Cracking the case of London’s elusive, acrobatic rare-book thieves | Hacker News Reader

Cracking the case of London’s elusive, acrobatic rare-book thieves

vanityfair.com

73 pointsRickJWagner42 comments

Book collecting is a niche hobby that spans the global middle class to the ultra wealthy (as opposed to baseball cards which are mostly an American thing). A rare book is easy to hide, easy to move, unrecognizable to most and quite liquid.

In October, someone dropped a box of books on the sidewalk in front of a library that was closed during Covid (along with its outdoor book drop which was locked). Many people had already rummaged through it by the time I got there with my 5 month old strapped to my chest. I came away with an autographed first edition, first printing of the intelligent investor. Hidden in plane sight.

Great find! I'd love to see it if you don't mind sharing a pic!

Happy to, please shoot me an email (mine is in my profile).

Wow, that is indeed a great find.

https://www.biblio.com/the-intelligent-investor-by-graham-be...

Wow super cool, you could probably fetch a pretty penny if you made the pilgrimage to Omaha, Nebraska for the yearly Berkshire conference. The acolytes there might even make you a priest or something!

What country to you live in?

Because in the UK, taking an item that has very clearly been donated is regarded as theft and can be prosecuted as such (particularity for such a valuable item donated to a library). The fact that it was poorly secured is neither here-nor-there and would be considered victim blaming.

I'm surprised somebody would openly admit to such a thing on HN. Perhaps cultural differences are at play.

I live in the US and in NYC in particular. In the city, it is common to donate your goods by leaving them nicely on the sidewalk for others to take. I do this routinely and have picked up numerous pots and pans, books and a vacuum cleaner.

Many Libraries in the city have been closed for a year and the outdoor book drops have locks on them. Don’t need to be a lawyer to point out that the weather would have destroyed these books long before a librarian got to them. The library clearly was not accepting donations.

Early in my life I was taught that you shouldn’t do or say anything you wouldn’t want posted on a billboard. Me discussing this openly on HN isn’t much different I guess. You’ll notice my handle also reveals exactly who I am. No hiding for me.

To me (and I would argue to most reasonable people), there is a world of a difference between the circumstances under which I found this book and reaching into the book drop to take it. I would never have done that.

I used to think the Mission Impossible movies were far-fetched. Apparently not:

> The thieves, as if undertaking a special-ops raid, had climbed up the sheer face of the building. From there, they scaled its pitched metal roof on a cold, wet night, cut open a fiberglass skylight, and descended inside—without tripping alarms or getting picked up by cameras ... "This is not something ordinary burglars try to accomplish."

Wow.

Reminds me of the book "The Island of Lost Maps"[0], although there are no acrobatics there is still stealthy thievery.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108762.The_Island_of_Los...

https://archive.is/h4pAD

Fascinating, I am going to read it in more detail. Most of the time these are thefts on order that's at least my limited experience

How much experience with rare book theft do you have?

The focus on the acrobatic nature of these thefts is kind of funny. You can find these skills & equipment (safely scaling a wall, rappelling down a rope, ascending a rope, hauling a load up a rope) in any climbing gym in the country, especially ones located near glaciated mountains where crevasse rescue skills are practiced.

Well, I'm sure there are many rare-book-specializing criminal gangs who draw their membership almost exclusively from off-duty trained crevasse-rescue teams in heavily glaciated parts of the world, but we don't tend to get so many of them around West London.

> we don't tend to get so many of them around West London.

how many of them do you need? they were only burglarizing one place at a time.

and it seems like if you're going to be a rare book thief, london would be a reasonable place to set up shop.

I don’t understand this studied attitude of worldly nonchalance here. ‘Oh of course, everyone should know there are dozens of rare book experts with alpine rescue skills operating in London. Everybody knows that’s the obvious business to get into given the ridiculous cost of commuting from zone C. It was only a matter of time before one of them went rogue and joined a Romanian criminal gang.’

Does the fact someone carried out this crime, in this way, not surprise anyone even a little bit?

Of course it does, it's just that people on HN need to pretend to never be surprised about anything, ever, and to always be "in the know" about everything discussed here.

It’s not particularly surprising.

The level of technique is something tens of thousands of people have in my city — 1% of the few million people in the metro. There’s hundreds of similar metros near mountains, globally.

The level of information necessary for the alarms is all over the dark web, and something someone with a criminal background would be able to find and understand. Another 1% of the population.

So, 100 * 1M * 0.01 * 0.01 = 10,000.

So globally, we’d expect around ten thousand criminals with that level of climbing skill — and it’s not surprising to find a dozen of them stealing books in London. They’re going to be doing something, somewhere: it turned out to be this, here.

I think the story is fascinating, like finding a pretty flower, so I don’t share the bored cynicism — but it’s about as surprising as finding a pretty flower in a meadow.

i’ve been reading police reports for years. i’m only surprised by human decency and politeness, now.

Anyone who travels on glaciers outside of tour groups is (or at least should be) trained in crevasse rescue. That's part of the deal of being on a rope team, everyone can rescue everyone else if one of them falls into a crevasse. These are skills you can master within 5-10 hours of practice. It isn't knowledge restricted to professional mountain guides or SAR folk.

