The books issue of Elle and stories of book theft from libraries in Moscow, Oxford and the US

I know everyone has already written about the "book" issue of Elle, guest-edited by Anna Popova, whom we know from the Dostoevsky bookshop. I leafed through it, and there is Katya Mukhina in her editor's letter writing about an assistant who stole from her the complete works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. As they say, it is both laughable and sinful. One cannot help recalling in this connection the words of Nikolai Ivanchin-Pisarev: "Having spent not a rouble on their own education, they assemble their libraries for nothing too." Yet the theft of Mukhina's multi-volume Tolstoy is of course no match for how the German Matthaei stole a manuscript of Euripides from a Moscow library, or how the 18-year-old James Halliwell plundered the library at Oxford. Although the most brazen example of book theft, I would say, is the American Stephen Blumberg, who made off with tens of thousands of books from numerous city and university libraries and shops across the United States. But on the whole, I hold that if you are going to steal a book, you might be so good as to read it. And then perhaps somewhere in the world the best-read fashion assistant on earth will appear. Like