Monday, March 3, 2008

From The Stranger: The Pleasure and Peril of Chasing Book Thieves

I saw this story in The Stranger this week and thought that it was amusing enough to share with the teeming hordes who read this blog. It is about the writer's experiences working at a book store and all the books he's seen stolen over the years. It seemed like it held some good lessons for all of us planning on going into libraries, and brings up one area of training that we are not receiving in the iSchool: the 100 meter dash.

Flying Off the Shelves: The Pleasures and Perils of Chasing Book Thieves

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Catcher in the Rye," anything to do with marijuana, and anything to do with Wicca are pretty much guaranteed to walk in our library. The Hunter S. Thompson fans are pretty decent - the books have high circulation, and they sometimes come back very late, but they come back. Oh yeah, and anything to do with Rastafarianism -- I mean, anything -- walks for good after one or two circs. The weird thing is that, for the most part, they're stolen by people who check them out and are strangely willing to pay for them. Like, they couldn't buy it from a bookstore? The only thing that comes to mind that's actually been stolen (masterfully, I might add, because it had extra security tags), was the annotated Wizard of Oz. Two copies, two different times. I guess they really loved that book.

iSchool alum, 2006