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Comment by cycomanic | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure the thief stole them out of greed, but didn't know who to sell to. Now the people buying and owning those books keeping them in their private collections, they typically do this out of vanity I would argue similar to people owning expensive art (although some do this also purely for investment).

A great book talking about the secret work of rare books is "the club dumas", which I highly recommend. The movie was quite bad on the other hand.

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Many of these items have a fence value of near 0. The second they pop up in a real auction the police are involved and the whole chain goes down. Their real value usually comes in as a bargaining chip if caught for some other crime. The second way is if someone specific wants to have an item. There is no real 'market' for these type of stolen items. The third way is to 'ransom' them. A stolen TV has value as it is semi common and usually you can offload it. A stolen one of a kind piece of artwork/book/etc basically has a 'investigate me' sign on it.

It sounds like a quite complicated, risky and expensive job to do just out of greed without any idea what to do with the stolen goods.

> they typically do this out of vanity I would argue similar to people owning expensive art

Seeing how many science libraries are simply throwing away so many historically significant math books, I'd say that quite a few of these "vanitous" people may be simply concerned about their conservation. A similar thing, in a much larger scale, may happen for art. As they say, today's thief is tomorrows conservator.

Haha, not that band of romanian thieves. They are quite dumb at times, I remember another case few years ago where they stole some paintings from a poorly secured museum, brought them home and one of them got scared of getting caught and burned them.

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