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 Attorneys for a Pittsburgh rare book dealer accused of selling millions of dollars worth of items stolen from the Carnegie Library are fighting the district attorney’s motion to freeze his bank accounts, court records show. 
 
 A motion filed by prosecutors and signed by Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas Judge David Cashman froze two bank accounts related to John Schulman’s Caliban Book Shop, arguing that the funds might eventually be needed to pay restitution. 
 
 Schulman faces 20 charges, most of them felonies, including forgery, theft and conspiracy for his alleged part in a scheme that saw $8 million worth of rare books smuggled from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Oliver Room over nearly two decades. 
 
 The shop owner is alleged to have dealt the books on Ebay and other online outlets. The books were allegedly handed off to Schulman by Gregory Priore, the library employee tasked for 25 years with keeping watch over the Oliver Room, which housed the library’s oldest and rarest items. 
 
 The prosecution also sought to freeze Priore’s bank accounts. He faces charges of receiving stolen property, conspiracy, forgery and library theft. 
 
 A motion filed Wednesday by Schulman’s attorney, Robert Del Greco Jr., challenged the bank account freeze. 
 
 Del Greco argued in the motion that defense experts will likely need access to those accounts, and Schulman will need to pay employees and bills, including rent, his mortgage and other costs. 
 
 A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Monday. 
 
 Preliminary hearings for both Schulman and Priore are scheduled for Aug. 1. 
 
 Detectives with the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office began investigating the Oliver Room in June 2017 after a scheduled appraisal found “multiple items as being missing or damaged,” according to the criminal complaint filed Friday against Priore and Schulman. A closer inspection comparing the room’s contents with the last appraisal done in 1991 found that about 320 items were missing from the room and 16 were vandalized by the removal of certain portions of the book, according to the complaint. 
 
 Police said a search of the Caliban warehouse in Wilkinsburg turned up a number of items taken from the Oliver Room. Receipts seized from the warehouse included 54 for stolen items. Ebay listings by Schulman under the user name “rarebookstore” showed dozens of sales of items that matched those missing from the Oliver Room, according to the complaint. 
 
 Megan Guza is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Megan at 412-380-8519, mguza@tribweb.com or via Twitter @meganguzaTrib. ||||| Hang on for a minute...we're trying to find some more stories you might like. Close 
 
 According to a criminal complaint filed after his arrest on Friday, Gregory Priore has taken razor blades to the pages of rare books for the past 20 years and walked them from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to a shop on North Craig Street — a whimsical, crowded rare book store that smells of antique paper called Caliban. 
 
 The complaint says Priore, the primary archivist and manager of the rare books room at CLP, would sell his goods to John Schulman, the owner of Caliban, who would turn it all for a profit. 
 
 Their scheme was successful until it came crashing down in August, when authorities conducted a nine-day search of Caliban’s warehouse in Wilkinsburg. In the single search, authorities say they recovered 42 stolen items valued at $258,945. 
 
 The two were arrested on Friday on counts of theft, criminal conspiracy and forgery. Between individual pages and entire volumes, CLP values the stolen material at over $8 million, making the heist one of the largest in history. 
 
 It became obvious materials were missing from CLP in April 2017, when Pall Mall Art Advisors began an appraisal of the William R. Oliver Special Collections Room at the central library. The appraisers found that about 320 of the Oliver Room’s 30,000 books, atlases and other items were missing – and 16 were missing pages. A criminal investigation began in late June 2017 after administrators at the library filed a complaint. 
 
 Priore was appointed sole archivist and manager of the Oliver Room in 1992 and was responsible for granting access and supervising visitors to the room, including other CLP staff members. He admitted to investigators that he approached Schulman about selling items from the room in the ‘90s but that Schulman later “goaded” him to continue. 
 
 According to the complaint Priore would remove maps, plates and books from the Oliver Room and Schulman would buy them from him personally and sell them through Caliban. Priore would receive between $500 to $3,000, depending on the item. Priore received over $100,000 in checks from Caliban, and deposited $17,000 cash into his account from 2010-17. The affidavit also says Schulman sometimes requested specific items from the Oliver Room. 
 
