Sunday
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Books frequently stolen
According to several sources, in the United States certain books, or books by certain authors, are much more likely to be stolen than others, although there are no hard statistics on the subject. The Bible has been cited as perhaps the most frequently stolen book.
Ron Rosenbaum, an author and New York Observer columnist, wrote in 1999 that Barnes & Noble had a list of these authors whose books are the most frequently stolen from that book-store chain - Martin Amis, Paul Auster, George Bataille, William S. Burroughs, Italo Calvino, Raymond Chandler, Michel Foucault, Dashiell Hammett, Jack Kerouac, Jeanette Winterson, but none more frequently than books by Charles Bukowski.
In 2008, Constant gave this list, which he called “pretty much the authoritative top five, the New York Times best-seller list of stolen books”: Bukowski, Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, and Burroughs, along with “any graphic novel”. Constant wrote that other popular targets are books by Hunter S. Thompson and the Beats, Chuck Palahniuk, Haruki Murakami, and Mark Z. Danielewski, and the most-stolen books tend to be a steady group with little variation over time. As of late 2009, Danielewski’s House of Leaves was the most frequently stolen book from Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, California, according to a store manager there.
In the United Kingdom, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides was the most-shoplifted book, according to a January 2008 article in The Telegraph.
Public libraries have a much different set of frequently stolen books. In the United States, how-to books are more often the targets of thieves, as are books about witchcraft, the occult, UFOs or astrology, according to Larra Clark, a spokeswoman for the American Library Association, who asked members which books were most often stolen. Of the 70 libraries across the United States who responded to her query in 2001, none mentioned books by Charles Bukowski. An official from a prison library responded that dictionaries and poetry were the most frequently stolen types of books at that institution.
In 2008, Constant gave this list, which he called “pretty much the authoritative top five, the New York Times best-seller list of stolen books”: Bukowski, Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, and Burroughs, along with “any graphic novel”. Constant wrote that other popular targets are books by Hunter S. Thompson and the Beats, Chuck Palahniuk, Haruki Murakami, and Mark Z. Danielewski, and the most-stolen books tend to be a steady group with little variation over time. As of late 2009, Danielewski’s House of Leaves was the most frequently stolen book from Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, California, according to a store manager there.
In the United Kingdom, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides was the most-shoplifted book, according to a January 2008 article in The Telegraph.
Public libraries have a much different set of frequently stolen books. In the United States, how-to books are more often the targets of thieves, as are books about witchcraft, the occult, UFOs or astrology, according to Larra Clark, a spokeswoman for the American Library Association, who asked members which books were most often stolen. Of the 70 libraries across the United States who responded to her query in 2001, none mentioned books by Charles Bukowski. An official from a prison library responded that dictionaries and poetry were the most frequently stolen types of books at that institution.
// posted by vm @ 11:03 PM 
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