Sunday 18 January 2009

Man jailed over book page thefts

Farhad Hakimzadeh, a wealthy businessman of Knightsbridge in London, stole and defaced pages from priceless books in the British and Bodleian libraries. He pleaded guilty in May to 14 counts of theft from the libraries in London and Oxford and on Friday was sentenced to two years in jail for the offence.

Passing sentence, Judge Peter Ader said: “[…] you cannot have been unaware of the damage you were causing. You have a deep love of books, perhaps so deep that it goes to excess. I have no doubt that you were stealing in order to enhance your […] collection. Whether it was for money or for a rather vain wish to improve your collection is perhaps no consolation to the losers.” […] Dr Kristian Jensen said: “Obviously I’m angry because this is somebody […] who has damaged something which belongs to everybody… which this nation has invested in over generations.” Clive Hurst [...] said: “We feel it’s a terrible mutilation of our material, and it’s damaging a source of information so it is less now then when it was complete.” Detective Chief Inspector Dave Cobb, of the Metropolitan Police, said: "[…] Some of the stolen pages were recovered at his home address but many more have been lost forever."

But a collector cutting pages out of rare books is analogous to those who dig holes in individual volumes of the archaeological resource (that great library of our unwritten history) to tear out individual “pages” to put in their personal artefact collections. While Mr Hakimzadeh went to jail for his self-centred destruction of cultural property held in the British Library, collectors of single pages torn from the archaeological record ("it's legal innit?") get a pat on the head from their partner the Portable Antiquities Scheme just down the corridor from its offices.

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