On a chilly March evening while out for a walk with his dog Sparky on the North Side, Robert Miller came upon some books scattered on the sidewalk.
Even in the dim light, Miller could see that these books, seven of them, were not the flimsy, glossy kind destined for a dumpster or part of one of those front-yard free library huts.
Miller, a retired Social Security administrator, peered closer. The books were sturdy, luxuriously bound in a material the color of antique ivory. The pages were thick and rough to the touch. He could tell that the books were old — very old.
“I look around, there’s nobody there and they are just lying on the ground,” Miller, 75, recalled recently. “They are beautiful books.”
He quickly stuffed the smaller volumes into his coat pockets, tucking the larger ones under his arms as he continued walking in his North Center neighborhood.
And as he walked, his imagination ran wild. Perhaps they’d been stolen and then thrown away when the thief failed to find a buyer, Miller at first considered.
“My working theory was that someone was angry at someone [else] and took their books and threw them away,” Miller said.
It would be another eight months before Miller learned the true story: that the books belonged to an 88-year-old North Side bachelor who’d spent his life traveling and collecting letters, toy soldiers, military garb and books — so many books that he’d lost track of how many he owned.
And it took the patient sleuthing of a rare books and manuscripts curator from the Newberry Library to reunite the lost books — some printed decades before Shakespeare penned his first play — with their owner earlier this month.
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, the Newberry curator, remembers receiving an email from Miller shortly after he’d found the books . He told her he wanted help returning them to their rightful owner.
“Honestly, I thought it might be a fraud or some kind of scam initially,” Karr Schmidt said.
But Miller faithfully responded to every request the curator made, sending her image after image of the pages inside the books, which she determined were rare volumes made in Germany during the Renaissance — the oldest printed in 1525.
“And [Miller] had a dog named Sparky,” Karr Schmidt joked.
Books date as far back as 1525
The books — written in Latin, French and German — were printed in Germany between 1525 and 1725. Several of them deal with the Protestant Reformation — the 16th Century movement that splintered the Catholic Church. The books — and the hand-written notes in the margins — give people like Karr Schmidt a remarkable window into the fierce debates of the day about the divisions within the Church. Someone has scrawled a giant X across the title page of a book written by the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus, who eventually came out against the Reformation and its best-known proponent, the German theologian, Martin Luther.
“It’s almost a viral sort of moment where print is really raising Martin Luther’s status, but also people trying to cut him down at the same time,” Karr Schmidt said.
The lost books are in “beautiful shape, she said, adding, “Almost all of them are in the original bindings.”
Those bindings were likely made of pig skin, some stamped with intricate floral designs.
But there were no markings in the books that pointed to a recent owner — either a private one or perhaps something showing they belonged to a university. Karr Schmidt scoured the internet, reaching out to antiquarian booksellers, both in the United States and overseas. She came up empty.
Then three weeks ago, about eight months after Miller found the books, Karr Schmidt came across an image of the binding of one of the lost volumes posted on the website of an Austrian book dealer. The dealer, who knew Karr Schmidt, agreed to give her the contact information for the man who’d bought that book back in 2021. It was Marvin Rawski, a lifelong Chicagoan.
Rawski, a Lane Tech High School graduate, spent almost three decades doing aviation electrical work at O’Hare Airport.
His passion, what still gives this octogenarian’s life purpose, is collecting things. Rawski lives on the top floor of a North Center two-flat in a dimly lit apartment cluttered with books. What little light there is comes from a few old reading lamps, one with a bare incandescent bulb.
He has books on shelves, books in stacks of gray “archive” boxes, an island of books in his bedroom. He keeps his clothes in shopping bags so that he can store even more books in his bedroom dresser. He’s happy to show a visitor his collection, but he doesn’t brag or display his treasures prominently.
Last week, a suitcase lay on his sofa — from a recent trip to France to buy more books.
“It’s wonderful to have things that are hundreds and hundreds of years old in your hand,” he said during a chat last week. “The quest is always interesting. One book leads to another book.”
Rawski’s oldest books date back to the mid-1400s, he said.
Rawski’s relentless hunt for books meant he had no time to search for the things of a more conventional life. He never married.
“I was too busy running around collecting something, and collecting a wife was not one of the things I wanted to do,” he said.
The trouble with owning so many books — “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds,” he said — is that Rawski doesn’t always know when he’s missing a few. Last March, he was doing a little tidying, getting rid of what he thought were all boxes of magazines and periodicals. He dropped a box on the sidewalk while taking it out to the trash. He said he would have bent down to retrieve it, but his back ached and so he left it for later.
When he went back, the box had disappeared.
A ‘very embarrassing situation’
It wasn’t until earlier this month that Karr Schmidt reached out to Rawski, through an email to his goddaughter, to say that the library had some of his books (he didn’t have an active email account at the time).
“I was flabbergasted because as far as I was concerned, I was not missing any books,” Rawski said.
He described it as a “very embarrassing situation.”
To show his gratitude, he decided to donate two of the books to the museum.
“It was a very nice thing they did for me. They could have kept” all the books, he said.
Miller — who has yet to meet the book collector even though he lives in Rawski’s neighborhood — said he’s delighted the books are in safe hands once again.
“As lovely as they are and as interesting as they are, I felt they should be someplace where they could be properly cared for and preserved,” he said.
On Friday, Rawski was peeling the wrapping paper from a small book bound in red leather that he’d bought on his most recent trip abroad.
Was he glad to have the lost books back in his possession? Yes. Does he now have them safely stored away? Sort of.
“If you were to ask me to show you one of those books right now, I would be hard-pressed to quickly find them.”