 Sometimes it would be months between transactions — other times Priore would make several deliveries in the span of a few weeks. Priore said he believed the last time he sold Oliver Room items to Schulman was in December 2016, before he learned the appraisal was due to take place in the coming year. Priore denied ever selling other items to any other book dealers and said he only sold to Schulman. 
 
 Administrators told investigators that no item from the Oliver Room was ever requested or authorized to be removed from listed holdings for sale purposes, according to the affidavit. Nothing identified as stolen or removed was ever authorized for sale to Schulman or Caliban. CLP had sold outdated or duplicate items to Schulman before, but nothing from the Oliver Room. 
 
 Detectives found over the course of the investigation that several of the missing items had been sold or advertised for sale by Caliban Book Shop, including the 17th-century book The Merchants Mappe of Commerce and plates also from that century titled “America…The Latest and Most Accurate Description of the New World.” 
 
 About seven items valued at $1,152,100 have been officially recovered as of July 2018, including a copy of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton, which was valued at over $800,000. ||||| 
 
 A patron steps out of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh on Friday. Authorities have charged a library archivist and a co-owner of an antique bookstore with stealing millions of dollars’ worth of material from the library. (Gene J. Puskar/AP) 
 
 Gravity. Constitutional democracy. The free market. 
 
 Once, sketches of these profound ideas were preserved and made available for viewing by appointment weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in a third-floor room at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. 
 
 That is, until the collection’s archivist plucked them from the shelves, authorities say, and deposited them at a rare bookshop on his way home from work. Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” worth $900,000, vanished. So did “The Journal of Major George Washington” and a 1787 first-edition book that carried Thomas Jefferson’s signature. “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith, too. 
 
 The archivist, Gregory Priore, 61, and the bookshop’s co-owner, John Schulman, 54, stand accused of stealing rare books, illustrations, photographs and maps — worth more than $8 million — over a 20-year period. They were charged last week with theft, conspiracy, forgery, receiving stolen property and other counts in the removal of 320 items and the destruction of 16 others. Together they “cannibalized” the collection, according to an affidavit filed by the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office. About $1 million worth of material, including Newton’s “Principia,” has been recovered, but other records, including Washington’s journal, are still missing. 
 
 “Greed came over me,” Priore told investigators, according to the affidavit. “I did it, but Schulman spurred me on.” 
 
 Robert G. Del Greco Jr., who represents Schulman, said in an emailed statement, “The complaint sets forth serious allegations, and we are treating them as such.” He called his client a “titan in the book community.” Attorneys representing Priore could not be reached for comment. 
 
 On Wednesday attorneys for Schulman fought the district attorney’s motion to freeze two of his bank accounts — a measure that prosecutors said would preserve money for restitution in the event of a conviction. In a countermotion, Schulman’s attorneys said Caliban Book Shop, which does business about a block from the library, is his family’s only source of income and supports his wife, who is a co-owner, as well as two sons. A hearing about the frozen bank accounts is scheduled for Monday, according to local news reports. 
 
 Schulman dealt the purloined items on eBay and other online platforms, according to investigators, though it is not clear how much money he allegedly made from the transactions. Between 2010 and 2017, meanwhile, Priore garnered roughly $117,000 in checks from the bookstore, authorities have determined, and he purportedly deposited $17,000 in cash over the same time period. 
 
 One of Priore’s accounts was also frozen. He became the sole archivist of the William R. Oliver Special Collections Room, stocked with about 30,000 items, in 1992. A desk at the front of the room allowed him to survey visitors, who deposited their belongings in storage lockers before perusing tracts of John Calvin, treatises of Edmund Burke or prints of the American West by Edward Curtis. 
 
 The library placed Priore on leave in April 2017 and fired him in June, after an audit revealed discrepancies with the holdings documented in a 1991 survey, according to the affidavit. The locks were changed, and the room remains closed. 
 
