For those who follow Book Patrol you've heard this song before. For a bookshop to survive in today's rapidly changing landscape one must take a more integrated, holistic approach to bookselling. The days of being able to survive selling just new books, or to a lesser extent used books, are just about up. The current seismic tremors in the publishing world coupled with the new and emerging modes of content delivery just might be the straw that breaks the traditional bookstore's back.

Many years ago, when I was a first-year high school English teacher, I overheard some of the veteran teachers talking in the faculty room of our school.  The conversation went something like this:

"These kids today. No self-discipline."
"I haven't taught a really smart class since 1987."
"Kids these days don't read, don't care, and can't write."
Etcetera.

This kind of conversation made me uncomfortable.  While I did  have the occasional difficult student -- several actually -- I liked most of my students and felt that for the most part they worked hard.  Because I had worked an office job I hated for a short time before becoming a teacher, I felt that teaching was a gift. I was lucky to be able to work in a classroom and to help others to see the what's so great about good literature and to teach them to write and to work towards their goals of college or career.  I won't lie and say every day was a good and perfect one or that I always achieved every goal I set or that all my students claimed me as their favorite teacher, but I really did feel like I was lucky to be able to have a job that allowed me to indulge my love of books and to share that appreciation with others, even with the reluctant students who felt books were unlovable and beyond comprehension.

I see by the papers a recent article in the Financial Times of London on the general subject of book theft, the occasion for the piece being three cases that achieved "high profile" status in Europe by virtue of the materials stolen, and for the stature of the people who committed the crimes. Indeed, the perpetrators have been described by some officials as "gentleman thieves," a description that could well apply to Edward Forbes Smiley III, the dapper American dealer whose theft of 97 maps valued at $3 million from various repositories earned him a sentence in 2006 of three and a half years in federal prison.

The most recent case in Europe involves a 60-year-old Iranian businessman, Farhad Hakimzadeh, who was sentenced to two years in prison in January for having removed pages from rare books in the British and Bodleian libraries over a seven-year period. He did this, it was later learned, to improve imperfect copies in his own collection--"augmenting" them is the bibliographical term--which he could then sell at better prices on the open market. One of the books he vandalized contained a 500-year-old map painted by Hans Holbein, an artist in the court of Henry VIII, and valued at 32,000 pounds.

The two earlier cases discussed in the article involve the thefts in France of Stanislas Gosse, a 30-year-old former naval officer whose particular passion was for illuminated manuscripts plundered from the library of a monastery in eastern France, and the five-year feeding frenzy of one William Jacques, also known as Mr. Santoro, David Fletcher, and to those who finally apprehended him on charges of making off with rare books from the London Library, Cambridge University Library, and British Library valued at 1 million pounds, as the "Tome Raider."

The details of these cases are fascinating, and those interested in learning more should read the Financial Times piece. But what puzzles me the most, I have to say, is not the disclosure of the crimes--since book theft has been with us for centuries--but for the incredulity of it all--as if such crimes are a recent phenomenon, and that anyone should be shocked that the perpetrators turn out to be "respectable" persons.

Let me note that there is a very good reason for why it is pretty difficult to go into the reading rooms of special collections libraries in much of the world these days. Bags and coats must be left outside, surveillance cameras are operating, and people are being watched. You can credit a good deal of that to the lessons learned from the twenty-year campaign of book theft undertaken by Stephen Carrie Blumberg, who I wrote about at length in "A Gentle Madness," and who we can safely say was the quintessential book thief of the twentieth century. His toll over a twenty-year spree: 23,600 books stolen from 268 libraries in forty-five states, two Canadian provinces, and the District of Columbia, booty conservatively valued at the time of his arrest in 1990 at $20 million. Part of Blumberg's MO, it should be noted--one way he gained the trust of libraries--was to masquerade as a visiting scholar.

I shall remember always the words of W. Dennis Aiken, the FBI special agent who supervised the investigation of the case:

"My conviction is that Steve Blumberg was going to get this stuff no matter what he had to do. He did nighttime burglaries. He defeated sophisticated alarm systems. He threw books out windows. He knew what was going on in the life of libraries, and he picked their weakest moments. I suppose if these people were willing to dig a fifty-foot hole in the ground and encase everything in concrete, he might not have been able to get in, but I wouldn't bet on that either. This is a very clever man. Book theft was his life."

Cautionary words if ever there were any.

The story so far: In One Touch of Venus (Library): Odyssey of an Imprint, Part I we find Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset on the ropes, desperate for money, and, in a deal with his paperbacks distributor, Kable News, establishing Venus Library. Venus Library flounders, Kable News' chief John Hayes seizes the imprint from Rosset, it becomes Venus Books, loses a a small fortune, and Hayes seeks a way out.

