has more class and whenever I've worn anything that had one you couldn't hide jack shit in there without looking like, well, you're smuggling tennis balls or something.
38: look do you not get this or something? It's the dinosaurs who wrote the Bible. Hence young-earth creationism. Obbink was trying to cash out before the palaeontologists closed in.
Rhamphorhynchus was a pterosaur, and Cartorhynchus was an ichthyosaur, but Oxyrhynchus are the cute elephant-snouted fish that ate the virile member of Osiris after Set cut him up, and (maybe via phallic power) generate electric fields to find their way around in the muddy waters.
What I am is what I am
Are you what you are or what?
I've mentioned at the other place, that I know him (Obbink), very slightly. Working on digital projects at the Bod we overlapped on the occasional meeting, and i used to go up to the Sackler for various things. Also, some of the papyri would come through digital workflows and platforms that I managed or had technical oversight over.
This is specifically from Oxyrhynchus: https://anonym.to/?https://bit.ly/2WGZT0Y and other papyri are here: https://anonym.to/?https://bit.ly/3e2BNnh
re: 13
That would have been super easy to do at the Bod. A really large percentage of the manuscript holdings only have a paper catalogue entry, or a card index. Nothing on machine. Also, when you are the Chester E. Bumwarble III Jr Memorial Library of the University of Northern Oregon, and you have 2 medieval manuscripts, it's pretty easy to keep them secure. When you are the Bod, or the Vatican, and have 10,000+ ... not so much.
For years, I had stack keys that would have let me go in and help myself, and if you were a bit smart about what you took, you'd be able to get away with it for a long time. The real absolute treasures are in strong rooms, but there's no practical way to keep many tens of thousands of bound volumes in strong rooms, while still retaining practical access to them for scholars and curators. It's not like that now, and the stacks and their security are quite different, but I'd bet a dedicated insider could still nick stuff. Especially if you are one of the gatekeepers to the more precious things.
Someone once brought me the Magna Carta, for example. Knocked on my office door, handed me a grey cardboard box. "Can you give this to J?". "Sure." When J came back from lunch, she said, "Oh yeah, take a look at this ...." and we opened the box. 30 million quid, in a box. That would be quite hard to steal, because someone would notice it was missing. But there's a lot of things that aren't worth 30 million quid, but which are still worth a lot of money to someone, which might not get missed for years. Ironically, the only time I remember someone standing over the people working on the digitisation of something, was when it was some 18th century Japanese porn. Priceless manuscripts, not so much. Literally dozens coming through the door, every week.
43.last is fantastic. When I came on the job here I did an inventory and found maybe a dozen things missing. Eventually found maybe about half that. The previous person in charge of the collection isn't really a curator or librarian, he's a research support officer from Sri Lanka who functions basically as our registrar (though most people here have no fucking clue what that role is about). He's a very smart and clever guy. Just for a lark I guess he'd taken a loose blank page from an old book and got an image of the map which had not been colored - a Hondius if IIRC, and fairly small and inexpensive, I could probably get another copy for a couple of hundred dollars - and did a very high quality photocopy on that paper. It looked really good, I mean, there was no plate mark (though that could be faked) and the ink didn't stand up on the page like with a proper copperplate engraving (though some dealers used to bleach and steam press their maps to get rid of discoloration and other faults, I know) so I knew it was fake but no one else here would. Now imagine you did that with say a Lorenz Fries Ptolemy and the like that are in the collection and you're talking serious money.
Someone once brought me the Magna Carta
The writers of heist movies aren't even trying any more.
This one: https://bit.ly/2ThacGH -- the text is very readable, too.
We've been watching this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ykww2/episodes/player
My wife gets annoyed when I keep saying, "I've seen that." ... "I know him/her.", etc. Book-dropping and/or name-dropping.
43 - You should have burned it! 30x better than those pikers in the KLF, and then maybe you'd get the divine right of kings back!
re: 47
Probably a flaw in the parchment (which I'm sure you know).
re: 49
Sadly, for your evil plans, there are a few of them. Four copies of that particular version, and four of the earlier one.
That's only eight things, unless there are pictures of them.
