In contrast to the slew of movies devoted to art thieves (Entrapment, Ocean’s Twelve, The Thomas Crown Affair, etc), purloining books has had a poor showing on screen – just the obscure Canadian film The Art of the Steal, and a Mr Bean sketch in which the klutz cuts up a codex, if you leave out the The Book Thief’s benign “borrowings”. Is this because most textual treasures are not beautiful objects – just print behind covers - or because Hollywood is in denial about its dependency on books and so undervalues them?
Whatever the cause, literary robbery at last gets its due in American Animals, a new film re-enacting a botched burglary in 2004. Planning to steal super-rare plates from John Audubon’s Birds of America, a gang of Kentucky students raided Transylvania University’s library preposterously disguised as elderly scholarly types. Although their haul (including a Darwin first edition) was worth $750,000 (£584,000), they had to leave behind the heavy Audubon volumes. They believed these to be worth $12m, based on a recent auction – then they were caught because they used the same email address for a Christie's valuation in New York as the one used to arrange the library visit.
Hopefully American Animals will kick-start book theft’s surge to cinematic parity with art crime and conman capers, as there are plenty of colourful stories out there waiting to be translated to the screen. There’s the 19th-century Italian count Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja, who magnificently pilfered the books and manuscripts he was in charge of as France’s Inspector of Libraries (his friend Prosper Mérimée, author of Carmen, mistakenly defended him). The serial “Book Bandit” Stephen Blumberg, who took 23,000 items worth $5.3m from 250-plus institutions in 45 US states before his 1990 arrest, and claimed to be rescuing them as part of an idealistic, anti-government mission. And the “tome raiders” who last year abseiled into a London warehouse and removed antiquarian books including works by Dante, Leonardo, Galileo, Newton and Copernicus.
Handily available for screen treatment too is a fictional heist story by John Grisham. Camino Island shows a young gang stealing Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts from Princeton University’s library, then switches focus to an FBI agent who infiltrates the world of the suspected fence, a Florida bookshop owner, collector and dealer. If it gets picked up by a hot producer, it could do for literary crime – and hence perhaps the cultural status of the book – what Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch did for art theft.
