Hand it over, hand it over, hand it over...
Everybody knows that these are hard times for the book world. Anna Goodall, in The Independent, reports that, adding criminal insult to economic injury, book thieves are making things worse. Poetry-book thieves.
Somewhat naively, as a new bookseller, I didn't think theft would be a big problem. I imagined my biggest difficulty would be being able to keep up with our incredibly well-read customers. However, the reality is that most bookshops have to write off thousands in their annual budgets to account for theft. And it's not the obvious wheeler-dealers and petty criminals whom you need to worry about. In fact, book thieves make you realise that you're not as good at judging a book by its cover as you might have thought... What I've noticed is that the books we have stolen are at the more literary end of the spectrum. One feels that the thief is going to take them home and read them, not just dump them in the bin in a post-klepto depression. Paris Review Interviews Vol. 2 and Crime and Punishment was a rather intellectual haul just the other week. So is it only thrilling to steal quality literature? At Foyles... a staff member [tells] me she's recently noticed that a lot of poetry volumes are mysteriously disappearing, and she suspects that plenty of literary fiction is being nabbed as well.