Foul Play at Harvard

One morning last fortnight, when inhabitants of Harvard's Lowell House entered their library, they discovered a curious act of vandalism: each of the 3,000 books on its shelves had been reversed, its back was to the wall, its title concealed. No book had been stolen.

Five men went to work turning the books around again. Carpenters put new locks on the library doors, fastened all windows. That night Yard cops were stationed outside to watch. Next morning locks and windows were found intact but the books had again been reversed, and for good measure, a portrait of Harvard's ex-President Abbott Lawrence Lowell was hung upside down.

By that time, undergraduate sleuths were in full cry. Lowell House's student chairman, blond, smart Senior Joseph P. Lyford, issued a list of five suspects. The Harvard Crimson put its heelers to work hunting clues. Few days later the 5,500 volumes in Winthrop House's library, a basement stronghold, were found reversed.

One morning last week the Crimson whooped: "MYSTERIOUS 'SNOOPER-MAN' CAUGHT RED-HANDED." Supporting its headline was a photograph. Pictured at the Lowell House bookshelves, with a pair of books in his hands, was Joseph Lyford. The Crimson's story: Hidden in the Lowell library night before, a Crimson photographic candidate had seen Lyford unlock the door precisely at 12:10 and begin reversing books, had snapped his camera.

Harvard gasped, and Joseph Lyford strode into the Crimson office with blood in his eye. He quickly established that the Crimson itself had pulled a hoax: it had faked its picture by posing someone else at the bookshelves and tacking on the body a photograph of Lyford's head.

Next day the Crimson, ignoring Joseph Lyford's threat to sue it for libel, made no mention of its hoax but reported that book-turning had broken out anew, this time in the Adams House library. Harvard was still baffled by its most mysterious pranking in many a year.

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