And the basic climbing orientation covers covert entry, alarm systems, and antiquarian book valuation? Or is that only with the advanced course?

There are millions of people in the world who own the gear and know how climb, rappel, jumar, and generally rig up rope systems. Not necessarily for glacier rescue, but the techniques for glacier resue can be learned from a book or a weekend course.

Ocean's Eleventh Volume

Hate to be the whiny HN poster with an off-topic complaint about scrolling or whatever, but:

Pull quotes do not belong on the web. They are out-of-place anachronisms from print publications, intended to entice a reader flipping through pages of a magazine, which does not translate to how people read on a browser. There should be stronger stigmatization of pull quotes in digital design than of using Papyrus and Comic Sans, on the same level as pop-up ads and auto-playing video.

Pull quotes _demand_ that the reader draw their eyes away from the article text just to re-read something they just read seconds ago, or are just about to read. These quotes scream with font size increased +10pt, and random words capitalized. They slow down reading, break concentration, and destroy the flow and pacing of the writer's craft.

How strong your antipathy! Many people think pull quotes look good and serve a purpose, print or digital. I agree with them.

Here's a screenshot from one of your articles: https://i.imgur.com/5AJ5mut.png (Crudely made on iOS, sorry.)

When am I supposed to read the highlighted text? Is it when it was pulled out and strongly emphasized? Or when it appears again, separated by a single paragraph, in the flow of how you originally composed the article?

Or in this one: https://i.imgur.com/DnhsI8n.jpg -- the pull quote comes after what I've just read, instead of before it, so I may have the pleasure of reading it twice. Both copies of the text are on my screen at the same time. Can you imagine if a podcast every few minutes repeated a sentence that was just spoken seconds ago, only at 4x volume, and then just resumed as if nothing happened?

(A comment about this second example: The paragraph directly after the pull quote starts, "The FCC took on this question..." Which "question" am I supposed to interpret this as? The one in the pull quote or the one in the previous body paragraph? The pull quote has not only screwed up the ordering of the text, but added ambiguity merely through its presence.)

If your intent is to appeal to readers who just flick through the page to read the headlines, why not write in bulleted form like Axios? If your intent is to look attractive, a text-heavy format is not ideal.

Can you state the purpose? It's really not clear to me in digital.

As a reader that actually likes to read, they are distracting, they are frustrating to accidentally read and reread, and pull me out of the story.

In digital formats, if these are much past the fold say maybe one to two screen lengths down, what purpose could they possibly be serving to the reader? I can't figure them out at all.

You should reward the reader, not distract and waste their time with duplicate content.

I imagine they're used for SEO now as search engines may weight that text more heavily. This is achieving the same end goal you pointed out of the original pull quotes.

I doubt it has anything to do with SEO. Some crawlers might try to extract section headings from content based on font size, but in this case the pull quote may even confuse this.

Vanity Fair didn’t want to optimize search rankings based on “The crime boss was ‘A CRIMINAL STAR in Romania,’ going by a variety of nicknames, among them ‘PIG HEAD’ and ‘GODFATHER.’” My bet is that they long ago told the web design team to make a theme that captures the feeling of their print magazine. The designers thoughtlessly included pull quotes in this theme. The CMS was adapted to allow insertion of said quotes. The person who prepared this article for publication added them hastily, scrolled 30% of the way down, picked two sentences that are near each other and are both about the same thing (Romanian criminals, not rare books), and moved on to the next assignment.

It’s probably just something the journalists of today learned from their bosses, who learned from their bosses, or learned in journalism school.

I completely agree. They've always felt unwieldy and annoying, emphasizing some bit of text from a few paragraphs ago that I had just read and was no longer related to what I'm reading now.

The work well in dryer sections like historical background or technical explanations to indicate "Hey! More Exciting Stuff Below".

Technical sections seem like precisely the place where concentration is important and the reader doesn’t want to be distracted.

If you feel the reader doesn’t want to read technical content, omit it. Make it collapsible or give a link to jump over it. Or just put it on a different page. The web permits things that print does not.

It’s weird to be apologizing for your content and your choice of document structure by scrambling it up with pull quotes because “it gets better, I swear.”

Sure it would be great if the whole piece could be exciting, but sometimes a bit of background knowledge is necessary to understand the remaining content. A great writer could no doubt make it exciting on its own, but most of these articles are written by run of the mill journalists and copywriters on a very limited time budget.

I know I've continued reading because of these callouts so it definitely does work on some people.

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We all find such annoyances annoying, but having a subthread like this upvoted to the top of a thread (which happens routinely) is like an invasive species taking over an ecosystem. That's why the guideline exists.

I find that the same issue is made worse when using a service like Instapaper to store content for reading on other devices later. The pull quotes read like an emphasized point, when in fact they're just text I'm about to re-read or have already read. This breaks the flow of reading by pulling me away from the author's intended order and pushes me to some other part of the article.

Removal of pull quotes entirely would be a Quality of Life improvement in such a case.

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