52 years later, Marshall Bank’s effort to get Boatwright Memorial Library to protect its rare books is still getting press coverage.
Last year, amidst construction changes, I decided to track down the books Bank had checked out and held hostage, with an eye to doing an exhibit. Working with descriptions and low-quality images from scanned 1970s newspapers, I first created a list of books that were definitively mentioned in the news coverage or could be seen in an accompanying photo.
Frost, Robert. West-Running Brook. 1928. Inscribed to Westhampton College from the author. 
Tabb, John B. Later Lyrics. The last stamp is from May 1974, we can assume that was when Bank checked this book out to hold it hostage. 
Frost, Robert. Selected Poems. This volume contains a bookplate: Edith Goode Memorial Browsing Room, as well as Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” in his own hand, “For Westhampton College.”
In a smaller collection, this would have been the end of it, but there were a few twists along the way. Many of the news articles referenced two signed volumes of Robert Frost’s: West-Running Brook and Selected Poems. Among the over 15,000 volumes are two copies of Frost’s West-Running Brook, and they are both signed. Luckily a Collegian article mentioned it was inscribed to Westhampton College, thereby eliminating the volume that just said ‘Richmond 1929.’
Fun Fact: The University Librarian at the time threatened to have Bank’s final grades withheld until the books were returned.
In a 1975 follow-up article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Bank is pictured outside BML’s Tower, and even without context, the books he is pictured with are much more modern than the ones he held hostage in 1974. This is because the library had received an anonymous $1,000 donation from someone who supported Bank’s efforts, and in the year after the booknapping, Bank worked to use that money to expand the modern poetry segment of the collection, and he is pictured with those books outside the tower.
Now that the ground floor has opened, I was able to use my research to mount an exhibit of the books involved in both stages of Bank’s library involvement, and when University Communications reached out about reviving an article about the booknapping, I had the books handy and was able to facilitate their moment in the spotlight. The exact volumes he held hostage, along with certain volumes he collected as part of the “Bank Modern Poetry Collection,” will be on display outside the Galvin Rare Book Reading Room until the end of the semester.