BackTalk: Let Them Steal Books

To advertise his yippie brand of anarchism, the late Abbie Hoffman famously wrote, in 1971, a book titled Steal This Book. Bookstores and libraries stocking it had to know they were taking a risk. I bet some bookstores let customers walk off with the title literally because they expected these customers would actually pay for other books. I think libraries should consider a similar tack.

I'm not inviting people to steal books from our shelves. But I wish more academic as well as public libraries had a section of used books they no longer needed advertised with a sign that said "take one, leave one," or "take one of these home with you to keep; consider borrowing one of our other books." Most of the books in our semiannual book sales, for example, aren't needed in our collections. There are hundreds of books left over from each sale that, sad to say, go to the dumpster. These should be put on a table as freebies. Some homeless people eat food from dumpsters. But very few impecunious book-hungry people look for free books there. I also think we should take a more forgiving attitude toward some book thieves.

I wish we knew more about the people who actually go to the trouble of stealing books from libraries. I don't hate all of these people. I do loathe the ones who steal rare books to sell them for profit. They want money for books, not ideas from them. These thieves deserve long prison sentences without reading privileges.

There are different levels of culpability in my classification of book thieves. The people who steal books simply because they can't be bothered to observe normal borrowing and renewal rules disgust me. They are not as calculatingly evil as rare book thieves; they're simply lazy and selfish. I'd like to humiliate these people publicly, put them in stocks, or sew the letter "T" for thief on their shirts.

Professors who fail to return books to the library are also on my bad thief list. Professors who think their faculty status entitles them to in effect requisition library property as their own are taking unfair advantage of their more liberal borrowing privileges. How dare professors deny students—let alone their colleagues—the right to read a book owned by the library?

Near the bottom of my special Inferno for library book thieves is the librarian who can't be bothered to check out a book formally. It should go without saying that librarians should set an example of good behavior to the public.

While I'm hell on wheels toward librarians and professors who fail to check out or return overdue books, I am a bleeding heart liberal with regard to thieves who are bookworms. The people who steal books because they want to read and reread them intrigue me. These people aren't ordinary criminals. They want to own what's in the book as well as the book itself. Of course, they should not steal books. And if they're caught, they should pay fines, or worse. But people who steal books because they really want to read them should be treated leniently.

Sure, many of these bookish thieves are anarchists like Hoffman, failed writers, and misfits. But these are the people to whom libraries should be especially dedicated. The great comfortable middle class can always depend on libraries to meet their needs. But book thieves who are also autodidacts constitute a select minority.

Some of these bookish thieves are simply absent-minded idealists. They are so besotted with books they don't even know they've walked out of the library without checking them out. These are true book lovers. We shouldn't charge these people fines: we should give parties in their honor.

In the long run, libraries and people only own the mere physical book. It's much better, of course, to own the ideas in a book. By this line of reasoning mere possession of the material book is beside the point. Everyone knows people who own a lot of books but show no sign of reading them. And there are some quite learned people who possess only a few physical books.

If we apprehend the merely absent-minded who have managed to leave the library without checking out books, or people who have borrowed them indefinitely without malicious motives, I think we should talk with them rather than punish them. Chances are these dreamy people just don't share the conventional world's view of the sanctity of public property. There is every reason to believe this special kind of thief will be very generous in sharing ideas. Some book thieves just might turn out to be great friends of libraries.