"Steal This Book" not on the List

[David Payne]

I read a similar article back in 1999: "Shoplift Lit: You Are What You Steal." Here, however, the author mulled (mocked) the literary motives of the thiefs, and he decided to stop and consider what books he thought were worth the risk. The author seemed a bit of a snot, but I still thought the article was funny. Plus it turned me on to Charles Portis.

Amazingly, the article's still online. 

>From http://www.observer.com/node/42023 (if the link drops, google "Shoplift Lit: You Are What You Steal"):

The most frequently stolen books in 1999 according to a semi-random bookstore employee?

Bukowski
Martin Amis
Paul Auster
Georges Bataille
William Burroughs
Italo Calvino
Raymond Chandler
Michel Foucault
Dashiell Hammett
Jack Kerouac
Jeanette Winterson

("What do we make of this list?" asked the author. "To me the big surprise was the two Frenchies.")

And the stuff he saw on the shelf that he might've risked hard time to own?

Persuasion , Jane Austen. 
The Sot-Weed Factor , John Barth
Labyrinths , Jorge Luis Borges
The Heart of a Dog , or The Master and Margarita , Mikhail Bulgakov
The Wapshot Scandal , John Cheever
Bleak House , Charles Dickens
Libra , Don Delillo
The Dick Gibson Show , Stanley Elkin
Invisible Man , Ralph Ellison
The Heart of the Matter , Graham Greene
Pale Fire , Vladimir Nabokov
The Dog of the South , Charles Portis
The Crying of Lot 49 , Thomas Pynchon
Shadows on the Hudson , Isaac Bashevis Singer
Tristram Shandy , Laurence Sterne
Dog Soldiers , Robert Stone
The Eustace Diamonds , Anthony Trollope
The Custom of the Country , Edith Wharton

On 6 Mar 2008 at 3:06 PM, rich  wrote:
> for a long time many bookstores downtown NYC would not keep DeLillo's
> novels on the shelf but behind the counter
>
> doubt that's the case anymore

And on 6 Mar 2008 at 2:32 PM, David Morris  wrote:
>> http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=520472
>>
>> There's an underground economy of boosted books [...]
>> 1. Charles Bukowski
>> 2. Jim Thompson
>> 3. Philip K. Dick
>> 4. William S. Burroughs
>> 5. Any Graphic Novel
>> This is pretty much the authoritative top five, the New York Times
>> best-seller list of stolen books.
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