THIEVES IN THE NIGHT BOOK UPDATE

Similarly, the rare book archivist at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh swiped 300-odd books valued at around $8 million-but it took him 25 years. He and a large network of accomplices went to jail for stealing and auctioning off his pilfered books. In 2012, more than 1,500 volumes-including centuries-old editions of Aristotle, Descartes, Galileo, and Machiavelli, worth many millions-were found to have been looted from the Baroque-era Girolamini Library in Naples by the library’s director. The most famous large-scale thefts almost always take place over the span of years.

Ed Maggs, fifth-generation co-owner of what is reputedly Queen Elizabeth’s favorite bookstore, London’s venerable Maggs Bros., tells me, “The problem of the connoisseur book thief is a real one.”

Some sticky-fingered collectors covet them simply to add luster to their shelves. “We in the business hear nearly weekly that something has gone missing,” Kühn says. In 2013, David Rubenstein, the billionaire cofounder of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group, paid the highest price ever for a printed volume, $14.2 million, for The Bay Psalm Book, one of 11 extant copies of America’s first known book. Last October, rare book collector and dealer Stephan Loewentheil spent just under $10 million for a first printing of Shakespeare’s plays, referred to as the First Folio. Connoisseurs will pay unfathomable sums for an iconic book. They are alluring and beautiful, with an aura that connects the present to the past. There are any number of reasons for someone to steal rare books. They even checked to see if a circus had come to town, so acrobatic was the feat. The Met Police assigned organized crime specialist Andy Durham to oversee the case while Ward and other detectives did what Durham calls the “grunt work.” But they had little to go on. “There were plenty of other valuables nearby. But why… books? Someone must have tipped them off. Ward could see these weren’t random warehouse robberies. press, meanwhile, remained focused on the Frontier Forwarding break-in, dubbing it the “ Mission: Impossible theft”-a tip of the hat to its similarities with the movie’s iconic scene in which Tom Cruise, as Ethan Hunt, suspended by a cable, breaks into a CIA vault. Scotland Yard raced to follow leads-and wondered where the burglars would strike next. Given their unique historical significance and the fact that many contained handwritten notes by past owners, most were irreplaceable. All together, the missing books-stolen on the night of January 29, 2017, into early the next day-were valued at more than $3.4 million.

That copy alone had a price tag of $293,000. The most valuable book in the haul was a 1566 Latin edition of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, by Copernicus, in which he posits his world-changing theory that Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun.

THIEVES IN THE NIGHT BOOK UPDATE

Among other rarities stolen: a 1497 update of the first book written about women, Concerning Famous Women a 1569 version of Dante’s Divine Comedy and a sheath with 80 celebrated prints by Goya. Also missing was an important 1777 edition of Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, his book describing gravity and the laws of physics. Gone was Albert Einstein’s own 1621 copy of astronomer Johannes Kepler’s The Cosmic Mystery, in which he lays out his theory of planetary motion.

Thieves in the night book