The investigation lasted two years and crossed state lines, finally ending with the conviction of James L. Brubaker, who was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $23,000 in restitution – most of it to Western.

The Western Front sat down with Lopresti to talk about the thefts.

What material did the thief mostly take from the Western library?
The thief stole mostly from the Congressional Serial Set. I am not saying we have a complete set. There is no complete set in the world. We had some volumes going all the way back to the 1830s. The ones that I thought were the most likely to be stolen I had already locked up decades ago, but I was not pessimistic enough.

How did you realize material was missing from the library?
If it hadn’t been for Julie Fitzgerald [a fellow librarian at Western] the guy would still be out there. Julie was in the Government Documents Department making sure the students had put their material away properly and she found an older gentleman looking at publications from the Congressional Serial Set.

While everyone is welcome to use the library, she thought his behavior was a little suspicious because he was paying a lot of attention to the people around him, but he wasn’t doing anything she could report. But this is the most important thing that happened in the whole investigation, the following week she went looking for the books he had been looking at and she did not find them back on the shelf. She eventually found them on the shelves in piles — upside-down, out of order —and she realized pages were missing from them.

We immediately called the University Police and Sgt. Bianca Smith came to investigate. She was the other most important member of the crew.

Why did the thief steal from Western? Were any other university libraries in Washington state hit?
I have not talked to the man, so I do not know why he did it, but based on his track record he seemed to be mostly interested in old maps – things that have some value that he could sell on, for example, eBay.

What did you do once you realized books had been tampered with?
We notified other libraries, we notified map dealers, because I think the worst thing you can do in a case like this is keep quiet about it, which is very tempting to do. What we wound up doing was looking on eBay, thinking that this would be an easy place to sell these things.

How did you catch the thief?
The assumption was these were for sale. You wouldn’t collect 600 publications to put on your wall, most likely.

EBay allows anybody to put out a permanent search. We put up about 50 permanent searches, and in a month I e-mailed my boss and said I think I know who it is, because this guy had more pages that look like ours on his site than the rest of eBay combined. Eventually I got permission to try and buy two publications from him that looked like ours.

If the request had come from Bellingham bad things could have happened, so I had two friends on the East Coast buy maps from him and send them to University Police.

Then Sgt. Smith sent them to the Washington State Crime Lab and they were able to confirm physically that both of those had been torn out of our books. So we had physical evidence that the gentleman involved, James L. Brubaker, who was from Montana, had stolen our maps.

What was the most frustrating part about the investigation?
We spent an entire year finding an agency that would be willing to prosecute. Every day I would come in and see things on eBay that would look like things that could have been ours, some of them being sold, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

How was the case resolved?
Several months later he was arrested and convicted. And to the best of my knowledge he has not paid back a penny to anyone. Ninety percent of that money would have gone to us. However, the Department of Justice contacted us and asked for a victim’s statement. We wrote up a statement to what had happened to us because of all this and they wound up sending us about 150 pages that appeared to be matches with ours. And eventually we will put them all back in the books. They also found four books that might have come from our library and we got those books back as well.

To hear the whole story, don’t miss Lopresti’s presentation on the subject at noon today, Oct. 5 at Village Books, 1200 11th St.