At one time, Waterstone's plastered a quote from Günter Grass across its
plastic bags: “Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred.” Perhaps this
was meant to deter book thieves, who might be more influenced than the
average shoplifter by Grass's words. If so, it probably didn't work. An
estimated 100 million books - a black market worth about £750 million - are
stolen from bookshops in the UK every year.
Most of us wouldn't dare to steal a book, of course. After all, libraries
still provide them free - and today Public Lending Right (PLR), the
government-funded group that arranges payment to the authors of books
stocked in public libraries, reveals its annual list of most-borrowed books.
Predictably, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final work in
J.K. Rowling's epic series, turns out to be Britain's most borrowed book.
It is not, however, Britain's most stolen book. That accolade belongs to the London
A-Z, at least according to a straw poll of more than 50 independent
bookshops across Britain (the giants, such as Waterstone's and Borders, say
that they don't keep figures).
“I've been in bookselling for 20 years and the London A-Z is the
most stolen book in the world,” says Patrick Neale, who worked at a
Waterstone's in London before setting up Jaffé & Neale bookshop in
Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. “A-Zs were like porn - you had to keep them
under the till.”
This makes sense. Everyone needs map books, they are in plentiful supply and
don't date rapidly. And, perhaps, stealing an A-Z would feel somehow less
“personal” than taking a work by a named author. Certainly, reference books
feature strongly in our most-stolen Top Ten. Local Ordnance Survey maps, the Oxford
English Dictionary and the Highway Code all make the grade.
“The worst theft we've had was of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of
the World, which was worth £100,” says Peter Donaldson, the owner of Red
Lion Books in Colchester, Essex. “How someone had a big enough coat to walk
out with that under it I really don't know.”
The “pocketing potential” of a book seems to relate to its resale value. Many
of the booksellers who took part in the survey are convinced that a thriving
black market for books exists - according to them, illicit sales are made
mainly in pubs, where disorientated consumers are happy to buy maps, travel
guides and the latest Harry Potter for their children from a network of book
thieves selling at bargain prices.
Paranoia or conspiracy? In 2004 a man was jailed after it was revealed that he
ran a gang of thieves who stole Lonely Planet travel guides to order. He had
sold an estimated 35,000 stolen books a year.
In April last year, a Glasgow man was jailed for 26 months for selling stolen
books worth £50,000 on eBay, under the pseudonym “easypeesy”. Gary Little,
44, admitted taking the books when he was working as a forklift truck driver
at a HarperCollins publishing plant. When an annoyed book trader found
deluxe bound editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion
collection, which usually sold for £100, on offer at £30, he contacted
Little's bosses and the jig was up.
Crime books are extremely popular. According to PLR records, James Patterson,
who mostly writes cop thrillers, is the most borrowed author from libraries.
And books about crime are also frequently stolen - hence the works of
Martina Cole, a prolific crime writer, appear high on the list. Her books
are also among those most read in prisons, and she claims to be perfectly
happy to be a target for thieves: “I think it's great, personally. If people
want my books badly enough to go and steal them it's a compliment, really.”
Some bookshops complain that “true crime” books, and works that appear to
glorify illegal activity, including those by Cole, attract “the “criminal
element”.
“My books are quite moral, actually, if people bother to read them properly,”
says Cole. “They are not handbooks for criminals. I think people read them
to find out about that world, though, and they can associate with the
characters.
“I've never said that I wanted to create great literature. I just want to
write a good yarn.”
Literature thieves come in all shapes and sizes. A bookseller from Bakewell in
Derbyshire recounts how an “unassuming, doddery old lady” would come to the
shop every week and steal a novel by Terry
Pratchett, the author of the hugely popular Discworld fantasy series -
who, incidentally, is the most stolen author in the UK. Police eventually
found some 60 Pratchett books on the old lady's shelves.
Another bookseller, in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, claims that a religious
bookshop had to move away from a cathedral because the priests stole so many
books.
In cities it seems that drug addicts are often the culprits, looking for books
to sell on quickly in exchange for money for their next fix. Some authors
may even have encouraged addicts and others to lift their books. In Irvine
Welsh's Trainspotting, Renton explains to a sniffy judge that he
stole books from Waterstone's because of his growing interest in
existentialism. “So you read Kierkegaard. Tell us about him, Mr Renton,”
says the judge.
“I'm interested in his concepts of subjectivity and truth, and particularly
his ideas concerning choice; the notion that genuine choice is made out of
doubt and uncertainty, without recourse to the experience or advice of
others,” answers Renton.
His friend Spud admits that he stole to fund his heroin habit. Renton receives
a suspended sentence. Spud is jailed for ten months.
“We got the feeling with Trainspotting that readers were being
encouraged to steal,” says Patrick Neale. Like many booksellers, though, he
reports that Abbie Hoffman's 1971 anarchist treatise Steal This Book is
rarely stolen nowadays: “I've just walked over and it's still sitting there.”
Students are sometimes to blame. Brian Schwartz, who used to own the Offstage
bookshop in Camden Town, North London, says that when particular plays
cropped up in their course syllabuses, drama students would cherry-pick the
texts from his shelves.
“For a while I put up a sign reading ‘We're a mom-and-pop organisation; don't
steal from us. If you need a book, I'll lend it to you',” he says. “It
didn't work, though.”
