Rare Book Monthly
Articles - February - 2009 Issue
<i>The Police Blotter:</i> eBay Buyers Beware; Book Thief Sentenced to 2 Years
Ebay seller bev103162smith had 99% positive feedback, with just a couple recent negatives for nonshipment.
"You have a deep love of books, perhaps so deep that it goes to excess." That quote may sound like it came from the spouse of a bibliophile, but the speaker was British Judge Peter Adler. The occasion was the sentencing of Farhad Hakimzadeh for numerous thefts from the British and Bodleian (Oxford) Libraries. Hakimzadeh had pleaded guilty to thefts of pages cut from ten books at those two venerated British libraries, though the belief is he stole many more. Judge Adler concluded his comments with a two-year sentence in the big house for Hakimzadeh. He will have plenty of time to ponder his activities that remain unfathomable to most others.
From 1997-2004, Hakimzadeh, a British national who emigrated from Iran after that nation's revolution, made regular visits to the libraries, scalpel in hand (actually, underhand). A scholar, writer, and successful businessman, no one imagined he came for anything other than scholarly research. Instead, Hakimzadeh would trudge off to dark parts of the libraries, where security cameras did not scan, and slice valuable pages from the antiquarian texts. Most of those books dealt with that area of the world today known as Iran and its neighboring states.
His reason for committing these crimes remains hard to understand. Hakimzadeh seems to be a man of substantial means, not needing to resort to theft to build a collection. Perhaps some of the pages he stole were simply unobtainable elsewhere. Many pages he removed from the libraries were found inserted in copies of his own books. It appears he was trying to improve or augment copies in his own collection, hence the judge's comment about his too-great love of books. He does not appear to have been financially motivated as with American page-cutter Forbes Smiley, who stole maps sliced from books and sold them. However, many of the pages Hakimzadeh took have not been found and it is not clear what he did with them.
Dr Kristian Jensen, Head of British Collections at the British Library, stated, "these thefts have struck at the very heart of the British Library's historic collections making their loss and the vandalism that accompanied their theft especially harmful. The violation of the collections by Hakimzadeh transcends mere monetary loss; his victims are the researchers of the future who will not be able to consult this material."
