Crime as old as the written word

As long as there have been book lovers, there have been book thieves. Egypt's Ptolemy II is said to have withheld wheat from Athens' starving citizens until they allowed him to borrow and make copies of rare Greek manuscripts.

The philosopher Aristotle showed sympathy towards those who stole books for the pleasure of reading, though he condemned the "unnatural" criminals who sold them on for profit.

In medieval libraries, religious works were chained to stands. Dire warnings of damnation for the light-fingered were common: "He who steals this book - let him be struck with palsy and all his members blasted," went one tract.

The advent of national libraries increased public interest in printed treasures rendered priceless by their antiquity. One of the more audacious thefts of recent years involved the taking of a £1m goatskin-bound edition of Shakespeare's first folio, published in 1623, from Durham University.

Earlier this month a Cambridge graduate who stole more than 400 old books from three libraries was jailed for four years. William Jacques, 33, plundered the British Library and Cambridge University library. Among the works he put up for auction were Kepler's Astronomia Nova, dating from 1609, worth £75,000, and two copies of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, printed in 1687 and put on sale for £135,000.

Even popular 20th century literature has been looted. The British Library has admitted that hundreds of comics, dating from 1924 and featuring Desperate Dan and Korky the Cat have vanished from its newspaper storage branch in north London.

As Aristotle hinted, not all book thefts are intentional. One book lover sends birthday cards every year to long lost volumes he has lent out and which his friends and colleagues have forgotten to return.