Children's books can be targeted, too. Jacqueline Wilson, the most borrowed
children's author in the UK, is also among the most stolen. In times gone
by, Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit books were often pilfered, too.
Booksellers blame underfunded teenagers, and young mothers with prams in
which to hide stolen goods, as the main culprits.
Regional variations also come into play. Books about the local football club
are a popular target for sneak thieves, and in the sleepy village bookshop
of rural Middleton-in-Teesdale, Co Durham, light-fingered visitors pocketed
a 19th-century book on salmon fishing. In Glastonbury, the home of New Age
spirituality, among the most stolen works from one bookshop are those by the
late Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the occultist once dubbed “the wickedest
man in the world”.
Finally, there are some thefts that simply elude comprehension. The New
Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding by Arnold Schwarzenegger was stolen
from Liverpool Central Library so often that eventually the librarians
stopped restocking it. And Pam Jones from Troutmark Books in Cardiff reports
that someone stole The Devil a Monk Would Be: a Survey of Sex and
Celibacy in Religion.
“It was about nuns and monks getting hot under the collar when thinking about
the opposite sex, and had tips to calm them down,” she says. “One piece of
advice was to sit in an icy pond. I was gutted when that went missing because
I was reading it.”
Book theft can be such a senseless crime.
Don't take a leaf from their books
Book theft is a crime - a serious crime ... but it can also be kind of cool.
Over the course of three years in the early 1960s, the playwright Joe Orton
and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, stole 72 books from their local library in
Islington, North London. They then not-so-subtly corrupted the covers before
returning them to the shelves: a volume of John Betjeman poems was given a
dust jacket featuring a tattooed old man in his underwear, and the faces of
“Great Tudors” were replaced with monkey heads. Orton and Halliwell were
arrested in 1962 and sentenced to six months in prison. The vandalised books
are now the most valuable in the Islington Library Service's collection.
The American activist Abbie Hoffman made a valiant attempt to keep the
countercultural book-theft ball rolling with his 1971 work Steal This
Book, which offered tips on everything from growing marijuana to
stealing credit cards, making pipe bombs and obtaining a free buffalo from
the US Department of the Interior. Although it didn't include a tip on how
to purloin literature, so many people took its title at face value that at
one time many bookshops refused to stock it.
Not so cool, however, is David Slade, 59, a married father of two and former
president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, who was jailed for 28
months this week for stealing 32 books from the private library of Sir
Evelyn de Rothschild and selling them at Christie's for nearly £233,000. He
had been hired by Sir Evelyn himself to catalogue his collection.
Perhaps Slade should have taken a leaf out of Farhad Hakimzadeh's book. The
60-year-old Iranian academic, former director of the Iran Heritage
Foundation and a published author, stole dozens of individual pages from
about 150 ancient books held at the British Library, the Bodleian and
elsewhere. He used a scalpel to cut them out, then hid them in his own
books. It was eight years before a British Library reader raised the alarm.
Hakimzadeh was jailed for two years in January.
Still on the loose is Cambridge University and London Library scourge William
Simon Jacques, also known as Mr Santoro. And David Fletcher. And “Tomb
Raider”. In 2002 he was jailed for stealing £1.1 million worth of antique
books from the two establishments in the space of five years. He was later
arrested again for stealing a 12-volume set worth more than £50,000 from the
Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley library - but while on bail, like the
books, he disappeared without a trace.
Hannah Fletcher
Ten most stolen from UK shops
1. London A-Zs:
London Street Atlas
by Geographers' A-Z Map Co. Paperback, £4.35
2. Ordnance Survey maps:
Exmoor Explorer Map
by Ordnance Survey. Paperback, £5.99
3. Terry Pratchett novels:
The Colour of Magic
by Terry Pratchett. Paperback. £5.44
4. Harry Potter books: Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows
by J.K. Rowling.
Hardback children's edition, £10.43
5. Lonely Planet travel guides:
Great Britain - a Lonely Planet Country Guide by David Else. Paperback, £11.49
6. The Lord of the Rings trilogy:
Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary Edition by J.R.R. Tolkien. Hardback,
£24.50
7. Martina Cole novels:
Faces by Martina Cole. Paperback, £7.59
8. Jacqueline Wilson novels:
Secrets by Jacqueline Wilson. Paperback, £6.49
9. The Oxford English Dictionary:
Oxford Dictionary of English by Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson
(editors). Hardback, £22.75
10. The Highway Code:
The Official Highway Code by the Department for Transport and the Driving
Standards Agency. Paperback, £1.59
According to independent booksellers (all prices from amazon.co.uk)
Ten most borrowed from UK libraries
1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
by J.K. Rowling
2. The House at Riverton
by Kate Morton
3. The
Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards
4. Relentless
by Simon Kernick
5. The
Other Side of the Bridge
by Mary Lawson
6. The Quickie
by James Patterson & Michael Ledwidge
7. The 6th Target
by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro
8. The
Savage Garden
by Mark Mills
9. Cross
by James Patterson
10. Step on a Crack
by James Patterson & Michael Ledwidge
Most borrowed titles from UK libraries (July 2007-June 2008), according to Public
Lending Right