 A complaint led detectives to open a criminal investigation that summer. They executed search warrants at Priore’s residence as well as at the Caliban Book Shop and a Caliban warehouse just outside the city. Priore told detectives he had first approached Schulman in the late 1990s about selling some items from the Oliver Room. He said he had used an X-Acto knife to remove maps and illustrations from books, according to the affidavit, placing small items in manila folders and simply rolling up larger ones before he walked out of the building. The archivist told detectives that he used the money to stay “afloat” — to pay his rent and make tuition payments for his children. “I loved that room, my whole working life,” he said, according to the affidavit. 
 
 Art appraisers helped detectives identify scores of stolen items at the Caliban warehouse, material that has since been returned to the Oliver Room. The search also turned up a stamp used to mark “withdrawn” on books, giving their removal from the library the appearance of legitimacy — a practice that Schulman told detectives he had given up because he felt it “was not the correct thing to do,” according to the affidavit. But there lay the stamp. 
 
 
 
 The Caliban Book Shop, in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, is co-owned by John Schulman. He is charged with theft, among other counts, in the disappearance of about 300 items from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. (Gene J. Puskar/AP) 
 
 Some of the most precious items traveled twisted paths to big-ticket sales. The affidavit charts how Caliban sold “De la France et des Etats-Unis,” the first-edition book signed by Jefferson, to Bartleby’s Books for $5,000 in 2013. It changed hands twice more and landed with Bauman Rare Books, which listed it online for $95,000. When informed of its origins, Bauman turned over the book to detectives, according to the affidavit. 
 
 Peter Harrington, who sells rare books in London, bought Newton’s “Principia” from Caliban in 2013, based on “made-up documentation” that it had been properly obtained from the library. He managed to recover the book from a private buyer and has returned it to Pittsburgh. 
 
 “Libraries need to be responsible for making sure they actually look after their books,” he said in a phone interview, calling the alleged theft especially surprising because it appears to have been an inside job. “It’s a breach of trust.” 
 
 If the valuation turns out to be accurate, the alleged library theft in Pittsburgh would be one of the largest in history. 
 
 James Richard Shinn was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1982 after disguising himself as a professor and amassing mainly travel and natural history books, worth more than $100,000, from college libraries all over the country. In 2006, E. Forbes Smiley III was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for stealing nearly 100 maps, valued at $3 million, including 20 from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 
 
 These heists pale in comparison with the one detectives believe was executed by the archivist and the co-owner of Caliban, a bookshop that shares a name with the complex Shakespeare character described as a “villain” and a “poor credulous monster.” 
 
 In a statement, the Carnegie Library said it was “deeply disappointed that two people we knew well and trusted are at the center of this case.”
– When appraisers discovered $8 million in rare books missing from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, investigators knew where to turn. As archivist and manager of the William R. Oliver Special Collections Room for 25 years, Gregory Priore let visitors in—and, allegedly, let some 320 items out. According to police, Priore, 61, agreed to sell stolen titles, maps, and plates, along with pages from 16 books, to John Schulman, owner of rare book store Caliban. Authorities say Priore received $100,000 in checks from Caliban and $17,000 in cash between 2010 and 2017, when the thefts were uncovered, per Pitt News. After missing items were found to have been sold by Caliban, a warehouse search uncovered 42 stolen items worth $260,000, according to police. A copy of a book by Isaac Newton, valued at more than $800,000, has also been recovered. "Greed came over me," Priore allegedly told investigators of what the Washington Post calls one of the largest library thefts in history, involving a still-missing book by George Washington and another signed by Thomas Jefferson. According to an affidavit, Priore said he first suggested the scheme in the 1990s to Schulman, who'd legally purchased other items from the library, "but Schulman spurred me on." The 54-year-old Schulman, whose shop is a block from the library, requested specific items from Priore, per police. Both men were charged last week with multiple counts, including theft, conspiracy, and forgery. Schulman has also had his bank accounts frozen, reports the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In a statement, the Carnegie Library says it is "deeply disappointed that two people we knew well and trusted are at the center of this case." (Book thieves also rappel from skylights.)