| Book theft is an age-old crime |
Almost as long as there have been libraries and bookshops, there have been book thieves who steal what they could have read for free - here are a few exmples:
The ancient Egyptian King Ptolemy II, is said to have withheld wheat from the starving citizens of Athens in the midst of a famine, until he was allowed to borrow and make copies of the manuscripts of the Greek literary and philosophical giants. The king kept the originals for his great library in Alexandria and sent the copies back to Athens. An entire annex of the library was devoted to "The Books from the Ships" -- rare volumes stolen from passengers in vessels that touched at the port.
In his treatise "Concerning Books," the philosopher Aristotle condemned those who steal books to sell for profit as "unnatural." He took a softer stand on those who steal for their own reading pleasure.
In medieval libraries -- where, if you wanted to replace a stolen book, you had to get a monk to reprint it by hand -- books were chained to reading stands, and often included graphic warning labels: "He who steals this book/may he die the death/may he be frizzled in a pan...Let him be struck with palsy/ and all his members blasted/ Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution/ Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not/ and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever."
In 1964, FBI agents in Detroit arrested two fugitives with a hoard of 16 cartons of rare books, coins and documents, stolen from the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
In 1985, Mark W. Hoffman, a notorious forger of rare Mormon documents, detonated two pipe bombs in Salt Lake City in an effort to cover his crimes, killing two people and almost killing himself. Hoffman used to slash blank pages out of old library books to obtain the properly aged paper for his forgeries.
In 1988, Jerry Gustav Hasford, an author nominated for an Oscar for his work on the script of "Full Metal Jacket", was arrested after police found more than 9,816 books in his rented storage locker, stolen from libraries as far away as Australia.
In 1990, police raided the Ottumwa, Iowa, farmhouse of Stephen Carrie Blumberg and uncovered a $20 million trove of more than 30,000 rare books and documents he had systematically stolen from hundreds of libraries around the country -- including Michigan State University, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. Blumberg would deactive alarm systems, pick locks, shimmy up dumb waiters and over fences, and pose as a legitimate researcher to reach his quarry, the rare books.
In 1995, antiquarian dealer Gilbert Bland was caught outside Baltimore's Peabody Library with four maps he had just razored out of a 200-year-old book. Police also found his notebook, which read like a shopping list through the great libraries of the world. Author Miles Harvey, who chronicles Bland's career in the book, "Island of Lost Maps," called him "The Al Capone of cartography, the greatest American map thief in history."
In 2002 a rare copy of the 1963 first issue of the Spider-Man comic was among ?13,600 ($20,000 ) worth of comics that were stolen at gunpoint in New York.
In 2003 following a find on May 6, of 2 unreleased Harry Potter books, four males were quized by Suffolk police, investigating the suspected theft of JK Rowling's unreleased and eagerly-awaited book Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
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