Editing Widener Library (section)

===<span id="williams"></span>Joel C. Williams===

[[File:HarvardCollegeLibrary HardLaborBookplate.jpg|thumb|right|upright=0.8|[[Bookplate]] placed in 2504 books{{r|crime_dont}}{{r|bookplates}}]]

In 1931 former graduate student Joel C. Williams was arrested after attempting to sell two Harvard library books to a local book dealer. [[Charles Apted]] and other Harvard officials visited Williams' home{{r|crime_indict}}
where (posing as "book buyers" to spare the feelings of Williams' family){{ran|B|p=88}}
they found thousands{{r|crime_indict}} of books which Williams had stolen over the years,{{r|klepts|p=D}} many badly damaged. The "absolutely crazy" Williams would "go to students studying in Widener and ask them what course they were taking. He would then borrow all the books for that course in the library. Then no one could get any to study", library official John E. Shea later recalled.{{NoteTag
|{{r|crime_1951}}
{{anchor|shea}}John Shea was for forty years Widener's "guardian and familiar spirit". His mother had been a college "[[wikt:biddy#English-irishmaid|biddy]]" who (he said) "did professor [[Charles Townsend Copeland|C.&nbsp;T. Copeland's]] laundry for years",{{r|crime_1951}}
and he began his own Harvard career in 1905 as a Gore Hall coatchecker.
By his 1954 retirement as Widener's Stacks Superin{{shy}}tendent, he was "perhaps the last of the legendary College characters",{{r|AZ|p=58}} renowned not only for leaving "no stone unthrown"{{mdashb}}as he himself put it{{mdashb}}in locating mis-shelved or otherwise errant books, but also for his "genius for such malaprop{{shy}}isms [which] in fact, were generally the ''[[wikt:mot juste#Noun|mot juste]]''". These included references to "venereal blinds" and "osculating fans" in the Catalog Room, equipment that had "outlived its uselessness", a gift of a bottle of wine "as a momentum", and mention that Widener's head janitor "has a maniac for sweeping the basement."{{hsp}}{{r|sheavian}}
}}

Despite the misleading{{r|ask_disturbing}} implication of bookplates placed in the 2504{{r|klepts|p=D}} recovered books, Harvard's charges against Williams were dropped after he was indicted on book-theft charges in another jurisdic{{shy}}tion, which imposed a sentence of hard labor.{{r|thieves}} After the unrelated arrest of a book-theft ring operating at Harvard, there was a "noticeable increase in the number of missing books secretly returned to the library", the ''Transcript'' reported in 1932.{{ran|B|p=89}}