The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

Chapter 10

1 Andrew Clark. Interview with the author.

2 Alan Beatts. Interview with the author.

3 Bob Gavora. Interview with the author.

4 This lax attitude was not always so. In the time of King Henry IV (late fourteenth, early fifteenth centuries) a man named Johannes Leycestre and his wife, Cedilia, stole “a little book from an old church.” His punishment: “Let him be hanged by the neck until his life departs.” Apparently, the fate of Cedilia, like that of most women of her day, was not worth recording. See Edwin White Gaillard, “The Book Larceny Problem,” The Library Journal , vol. 45 (March 15, 1920), pp. 247-254, 307-312.

5 Sebastiaan Hesselink, interviews with the author, and Travis McDade, The Book Thief (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006).

6 Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Splendor of Letters (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), p. 15.

7 Robert Vosper, A Pair of Bibliomanes for Kansas: Ralph Ellis and Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick (Bibliographical Society of America publication), vol. 55 (Third Quarter, 1961).

8 James Gilreath and Douglas L. Wilson, eds., Thomas Jefferson’s Library (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1989).

9 Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis wrote this for a speech that was never delivered. Quoted in Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, p. 23.

10 P. Alessandra Maccioni Ruju and Marco Mostert, The Life and Times of Guglielmo Libri (Hilvesum, Netherlands: Verloren, 1995).