The Book Thieves of London | Hacker News Reader

The Book Thieves of London

thedabbler.co.uk

55 pointslermontov18 comments

I worked in the book trade between 2000 and 2004. I did catch someone's eye once who left the store before putting all the neat piles of hardback books he had stashed under a table in his briefcase.

And I also marked Rough Trade and Lonely Planet guidebooks with invisible ink. After Robert Jordan was arrested I had to identify my handwriting to the police and be available for a court date, but never had my moment in the witness stand... there was no need

I was really confused as to what Robert Jordan got arrested for until I realized it should be Ronald Jordan. :)

Apologies... all book related...

If it's of any interest, you can read Ronald Jordan's Court of Appeals judgment here:

http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWCA/...

For what it's worth, mention's made of books being marked.

As an aside, I find it quite incredible that the police office brought in to calculate Jordan's earnings did so on the basis that Jordan was paying his thieves 60% of face value. Sixty percent! I'd be kinda surprised if it was as high as twenty!

Police have no incentive to accurately price out earnings, and may not know about the details; rather, to overstate them to impress the court & press. I see a lot of this in drug cases - the police will say a bust resulted in a street value of $50k where the person only spent, say, $500, because they're using rounded up figures of the highest street price, and nothing at all realistic. Sometimes it's funny: yesterday I was reading a NZ article where the lawyer was trying to explain to the judge that just because his client was caught importing something like 100 doses of MDMA off Silk Road (cost ~$200, IIRC), his client wasn't a dealer - it was simply that because European MDMA is so cheap and there's overhead in handling an order & shipping it into NZ with decent stealth, few SR sellers will bother with small orders under 100!

Well that's the ironic thing - by overstating how much he was paying, the police officer showed that he earned less because his costs were so high.

While the site is still down, here's the Google cache of the page:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1-86FF_...

This is as good an opportunity as I'd be likely to get to heartily recommend "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Thief

One of the finest books I've had the pleasure to read.

And by "read", I mean "steal".

This book is surprisingly hard to find on Amazon.

This one's title appears to be "By Markus Zusak The Book Thief": http://www.amazon.com/Markus-Zusak-Book-Thief-First/dp/B00N4...

This one has the same title, but the author appears to be "-Alfred A. Knopf-": http://www.amazon.com/Markus-Zusak-Book-Thief/dp/B0084V2R7Q/...

Only searching by ISBN was I able to find what I'm reasonably sure is the actual genuine book: http://www.amazon.com/Book-Thief-Markus-Zusak/dp/0375842209/...

What's going on?

Alfred A. Knopf is the name of the US. Publisher for said book.

Quote: "It only took Roy a minute to discretely nudge the pile ..."

A small, barely detectable but finite nudge? Or did the author mean to say "discreetly"?

Reminded me of this story from my old stomping ground, the bookstores of Ann Arbor: http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/02/davids_books_own...

500 error. I don't think this is a site that can handle large amounts of traffic.

Indeed. I got in there just before the stampede. A short, entertaining read about the dying art of book theft, and a summary of some of the 'characters' of the trade.

Google cache here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:thedabb...

During the London riots, bookstores' inventory was left untouched. If there were any book thieves left they would have had easy pickings.

First hit on Google: http://www.thewire.com/global/2011/08/its-pattern-london-rio...

Stupid gaudy trainers and wide-screen TVs only. Tsch, kids today eh?

A beautiful but fundamentally sad tale about the decline of the physical distribution of information and it's associated sub-cultures.

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