What drives people to steal precious books
By Tim Richardson writing in the Financial Times, March 6 2009

Every so often a high-profile example of book theft makes the news. The crime in question does not concern hard-up students helping themselves to textbooks in Foyles. Rather it details cases of premeditated, often audacious, theft of beautiful and rare books.

It happened in January, when Farhad Hakimzadeh, an Iranian businessman and book collector, was given a two-year sentence for cutting and stealing pages from antiquarian books in the British and Bodleian libraries over seven years. Hakimzadeh, 60, said he took the pages, from texts that date back to the 16th century and deal with European and Middle Eastern relations, only to augment his own collection. It was proved, however, that he was using stolen single pages to increase the value of books he already owned, which he could then sell. One such page contained a 500-year-old map painted by Hans Holbein, an artist in the court of Henry VIII, worth £32,000.

It also happened in August 2000, when Stanislas Gosse, a 30-year-old former naval officer and engineering tutor, began secretly to plunder the library of the ancient monastery of Mont Sainte-Odile, high in the Vosges mountains of eastern France.
Gosse stole a key and began taking volumes at night from the library, which contains thousands of precious illuminated books. He carried the weightier tomes home on his bicycle. Later he utilised a forgotten secret passage to gain entry to the library.
When Gosse was finally caught red-handed in May 2002, he was trying to get away with three suitcases containing 300 books – at which point he admitted everything. Police raided his flat and found 1,100 historical and religious books and manuscripts meticulously arranged, catalogued and, in some cases, restored. Nothing had been sold.

Read Tim Richardson's full story at FT.com.