Impatient, Visbeck grabbed the top of the case out of the man's hand, opened it and removed the three books, according to a police report. The owner then put his body between Cole and the door.

A struggle--each man has claimed the other started it--ensued. According to Visbeck's account, Cole shoved Visbeck out of the way and made a run for the door.

Visbeck managed to grab the case again, but Cole didn't let him hold on. Instead, the Harvard Ph.D opened his mouth and bit Visbeck's left thumb, drawing blood. Visbeck let go, and Cole drove away.

In subsequent interviews, Cole told a Harvard police investigator and Barnstable County Police Det. Mark Delaney that he had bitten Visbeck. But he said he did so only after Visbeck assaulted him. He denied taking any books, according to police reports.

The case is now before a judge. On July 11, Cole pleaded not guilty to two felonies: larceny inside a building as well as assault and battery with a deadly weapon--his teeth.

Jonathan Shapiro, the Boston attorney representing Cole, says the charges are meritless, and he has filed a motion to dismiss them. In one brief, he argues that the assault charge is inappropriate because of a court decision holding that body parts cannot be considered dangerous weapons. Shapiro also says the alleged crime does not constitute larceny.

According to prosecuting attorney Ursula A. Knight, a decision on Shapiro's dismissal motion should come by December 8.

Sliced Books

At about the same time that Visbeck was telling Barnstable County police about the incident, Harvard Police Lt. John F. Rooney talked to an official at the Boston Public Library. A man had come to the library and was suspected of cutting a print out of a book. The man's name was William Cole.

The Boston library's account troubled Rooney, sources say, because it closely resembled one in a series of rare book mutilations reported to University police by a Widener Library official in late May. In those incidents, a person used a knife or razor to slice out pages of text, prints and plates. The person then left the book bindings in the library, discarding some at random locations and reshelving others.

"A page being cut and placed next to the binding is similar to the way one of the mutilated books (Giuseppe Macali's Antichi Monumenti Per Servire All' opera Inititolata I'Italia Avanti il Dominio Dei Romani, 1810) from the Widener Library was found on May 24, 1994," Rooney said in a sworn affidavit he wrote to request a search warrant. A copy of the affidavit was obtained by The Crimson.

At the Boston Public Library, Cole had allegedly requested a book from a librarian, who inspected it before giving it to him. When he returned the book, the librarian found that one of the pages had been sliced and moved from its original position to the back of the text, according to Rooney's affidavit.

The Boston library tried to contact Cole by using a phone number he provided when he requested the book. But that didn't work--Cole had switched some of the digits in his phone number around.

Acting on those leads, Rooney and Sgt. Kathleen Stanford visited Cole in his Belmont home, the affidavit says.

Once there, Rooney saw several prints in the dining room that had been matted and framed. As Rooney and Stanford looked around the house with his permission, Cole told them the prints were gifts from his mother, and he denied having any interest in prints.