The Manhattan District Attorney will return 17 rare books that were stolen in the 1980s to the heirs of John Hay Whitney and Betsey Whitney, a family of venture capitalists known for their philanthropy and rare art collection.
The books include handwritten love letters of the English romantic poet John Keats and an Oscar Wilde novel, “De Profundis,” which was written as a letter while Wilde was imprisoned for his romantic relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas.
“What in other cities and other times would have become just another closed case in the dustbin of history, today results in the return of irreplaceable pieces of literary history to their owners, and that is because here in New York, the art capital of the world,” Chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit Matthew Bogdanos said.
The books, which also include a signed first edition copy of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” were stolen from the Whitneys’ Long Island home in the 1980s during a period of non-stop home construction, according to Bogdanos. They reappeared in Manhattan in January 2025, when an individual who inherited them from his grandfather attempted to sell them to two separate rare book dealers.
Both dealers contacted law enforcement after discovering the books were listed as stolen on the Art Loss Register. The DA’s office issued warrants and seized the books. In 2026 a New York Supreme court judge authorized them to be turned over to the Whitney family.
On Monday, Whitney’s grandson, Peter di Bonaventura, accepted the books and announced his family’s intention to auction the books, which are collectively valued at nearly $3 million, and donate the proceeds.
“It’s wonderful that this unit exists to be able to recover these gems,” said di Bonaventura.
The investigation into how the books were stolen from the Whitney estate and the status of 11 other missing books is ongoing. What is clear is that the books were stolen from the Whitney’s Greentree estate on Long Island between 1982 and 1989, and the grandfather of the man who was seeking to trade the books in died in 2009.
The Keats collection includes 37 love letters to Fanny Brawne, his fiancée — eight of which were handwritten by the famed poet. One of which is the first letter he ever wrote to her. After Keats’ death from tuberculosis at the age of 25 in 1821, Brawne married another man, but she kept the letters, leaving them to her children in 1865.
“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain,” reads a line in the first letter that Keats wrote to his muse.
After the letters were compiled and sold at auction by Brawne’s children, a few years later their sale inspired Wilde to write a sonnet titled “On the Sale by Auction of Keats’s Love Letters.” At the time the letters were bid for 543 British pounds. They are currently valued at more than $2,000,000.
“Manhattan is a more vibrant place, when our museums, galleries, all that store these priceless works, follow up and do the right thing,” Bragg said.
