The bizarre, true story of the world’s greatest living art thief

I find it interesting that one person spent four years in prison and went back to stealing the same things that landed them in prison for four unrecoverable years.

Four years ain’t nothing to sniff at. You’d think that would be enough to persuade them to knock it off.

I wonder if there’s some deeper need at play, one deeper than the anguish of losing years of one’s life in prison.

Duncan Jevons, a turkey-farm laborer from Suffolk, England, stole 42,000 library books over 30 years, starting in the mid 1960s, stashing them a few at a time in his battered leather briefcase. He lived alone and had broad literary tastes, taking volumes on nearly every subject except sports. Books, said Jevons, never cause problems like people do. He was eventually nabbed by the police and spent eight months in jail.

I can sympathize with that. Books are a window to a whole new world, especially when you're alone. Reading a book and giving it back is fine, but there's something special about having them around. Not saying it's OK to steal, of course, just that I can relate somewhat.

Breitwiese’s favorite book thief is a fellow Frenchman, an engineering professor named Stanislas Gosse, who had a passion for religious tomes. Gosse stole a thousand volumes over two years from a securely locked library in a medieval monastery. The locks were changed three times during his binge, to no avail, for Gosse had learned, in the course of his constant reading, of a forgotten secret passage behind a hinged bookcase connecting to a back room of the adjacent hotel. He filled suitcases with books that felt to him abandoned, soiled with pigeon droppings, and entered and left the premises by blending in with tourist groups. Gosse cleaned the books and stored them in his apartment. He was arrested in 2002 after police hid a camera in the library, but just served probation.

He had to climb the outside walls of the abbey to get there. He originally faced 5 years in prison, but his lawyer got him a suspended sentence because he took good care of the books, restored some of them, and returned all of them. He got a $20,000 fine and community service (helping the monks catalog and restore books).

Articles like these are absolutely fascinating to me - a little slice of humanity that I never would have thought existed. One art theft every 12 days for seven years. Stealing 19 tons worth of books. The sheer commitment level of these people is frankly astounding to me. Man. The things you can build a life around.