Rare Books Stolen From Ex-Moma President's Home Recovered After Nearly 40 Years

Seventeen rare books and manuscripts once owned by John Hay Whitney and Betsey Cushing Whitney are being returned to the family's descendants after a decades-old theft from the couple's Long Island estate, Greentree. The recovered group, valued at more than $2 million, includes a gilt morocco-bound portfolio of eight handwritten letters from English Romantic poet John Keats to Frances“Fanny” Brawne, the most valuable item in the cache.

The Manhattan District Attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit said the books were among 28 believed stolen from Greentree nearly 40 years ago. The missing volumes came to light in 1989, when the family realized the books had disappeared and contacted the Nassau County Police Department. The investigation has remained open, and authorities say the search for the remaining items continues.

Among the other recovered works are a first edition of Aleister Crowley's erotic poetry compilation, estimated at about $6,000; a signed first-edition copy of James Joyce's 1905 experimental novel *Finnegan's Wake*, also estimated at $6,000; and four letters by Oscar Wilde excluded from *De Profundis* (1905), estimated at $2,000. Together, the books offer a compact portrait of the Whitneys' literary holdings, shaped in part by Helen Hay Whitney, John Hay Whitney's mother, who collected rare books and left him hundreds of volumes after her death in 1927.

The recovery began last January, when an unnamed individual tried to sell 17 of the stolen books to two Manhattan rare-book dealers, B &B Rare Books and Adam Weinberger Rare Books, saying the books had been inherited from a grandfather. Both dealers alerted authorities after the titles appeared in the Art Loss Register. Since then, the district attorney's office has executed six search warrants.

John Hay Whitney, born in 1905, later became president of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), served as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, and led the New York Tribune. He and Betsey Cushing Whitney were also major collectors of 19th- and 20th-century European painting, with works by Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Gustav Klimt among their holdings. The Whitney heirs plan to auction the recovered books and donate the proceeds, turning a long-buried theft into a public recovery with a second life in the market.

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