400-year-old Bible stolen from US is found in Netherlands | Hacker News Reader

400-year-old Bible stolen from US is found in Netherlands

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Once upon a time I unassumingly pondered upon my university library's sale. This type of thing happened every term and every term I would skip a class or so to pore over the treasures.

And this time, indeed there was a treasure. The first thing that struck me was the big sticker on the first page that said "DO NOT REMOVE FROM LIBRARY" and "DO NOT THROW OUT". Well, I am not sure exactly what it said, but that was the general drift.

As the honest, hardworking, minimum wage person that I am... I promptly alerted the librarian on shift. The librarian (and his team of white walkers) then rather alarmedly started digging through the books in search of similar labels.

At the end of the day I wasn't even thanked. Honesty goes a long way to making one a poor student and without booze money.

So you want to know what the book was? I'll give you a hint. There were two volumes. And the writer was "more modest than Newton".

I estimate that the two volumes are worth about USD 8000 together.

At the end of the day I wasn't even thanked.

Sounds like the librarian is yet another person trying to cover his own ass. Instead of showing gratitude, he probably wants to pretend the whole incident never happened.

How much gratitude do you generally expect for simple, ethical actions that take almost no effort on your part?

Generally you would expect a simple amount of gratitude that takes almost no effort on their part. Like "Thank You".

It seems the amount of gratitude should also be proportional (albeit with a small coefficient) to the loss that was prevented.

It's interesting that the voting on this comment has fluctuated up and down. If anyone happens across this old thread and would like to provide a counterargument, I'd be interested in reading it.

Interesting that this was also downvoted, as well as other very reasonable comments in the thread. Some very odd patterns. My original comment went up to 3 and down to 0, second is at 0, and some other comments are gray enough to be somewhere between -2 and 0. Let's see if the experiment continues.

You reject the amount of effort it takes to walk away from $8,000 -- perhaps a semester of tuition for a college student?

Yes, I reject the amount of effort that takes, just like I neglect the amount of effort it takes not to pocket the money you find in a wallet on the ground.

False analogy.

I believe it’s a false analogy too. But why exactly is it false? Is it because taking money from a wallet is obviously immoral and you’re robbing an individual?

If I go to sell an item on eBay (or a pawn shop) and accidentally enter $8 in the price rather than $800, I doubt there is any recourse for me on legal or moral grounds when that item gets bought. Caveat venditor.

Dropping a wallet on the ground is a completely different story where neither party is taking part in a bona fide transaction.

It would be silly to still send an eBay item to the buyer if you accidentally put down $8 instead of $800 as a seller. Or to buy an item if you accidentally put down $800 instead of $8. In both cases I don’t see how you shouldn’t not take part in the transaction.

In the same way people will sell photos of an item for $80 while the product is normally $800. People will think they found an amazing deal but really just be out $80. You could say that was greed talking. It seems more like a scam to me.

Once when I was visiting a technical library, I saw that they had many volumes of a particular 1940s Russian engineering journal (Izvestiia Akademii nauk SSSR, Otdelenie tekhnicheskikh nauk, rare in the US, probably common in Russian) that had several articles I was trying to find copies of. I opened the index to the journal from the early 1950s to determine the volumes to check, and must have found that they didn't have the right volumes. So I put the index in the reshelving spot.

A few days later I saw the index in the free book pile. I took it and showed the librarian on duty. As I recall they said that the journal wasn't in the online catalog, so they didn't think the book was theirs (despite the markings on the book clearly saying it was). They seemed quite alarmed that they nearly threw out the index. I imagine the journal is now in the online catalog.

Later, I scanned the entire index just in case it disappears for similar reasons in the future...

Can you please put me out of my misery and give the name of the author. I am really curious. Google wasn't of much help.

Leibniz I'm guessing.

As a counter-anecdote, in my experience it is very uncommon for large entities which are disposing of books and other equipment to remove such labels even from things they clearly intend to not keep. You identified something which was likely a mistake, but I've had the opposite reaction when I asked about a "do not remove from this room" label on a book I wanted to buy: "oh, that's just left over from when it was a part of our collection, but we are selling it." (In the end, I bought it.)

On the topic of stolen books, an employee at the Royal library in Sweden stole a number of ancient books, some of which turned up in the US. The case ended with him blowing himself up.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/books/swedish-royal-libra...

