NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) – A rare letter penned by author Lewis Carroll in 1890 recently surfaced on the Internet auction site eBay, where the seller detailed everything from its beautiful signature to its distinctive purple ink.

To a Yale University librarian, however, it all sounded a bit too familiar for comfort.

Now, police at the Ivy League university are investigating when and how the valuable letter was purloined from its Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The search for the culprit has taken police down a proverbial rabbit hole as they try to track the letter’s path from Yale to a Utah-based collector, who purchased it from another seller without knowing it was stolen.

Carroll, whose given name was Charles Dodgson, was a teacher and minister best known for his 1865 children’s classic, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

One of Carroll’s favorite young friends, Alice Liddell, inspired the famous tale of a girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole into a land of satire, inverted logic and nonsense.

Winifred MacDonald, another young friend of Carroll’s, is believed to have helped immortalize Alice with her praise for the early version of the manuscript and her family’s urgings to Carroll to publish it, according to literary scholars.

The letter stolen from Yale was written to MacDonald, by then a grown woman, in 1890 to thank her for sending a photograph of herself in costume. Yale acquired that letter and about 25 others in 1971 when it purchased the papers of her father, Scottish writer George MacDonald.

The eBay ad, which has since been pulled off the site and deleted from its archives, featured a picture of Carroll and an image of two of the letter’s four pages.

It promises authenticity, but glosses over provenance: “Originally obtained from Whitlock Farm book barn in Bethany, CT, in 1999,” is all it says.

Police called that business, officially known as Whitlock Farm Booksellers, after learning from library officials that the letter had been stolen. Norman Pattis, an attorney who purchased the book store last year, said neither his records nor those of the previous owners showed any sign of the letter passing through the shop.

Police say it might have been lumped in with a larger transaction.

“This is every used bookstore owner’s nightmare, to be told an item you bought and sold in good faith was stolen,” Pattis said. “The question of provenance is always an open question. How do you know what it is? And if it came to you from a legitimate channel?”

Officers believe it might have passed through several owners in the undetermined number of years since it was stolen from Yale’s collection.

“Tracing it back all the hands it has gone through since it left Yale – that’s going to be the difficult part,” said Yale police Lt. Mike Patten.

The collector who offered it for sale on eBay returned it to Yale after learning that the university was the rightful owner.

The Carroll letter is not the only item stolen from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in recent years.

Renowned dealer E. Forbes Smiley III, of Chilmark, Mass., is scheduled to start serving federal and state prison time in January after admitting he stole nearly 100 rare and expensive maps from libraries worldwide, including the Beinecke library.

He was caught after a Yale librarian discovered a razor blade on the floor near the spot where he had been perusing books of maps.

—

Information from: The Hartford Courant, http://www.courant.com

AP-ES-11-27-06 0100EST