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A collection of stolen rare books worth millions of dollars, including letters by John Keats and work by Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, is being returned to its owners’ heirs decades after being taken from a New York home.
Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg will hand the 17 works, including a bound collection of Keats’ love letters to his fiancée Fanny Brawne, to the family of John Hay Whitney and Betsey Whitney on Monday.
The books, which were stolen from a home on Long Island in the 1980s, were found last year when an unnamed person tried to sell them to rare book dealers in New York, who contacted law enforcement.
“Manhattan is the cultural capital of the world,” Bragg said. “We will not allow our borough to be a center for trafficked art and antiquities.”
The heirs plan to auction the books, together valued at nearly $3mn, and donate the proceeds.
Hay Whitney, a second world war veteran, was the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, the president of the Museum of Modern Art, and ambassador to the UK. He died in 1982. At least 28 books were stolen between 1982 and 1989.
The district attorney’s office said last year, a person attempted to sell 17 of the books to B&B Rare Books and Adam Weinberger Rare Books in Manhattan, saying he had inherited them from his grandfather.
The dealers saw the books were listed on a register of lost work and contacted authorities. The office is still investigating what happened to the remaining 11 volumes.
The collection includes 37 Keats love letters, dated between 1819 and 1820, which are valued at about $2mn.
There is also a signed copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and a first edition of Four Letters by Oscar Wilde that were not included in De Profundis, the 50,000-word letter he wrote to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, while imprisoned for “acts of gross indecency”.