Looted!

[muckefuck]

It's not often that I can say I've contributed to foiling a crime. (And by "not often", I really mean "not ever".) But I arrived at work to find an urgent message from my überboss about some titles which had shown up on the desk of a used-book dealer. The attempts to obscure our ownership stamps made him suspicious so he got in touch to see if they were missing from our shelves. I found no indication they'd been properly withdrawn, so security decided to refer the case to the police.

But it doesn't end there. I cc'ed in the head of circulation and she revealed that we'd been hit already by book thieves with a similar m.o. They obtained borrowing cards using pseudonyms, checked out their full allowance of recent textbooks with a significant resale value, and then disappeared. In fact, one of the books they made off was an earlier edition of an identical title! Replacement costs ran into the thousands at our library alone, and we weren't the only ones targeted.

I have to say, I'm anxious to hear what comes of this. The last time we lost serious money to a serial book thief, someone wrote a book about it.

Comments

[alcippe.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had no idea books could be such 'big business'. It's not an ordinary, run of the mill crime, is it? I wonder what kind of character is behind this new batch of thefts.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

No, I imagine it's pretty specialised. Not every knows how pricey academic textbooks can be. (I once chewed monshu out for buying me a grammar on my Wishlist. Yes, I wanted it, but I didn't want someone spending $200 for a new copy.)

As a side note, our new art librarian is big on having the collection circulate. Traditionally, libraries were pretty cautious with art books because they're "so expensive". But, as she points out, that's based on buying them for the home when your standard of comparison is a paperback bestseller. But in a situation where we're buying new texts from academic publishers by the thousands, they don't stand out.