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"In the end," says Harvard college library security officer Louis Derby, "we are entrusting the users of the library with responsibility for maintaining our collection, their collection." Sometimes that trust is conspicuously rewarded, as the following anecdote may illustrate.

Librarians remove books from the open stacks and put them in Houghton Library or the Harvard Depository when they are judged to have become too valuable to leave at risk. Many volumes on University Library shelves were common stuff in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries when acquired; slowly they have become collectors' items.

Sometimes appreciation in value is rapid. Daniel Wenzke '98 sent an urgent letter to librarian Eva Jonas at the Museum of Comparative Zoology last September. "I write to you as a Harvard undergraduate who has spent many delightful afternoons in your library poring over tales of the great bwanas that roamed the African continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries....I don't need to tell you that Harvard's collections are amazing, or that many books sit amongst their counterparts as diamonds in the rough, immeasurably valuable in comparison, both for their age and their scarcity. I do, however, feel compelled to urge you to secure three of these incredibly rare books from general circulation into special collections."

Wenzke was most concerned about a first edition of J.H. Patterson's The Man-eaters of Tsavo. "A big production movie depicting Patterson's misadventures with the Tsavo lions is scheduled to be released on Oct. 11, less than two weeks away. The movie, entitled The Ghost and the Darkness, stars Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas, and is sure to...dramatically increase the value of your already priceless books."

Jonas took Wenzke's advice, and he donated a recent edition of the book for use in general circulation.

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