[CPProt.net] Plot thickens in vanishing books mystery

[MSN CPPnet]

Plot thickens in vanishing books mystery
By Andrea Petrie
July 1, 2005

In many ways it was a textbook arrest: police nabbed their man within 50
metres of the robbery of a Prahran shop early on Tuesday.

But this was not your average smash and grab. The High Street shop is one of
Melbourne's oldest antiquarian book stores and the thief - who bypassed
nearby stores selling jewellery and fine china - allegedly made off with two
dozen of English literature's finest.

But when the man was arrested, the loot was gone.

And it remains a mystery. The Collingwood man, 43, has told police he does
not remember what happened to the books, some more than three centuries old.
They were valued at more than $10,000.

Police say the man - who was drunk and who splattered blood throughout the
store after cutting himself on the window - smashed a glass cabinet at the
back of the store before gathering the books into a cardboard box and
fleeing.

The collection includes a rare edition of Charles Dickens' A Christmas
Carol, poems of Lord Byron and works by John Steinbeck and Sir Walter Scott.

Also spirited away was a copy of The Book of Fate and Fortune, An
Encyclopedia of the Occult Sciences. But most valuable of all is a $3200
first edition of A Collection of Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads of
legendary English outlaw Robin Hood.

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AdvertisementSheilah McGrath-Campbell, a worker at the High Street store,
Kenneth Hince Old and Fine Books, yesterday described the case as "quite
peculiar".

"Two doors up there's a jeweller, three doors up there's a store that sells
beautiful china that's hundreds of years old and for some reason he came
here to a book shop," she said.

"He obviously had no taste in books, though, because while they are
beautiful books he took, and we're heart-broken they're gone, it's almost
like that's all he saw because he passed another cabinet to get to this one
at the back of the store."

She said some of the books were heavy reading that would require an interest
in the topic.

"I doubt, for instance, that he would've been interested in The Mormons' Own
Book on Mormonism that was published in 1857 and some of the other
subjects," she said. "It's awfully disappointing, but... while it's broken
our hearts that these books have gone... no one was seriously hurt."

A man has been charged with burglary and theft. He has been bailed to appear
in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on August 26.