Dibs

A huge case involving millions of dollars’ worth of books, stolen from libraries by various thieves including a trained antique-books expert over several years, is rocking New Zealand. Called Operation Pukapuka (the latter is the Maori word for “book”), the case centers around 44-year-old Lee Simpson, who over ten years stole some 2,500 books from libraries at the universities of Canturbury, Lincoln and Christchurch, as well as from the Canterbury Museum, and resold them to shops and collectors. “Simpson gained his knowledge of rare books and manuscripts through his late father, who collected them and worked as a volunteer at the Canterbury Museum,” reports Stuff.co.nz. “Simpson began offending in the early 1990s. Another prolific offender was Lionel Barry Quill, 64, who was jailed after admitting eight charges of receiving stolen goods. Quill often used a series of false identities to sell the goods. The Christchurch District Court was told that between April 1998 and September 2004, Quill made a total of 112 transactions, with sales totalling $37,966. Another family group of thieves admitted charges relating to theft of 660 books, with a face value of $34,000, from Christchurch libraries… The thieves’ modus operandi was almost ridiculously simple. They breached the system of trust by enrolling at libraries using a variety of false identities to borrow books, and once at home, removed any marks identifying them as belonging to a library.” About 1,500 of the stolen books have been recovered, but untold numbers “were sold to overseas collectors on the internet, to be lost forever,” Stuff reports.