The Gospel on Book Theft

Abstract

The Gospel on Book Theft John Maxwell Hamilton (bio) Twenty-five years ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay for the Sunday New York Times Book Review that showed the power of the printed word. The essay argued that nearly everyone is a book thief and that might not be so bad. We learn something about people from the books they buy. We learn much more from the books they want so desperately that they slip them under their clothes and walk out, as one woman did at the New York Public Library. (She was foiled when the six-inch thick Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, clutched between her legs, fell to the ground in front of the library guard.) Many responses to the Times essay were gratifying. Agitated librarians said I was inciting theft. A reader, distressed to learn that Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book was missing from the Library of Congress, renewed the library’s stock with his own copy, which gave members of Congress and their staffs new material to pilfer. But one common reaction to my list of “the ten most stolen books” was disturbing. Friends hailed me on the street in Washington, D.C., where I lived at the time. “I didn’t know Practice for the Armed Services Test was the third most stolen book,” one said. “Wow,” said another, “that’s really interesting about The Joy of Sex. Who would have guessed it is stolen almost as often as the Bible?” Right, but none of it was true. Except for the Bible. It is the most stolen book—everywhere on the planet. A maid at a Singapore hotel once told me that it was lifted much more often than The Teaching of Buddha, which is written in English and Japanese and includes a note explicitly inviting people to steal it. The Nashville-based Gideon Society, which puts Bibles in hotel rooms all over the world, does not give written permission to steal them, thereby providing lodgers an eternal two-for-one value—salvation [End Page 265] and damnation all in one easy act of putting the book in their suitcases next to their dirty underwear. A better road to salvation than the one offered by the Gideon Society can be found in Brazil’s federal prison system. It recently decided that inmates could earn early release by reading. For each book they finish, prisoners receive a four-day reduction in their sentences. The program is called “Redemption through Reading.” Anyway, after the Bible, who can say for sure which books are stolen most often? Couldn’t absolutely everyone see that I had made this list up, using titles to create categories of theft that I could then discuss at length? The most resounding evidence that the answer was “no!” came later. I was killing time in a bookstore, waiting for a dinner companion. My eye fell on a copy of Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel, a biography by Marty Jezer. Authors, like dogs, are always hunting for their scent, so I naturally opened the book to see what Jezer said about Steal This Book, whether by any chance he mentioned my offbeat comments. Here is what the deadpan footnote on page 229 said: “On November 18, 1990, the New York Times Book Review listed Steal This Book as among the ten book titles most stolen from libraries and bookstores.” After pondering the response to my essay for many years, I have arrived at an explanation. We have nearly limitless credulity for words set in type. We take words on a page as the gospel, even when the book is not a Bible. Readers rail against newspapers as biased or irresponsible, as the outraged librarians did with my essay, but then readers clip what is presented in the newspaper, put it on the refrigerator, and tell their friends about it. When it comes to books, they are even more likely to suspend judgment altogether. Although a book has a price on the outside just like a box of cereal, people treat what is inside as if it were manna. No one understands this suspension of judgment better than consultants. “I was amazed at how...