Charles Darwin's notebooks reported stolen from Cambridge University | Hacker News Reader

Charles Darwin's notebooks reported stolen from Cambridge University

theguardian.com

10 pointsjonbaer5 comments

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Luckily: "The two Darwin notebooks had previously been digitised and their content is available online." .

University of Cambridge has a bit more on their "appeal" site (https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/DarwinAppeal)

The digitized notebooks are available:

[1] https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00121/1

[2] https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00122/1

Also, today is the anniversary of the release of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life on November 24, 1859.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species

Reminded me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24248197

In that story, one of the sleazy culprits (who fenced the stolen books) was not only a member of the Antique Books Association, he also served on its ethics and standards committee!

I think this kind of thing is common. It's only experts in the field who really appreciate the value of this stuff, so it's only experts who steal. The field is small enough all experts know one another. To regular thieves, they're just dusty old books which wouldn't even sell for a dollar at a flea market.

Totally crazy that they didn't know where they were for 20 years and now call them stolen.

It does say this in the article:

>Dr Jessica Gardner, university librarian and director of library services since 2017, said: “My predecessors genuinely believed that what had happened was that these had been mis-shelved or misfiled and they took forward extensive searches over the years in that genuine belief.

>“Now we have completely reviewed as a new team what happened and come to a conclusion that that’s not a sufficient position or set of actions to take.”

The article goes on to say that "Cambridge University library has more than 130 miles (210km) of shelving", so it would have needed time to really think and consider the possibility that the notebooks have been stolen, I believe.

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