The channel has already published a piece on how, in recent years, European libraries have suffered badly from thefts of rare editions of Russian classics: in the Baltic states, Berlin, Warsaw, The Hague, Geneva, Lyon, Munich, Paris, Prague and Helsinki,

The channel has already published a piece on how, in recent years, European libraries have suffered badly from thefts of rare editions of Russian classics: in the Baltic states, Berlin, Warsaw, The Hague, Geneva, Lyon, Munich, Paris, Prague and Helsinki, book thieves substituted copies for the originals. The most popular author was Pushkin; Gogol, Krylov and others were also carried off. It has been established that up to 170 books were stolen (more than 70 of them from Warsaw), their total value estimated at €2.5 million.

Connoisseurs of the Russian antiquarian book trade shared their view of the situation with The Art Newspaper Russia. In their opinion, the books were intended for the Russian buyer, but for the most part never reached him.

Evidently the thieves did not dare to smuggle the items into Russia. If these books were offered for sale in Russia at all, it was done privately, and no notable figure of the domestic antiquarian trade wished to have anything to do with it. Besides, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers circulated lists of the stolen items, which means that every professional in the market knew what to look out for when offered a copy from a compromised print run.

According to the experts, the wave of thefts was probably inspired by the auction records of 2018–2019 at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, when a first edition of “Eugene Onegin” went for £467,000. The thieves were presumably counting on a similarly swift profit. Judging by the inventory of what was taken, they were stealing not to order, but from a list of “the most expensive”.

What they were thinking is unclear. These are several identical copies of “Poltava”, “Boris Godunov”, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”. When identical books appear on the legal market, the price falls. And what are we to say of the shadow market? Who needs such a mass of them? They clearly believed they were stealing something liquid, with a high margin. And that is not so.

Moreover, these are copies bearing library stamps. The expert called the estimate of the damage at €2.5 million highly hypothetical.

A book is not a painting, but a print-run object. The same lifetime edition of Pushkin without stamps costs one sum; with the stamp of a defunct library, ten times less; with the stamp of a functioning one, a hundred times less.