Don't get any ideas.

Libraries seem to be magnets for thieves. I've noticed a substantial number of items missing from the shelves of "Huron State U." since starting work here. These are usually items which are currently required textbooks or items which are predictably in high demand among student report-writers, but recently I found that two of the three volumes of an early edition of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica were inexplicably gone from the shelves. That's a three-digit book on the secondhand market, and it seems unlikely to me that its disappearance is entirely a coincidence, or that they were taken by a student who needed them for a class.

The University of Oregon, in this story, is just the most recent university library to find its property being auctioned off on eBay. Miles Harvey, in The Island of Lost Maps, described in painful detail how a mild-mannered thief with the preposterously appropriate name of Gilbert Bland managed to lift millions of dollars worth of rare and salable old maps from library atlases simply by using WorldCat to locate the libraries that owned them, pretending to be a "scholar" in order to get access to them, and then surreptitiously dismembering them with a razor blade. (Amazingly, several libraries could not even be bothered to return the FBI's telephone calls when Bland was finally caught with a Florida strip-mall store filled with stolen library property.) And of course it's common knowledge to anyone who closely followed the sordid career of Mark Hofmann's forgeries that he 'acquired' appropriately-aged paper for his forgeries by slicing endsheets out of old library books.

It's tempting to say that this means secondhand book buyers should be suspicious of ex-library books and all old maps in internet selling venues; however, I know from firsthand experience how often libraries blithely and ignorantly discard books that are in high demand on the secondhand market. Advocating that such ex-libs be shunned, or that libraries summarily destroy discarded materials in order to prevent confusion between legitimately acquired ex-lib books and stolen ones, would be an intolerable injury to those readers who are savvy enough to know what to look for and where to find the legitimate ones offered for sale. Even an injury to learning itself, if I might wax pompous for a moment.

It's likewise tempting to advocate closing the stacks entirely, but this is financially prohibitive for most institutions, and a serious barrier to usage of the library. However, I note that the one volume of the Whitehead/Russell book which is still in the possession of "Huron State" is the one that was inexplicably placed in non-public storage.

As always, I'm open to suggestions. Perhaps the library world needs to hire someone like this.

(Note: if anyone reads this an takes it as an inspiration to start stealing library books, be warned: If I find out about it, I will hunt you down and take them back.)