Rare books: Foiling the thiefs

• Ref:
• Location:
• Type:
• Salary:
• Start Date:

THE theft of rare books and manuscripts from libraries is not new. Medieval abbots used to attach precious volumes with chains to stop touring scholars from leaving the monastery with them. And today, valuable books appear increasingly at risk: spectacular recent heists from European libraries have exposed something rotten at the heart of the international rare book trade.Librarians, auctioneers and antiquarian booksellers converged on the British Library last week for a meeting with a dire title, “The Written Heritage of Mankind in Peril”. The conference was prompted by a theft discovered in 2002 at the National Library of Sweden and by an even larger heist ten years later at the Girolamini library in Naples. Both were inside jobs: in Sweden, the manuscript curator committed suicide when his crime was discovered; in Italy, a government appointee with no library experience was convicted of stealing 1,400 rare books and imprisoned. What has stunned the book world is not just the scale of the thefts, but how easily the stolen goods were fenced and resold.

20150702 12:05:22

Comment Expiry Date: 

Fri, 2015-07-17

<div class="og_rss_groups"></div>
Source: Retailing
Rare books: Foiling the thiefs