BookFinder.com Journal

I just finished reading local graphic novelist Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter, a noirish 1970s library action-detective story loosely based on an actual high-profile 1996 rare book theft. While Bookhunter works best in print, Shiga also makes it available to read online, either via a page-at-a-time interface, or as a single long page (best for high-bandwidth users).

The Stranger book editor Paul Constant writes about a somewhat less interesting brand of book thief in his article “Flying Off the Shelves: The Pleasures and Perils of Chasing Book Thieves”, based on his encounters with book thieves while working in Seattle independent bookstores:

“In my eight years working at an independent bookstore, I lost count of how many shoplifters I chased through the streets of Seattle while shouting ‘Drop the book!’ I chased them down crowded pedestrian plazas in the afternoon, I chased them through alleys at night, I even chased one into a train tunnel. I chased a book thief to the waterfront, where he shouted, ‘Here are your fucking books!’ and threw a half-dozen paperbacks, including Bomb the Suburbs and A People’s History of the United States, into Puget Sound, preferring to watch them slowly sink into the muck rather than hand them back to the bookseller they were stolen from. He had that ferocious, orgasmic gleam in his eye of somebody who was living in the climax of his own movie: I suppose he felt like he was liberating them somehow.”