The Financial Times wants to know.
From the story...
I had the dubious privilege of witnessing the arrest of another notorious book thief. This was William Jacques, alias Mr Santoro or David Fletcher and sometimes dubbed the “Tome Raider”. Subsequently described in the press as a “master of disguise”, the man I saw looked rather anonymous in a cheap blue anorak – which is, perhaps, the most effective look for a book thief. Over five years he had stolen books worth £1.1m from the London Library, Cambridge University Library and British Library, including works by Galileo and Newton. One book alone, an original of Malthus’s 1798 tome An Essay on the Principle of Population, was worth £40,000.
As I quietly worked in the Lindley Library, two uniformed police officers suddenly appeared and took him away. It transpired that the RHS’s vigilant librarians had noticed Jacques behaving suspiciously on previous visits. Jacques has since jumped bail and remains at large. As for librarians and security staff, rather than watching out for a “master of disguise” in a false beard, they would probably do better to look out for an average-looking guy who seems to be looking at books for no particular scholastic reason. For if he fits the profile of most book thieves, he is likely to strike again.
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