Thieves Loot National Archives of U.S. History : Crime: Filchers are as likely to take works about Nobel laureates as auto-repair manuals.

Charles Merrill Mount is an author, painter and self-described “Edwardian gentleman” who holds history and art in high esteem.

In 1987, the law got less of his respect.

Mount sold 25 items--including nine letters by the 19th-Century artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, famous for a portrait of his mother--to a bookstore in Boston. A few weeks after the $20,000 transaction, Mount tried to peddle notes by Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.

This time, federal agents were waiting. Alerted by proprietors of the shop, agents arrested Mount and subsequently charged the 59-year-old resident of Washington with purloining 400 documents from the Library of Congress and National Archives.

For Mount, a portrait painter of some distinction who also had published three volumes of art history, the tableau turned unremittingly bleak. He went to jail. The pilfered letters went back to the stacks. At sentencing, a federal judge chastised Mount in a thunderous voice. “What a miserable waste of a life,” said the judge.

Archivists rejoiced that the items had been recovered and shouted Hallelujah again in February when officials at Sotheby’s, the upscale New York City auction house, retrieved four Walt Whitman notebooks--and a paper butterfly--missing from the Library of Congress for 51 years. One Whitman buff said he “trembled” at the news.

Investigators are looking for six companion Whitman notebooks also among pieces shipped to Ohio for safekeeping during World War II and found to have been stolen later. A half-century may seem a long time for letters to be lost but time, itself, is not the problem. In the world of papers and documents, the ages ever await. So do the crooks.

Three years ago, authorities collared Stephen Carrie Blumberg, 42, now considered the most ambitious book thief in American history. Blumberg, who preferred the alias “McGue,” snatched more than 24,000 rare volumes and manuscripts from 327 university libraries in 45 states and Canada. USC was among his major victims. The stash weighed 19 tons and was believed worth as much as $20 million.

He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but was convicted and sentenced to six years.

Smaller-scale capers are common. In the 1970s, two defrocked Byzantine priests confessed that they were part of a conspiracy to steal ancient atlases and maps from the Yale University library, and, last year, nearly two dozen medieval manuscripts were taken from the Columbia University rare book collection.

The New York Public Library lost a portion of a cherished stamp collection in 1977 when thieves opened metal frames with an acetylene torch and grabbed 153 items. Half have been located by the FBI. “The other half remain at large,” said Rodney Phillips, the library’s associate director for the humanities.

As the Mount case reveals, the Library of Congress is vulnerable too.

Pilfering became so widespread three years ago that James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, halted public access to general circulation stacks--items now must be fetched for readers by staff members--and instituted $2.3 million in security measures that seemed more akin to the CIA.

Billington ordered video cameras and theft-detection devices installed, cage-like grids built around stacks, a redesign of reading rooms, and vigorous inspections of purses and briefcases at entrances and exits.

“It’s a sign of the times,” said George Needham, executive director of the Public Library Assn. in Chicago. And of course the Library of Congress expects increasingly to deliver information by way of computer--a convenience for the public, another safeguard for the institution.

Authorities say they had no choice. Reporting to a joint congressional committee in 1993, Billington said 300,000 books were missing and 500 “mutilated”--pages or pictures excised. The Library of Congress had more than 108 million items, he said, but the disappearance of a small mountain of material was alarming. “Direct access had inflicted a terrible loss,” Billington said.

The public proved greedy, if eclectic in its tastes. Filchers were as likely to take works about Martin Luther King Jr., the Nobel Prize winner, as selections by Stephen King, the “bard of bad dreams.” Folks lifted auto-repair manuals and meditations on the occult.

Users complained that closing the stacks punished the many for the misdeeds of a few and was no way to run a library that belonged to the people. Officials were sympathetic but said the institution was under siege and its collection of books was in jeopardy. “If you’ve lost it, you’ve lost it,” said Library of Congress spokeswoman Jill Brett.

Security was always tight in the so-called “special collections” of the Library of Congress--repositories of documents and rare texts--and pilferage was minor compared to the general stacks. But even in archival sections, there have been notable losses.

Most prominent is an extensive collection of Felix Frankfurter papers missing for nearly a quarter-century--including correspondence between the renowned former U.S. Supreme Court justice and President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Gone, too, are letters exchanged by the painter Whistler and his biographers, Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell, and the correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt with Leonard Wood, the former Rough Rider and Army chief of staff. A letter to Wood from the artist John Singer Sargent has also been heisted.

David Wigdor, assistant chief of the manuscript division of the Library of Congress, said that archival material often gives subtle shape to historical events and that, even if documents have modest value as collectibles, thieves are depleting the national treasure nonetheless.

The impact of archival theft should trouble everyone in a free society--but, says book expert Katharine Leab, Americans are exceedingly oblivious when it comes to such matters.