Skepticlawyer

Sometimes, politics is like dodgems. I’ve just had to thread the pushbike through what is rapidly becoming the Broad Street obstacle course. This started with the usual bunch of Animal Libbers (attempting to disrupt a graduation), and was followed by a large and somewhat pushy Gaza/Palestine/Hamas protest. The Oxfordshire constabulary are fond of using mounted police (and the horses are lovely, to be fair, very placid and uncomplaining) which of course then means large piles of horseshit everywhere. It gives one a clue as to what streets smelled like before the internal combustion engine. In other news, this bloke has just been nicked for defacing books in the Bodleian and British libraries. He removed pages — often beautiful maps — from rare editions with a fine razor, secreting them among his own collection and so making them very difficult to find. A genuine bibliophile, his booklust transformed over time into a desire to own bits of the rare books he examined. From the judge:

You have a deep love of books, perhaps so deep that it goes to excess. I have no doubt that you were stealing in order to enhance your library and your collection.

Apparently he’s not alone; this article gives a useful potted history of notable book thieves in Britain. Often wealthy and cultured, they keep their reasons to themselves and don’t appear keen to profit from their crimes. Only one — who targetted important libraries in Wales — onsold his thefts in order to pay off gambling debts. You could — if in an appropriately Sun-subeditor-ish mood — call the latest chap ‘the man who loved books’, but that would only be part of the story.