That's good because I didn't get it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS
The archivist outside jokes are damaging to the documents.
Other people can explain their inside jokes, but I'm not going to start because being understood has rarely helped me.
This part of the OP article seems really key to understanding the story:
If Obbink's relationship with the Greens had a fatal flaw, it was that he needed it to stay secret, whereas the Greens wanted to shout it to the world. "By far and away, Dirk is the most strategic friend and supporter of all that we are doing," Carroll wrote to Steve Green in a June 2011 email.
In negotiations with Hobby Lobby for the sale of the four "first-century" fragments, Obbink had demanded a set of highly irregular contract clauses: There was to be no public announcement of the acquisition; Obbink could never be named as the seller; and the fragments would stay in his office at Oxford for four years--after which there would be what he called "a kind of 'shared custody' with 'visitation rights.' "
Ordinarily the way the illicit antiquities market works is that both the dealer and the buyer have strong incentives to keep everything quiet. In this case the Hobby Lobby people wanted to draw attention to what they were doing to promote and legitimate their bible museum project, and that ended up blowing everything up.
The driver of the whole story seems to be the Greens' craving for status; they saw the other creationists with their lame kitschy plastic dinosaur show and wanted to distinguish themselves from the rubes by supporting Serious Inquiry. Yes. A Museum of the Bible. Real scholarship.
And, you know, it wouldn't be the thousandth time Oxford University was selling status to parvenus. It's...what it does. Although the challenge is maintaining the firewall between the scholarship, which is real, and the status-selling. This is where Oddink fucked up.
Interestingly, Green couldn't help himself but let the carney out with all the mummies on stoves and whipping out fake finds in front of goggling students. I think this is what Susan Sontag meant about camp being failed seriousness? All that striving for authenticity and...splurk!
Also, there's another twist; as well as the Greens trying to buy Oxford's imprimatur, Oddink bought that weirdo robber baron fake castle! He literally did the exact inverse of using your supermarket chain fortune to buy class; the for-reals Oxford don used his ill-gotten gains to buy authentic American vulgarity. It's an amazing, amazing story.
Even before you reflect on the idea of conservative evangelical thinkers fully buying into close reading and the linguistic turn in the hope of deconstructing their way to the original divinely inspired first draft, which sounds like Umberto Eco made it up.
The divinely inspired first draft of the Bible sounds like Umberto Eco made it up?
...yep, sounds plausible.
The evangelical theologians steeping themselves in Derrida, but yes, the draft itself would be pretty Eco-esque too.
There's only one weirdo robber baron fake castle I recognize. Super bizarre, though. You can get a real Scottish country house for high six-figures pounds. Cheaper than a flat in a fancy part of London.
"sounds like Umberto Eco made it up" describes too many true things.
the mummies on stoves and whipping out fake finds in front of goggling students
That part of the story (which was Carroll rather than Green) is totally bonkers. You manage to get hold of some otherwise-unknown fragments of Sappho, and you soak them in dishwater just to wow a bunch of undergrads (and, I guess, angle for a higher salary from Bay/lor)? Papyrus is durable stuff, obviously, but I would figure "do not unnecessarily immerse the Sappho" would be a strong rule of thumb.
Have long since lost touch, but back in the day I knew the two guys in the OP article from the Bay/lor classics dept pretty well, and ever since this story started coming out I've been worried that one of them was going to turn out to be caught up in it somehow: he was a papyrologist in the town where Obbink bought his infamous castle, had collaborated w/ Obbink since our grad school days, and was a devout evangelical who I knew had done some work with the Green collection; kind of made me wonder if he had been the one to link Obbink w/ the Greens in the first place? Relieved to see that was apparently not the case. What a thing to get caught up in, though.
When it is time to immerse the Sappho, you'll know.
62.1: He comes from the state that created Carhenge.
67-8: Just confessing I don't know the Wendy and Lisa bit without googling for the actual wording, sorry!
I don't even know who they are, so no worries.
There's a nearby Robber Baron Castle called Royal Orchard:
https://www.alexandernicholson.com/royal-orchard
Local legend is that it was built by the Scott family who made their fortunes selling toilet paper, but apparently it was a different Scott (a banker, natch).