Wow, crazy :-) thanks for posting

An asshole to the very end. His suicide injured 11 other people.

If you read the “Deep Sleep” article, there’s a story about a guy that steals a Gutenberg bible from Harvard and meets a similar fate.

Ah, the book theft involving Caliban Book Shop. I worked in an office opposite that book shop for almost five years - walked right past that book shop every day, and had no idea they were centrally involved in moving millions of dollars of stolen books.

Sometimes, crimes really do happen right under your nose.

Stories like this remind me that trust is an indispensable aspect of civilization. Ultimately we have to trust our road workers to do good work, our bank tellers to be honest, and apparently our archivists not to steal what has been entrusted to their care.

Also, it reminds me that our justice system(s) are mostly about punishment, because we can't actually prevent crimes, just act once they are already committed.

We must trust because we cannot verify, except in Phillip K. Dick novels and Tom Cruise movies. (China's dystopian work in this area notwithstanding.)

trust has become implicit with mass surveillance. the only thing left to do is to read minds, but that's almost an afterthought for distraction and hysteria. what does it matter what you think or believe when everything you do is closely monitored and reinforced?

a reciprocal strategy develops (trust the trusted) even if you have no surveillance,technology or civilization. trust transactions begin with a certain fixed amount and then the balance shifts based around the perception of the participants.

intercepting perceptions, can circumvent trust/distrust which scales nicely if you can have sparse networks and centrally distributed information on the cheap. you can even customize interceptor information for specific networks, to create all types of down stream effects.

so how has it become implicit? well, you can use technology now to create your own trust/distrust network of information, then you can train this thing to judge new information for you, and most importantly you can expose (or hide) any biases you might have with adversarial networks. this will lead to a new type of trust, a type of meta-mathematical consensus, where machines just make trust decisions far better than humans can, and ideology starts to become replaced by dataology. data dissidents may find ways to circumvent trust networks as impostors or use cloned disposable networks, but crime and problems associated with resistance to existing orders will decline precipitously, you may be against roads but you need to use them all the same.

you may even see an emergent class of rebel/terrorist/revolutionary celebrity, since the novelty of not using a valid and accurate trust network geared towards ones preferences will be the same as not using the internet or banking systems for mass communication or commerce. parallel societies can easily exist without conflict, but the mass of humanity always moves together in the direction of simplification, and it's easier to trust machines, so far they have a much better track record than people, given their rapid adoption in almost every critical human sector. the trade off is that machines become difficult to build, repair and understand, but being a human becomes a lot easier, and one serves the other.

this may seem naive to people inside technology networks, but i expect a type of generational dependence to grow, and things that work are rather hard to obsolesce once they establish a critical mass of global adoption. people trust machines, computers, the internet, they will grow to entrust them with trust-proofs.

What surprised me was that according to the director of the American Pilgrim Museum in The Netherlands [1], they asked him to send the Bible by regular mail. He opted to bring it to the American embassy in The Hague instead.

1 https://www.bndestem.nl/binnenland/400-jaar-oude-in-vs-gesto... (Dutch)

Here is another case for anyone interested. Sadly in this instance the court decided to let the thief keep and auction it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest

> Wearing blue latex gloves, [the FBI agent] displayed the Bible, carefully opening its weathered pages.

Don't archivists dealing with old books use their bare hands as they are kinder on the paper?

Hands contain oils, mold spores, bacteria, etc. and are certainly not good for fibrous media. Strategies depend upon what kind of media you have. Disposable cotton gloves are very popular. If you are interested in further research, the Getty is one of the world authorities on antiquities handling, they probably have a page or guide about it someplace. (Source: I have an art collection on antique paper myself, and have made efforts in the past to optimize handling and storage.)

For books, clean, dry, bare hands is recommended by the Library of Congress, the British Library, and Library of Canada. They explicitly recommend against using gloves.

https://thediscoverblog.com/2019/04/05/the-gloves-come-off/

Interesting summary, though the argument is limited to old worn books that are still physically sturdy and they explicitly disclaim the recommendation for art and photographs.

I second this. I've handled 1000 year old books and was required to not wear gloves. I was told it was about increased dexterity being worth the oils deposited on the page (and to avoid the parts of the page with content).

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