Enter Maurice Girodias.

With all the gloomy news about the publishing industry cutting back drastically on worthwhile releases in the face of pressing economic times--take a look at the most recent developments at one major New York house, where a new imprint devoted to pop culture and entertainment has been announced--it is gratifying to report on some fabulous books being released this spring that are truly worth spending valuable time with (dare I say, too, actually "worth the paper they're printed on"?).

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, by Elaine Showalter; Alfred A. Knopf, 586 pages, $30.

I admit I'm a sucker for books about books, and that I am particularly partial to trenchant works of literary biography and literary criticism, especially when new ground is clearly being broken. Elaine Showalter, professor emerta from Princeton University and author previously of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from From Bronte to Lessing (Princeton University Press, 1977), a standard work, now offers a penetrating history of American women writers in America, as the subtitle states, from the early seventeenth century, up to the present moment (a nice touch, that--Anne to Annie.)

"I believe that American women writers no longer need special constituted juries, softened judgment, unspoken agreements, or suppression of evidence in order to stand alongside the greatest artists in our literary heritage," she writes, explaining her purpose. "What keeps literature alive, meaningful to read, and exciting to reach isn't unstinting approval or unanimous admiration, but rousing argument and robust debate."

Lighter Than Air: An Illustrated History of Balloons and Airships, by Tom D. Crouch; Johns Hopkins University Press, 191 pages, $35.

This copiously illustrated overview of lighter than air aviation chronicles an adventurous period in human accomplishment with style and insight, focusing on the earliest attempts to take flight by way of inflated envelopes, with two French paper-makers, the brothers Jacques-Etienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, leading the way in the 1780s. "Why did it take so long to learn to fly?" Tom Crouch, curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, asks.  "The Greek philosopher Archimedes (287-212 BC) explained the basic principle of buoyant flight more than twenty centuries before human beings first took the sky aboard balloons." He offers a fascinating account of the thrilling quest for human flight.

Babylon, edited by I. L. Finkel and M. J. Seymour; Oxford University Press, 238 pages, $40.

Few names from antiquity conjure up images of exotic mystery and curiosity more than biblical Babylon, the city of the wondrous Hanging Gardens,the Tower of Babel, King Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel in the Lion's Den, the Ishtar Gate, despite the passage of 2,500 years since its fall. Located on the banks of the Euphrates River in what is now war-torn Iraq, what remains of the vanished city today are mostly dim memories and second-hand accounts passed on by such historians as Herodotus and Ctesias, and, of course, a range of exquisite artifacts that have been recovered over the years and removed to a number of great museums.

Irving Finkel and Michael Seymour have edited this comprehensive catalog issued in conjunction with what by all accounts has been a dazzling exhibition at the British Museum in London (it closes on March 15), showcasing treasures from numerous collections, the BM's, of course, but also twenty-three other lenders, including the Louvre in Paris and the Vorderasiatisches in Berlin. "Babylon, in all its manifestations," they write, "is at once remote to us and all around us. Like no other city, its history has become bound up with legend."

History buffs, art buffs, and archaeology buffs alike with love this book.

One area I collect in is books about books.  A part of that collection includes book trade labels.  What is a book trade label?  If you've handled old books, you've likely noticed teeny-tiny labels typically on the front or rear endpaper.  They will often be less than an inch long and a half inch tall. 

I'm not really sure why, but it seems more natural to refer to these tiny bits of paper as tickets when associated with a bookbinder, and a label when it is from a bookseller. Perhaps because craftsmen use jobbing tickets and retailers label their merchandise. In the interest of casting my net wide, I refer to them all as book trade labels.  That was the nomenclature used when I found Seven Roads Book Trade Labels and realized I was not the only one interested in these gems.  Unfortunately, Seven Roads went dormant in June 2007.  However lost Seven Roads is, we gained the Bibliophemera blog, which often features labels.

We just posted our Top Twenty, our annual report on the top prices paid for books and manuscripts at auction last year, proving once again that people will pay top dollar for religion (Islamic manuscripts) and rock & roll (Lennon's lyrics to "Give Peace a Chance"). Richard Goodman interviewed Abigail Rorer, whose wonderful book Mimpish Squinnies was honored at the Codex fair last month in Berkeley. We also found a completely driven collector (is there any other kind?), a neurologist in New Jersey, who has managed to assemble what may be the finest collection of American magazines anywhere. (So print may be disappearing, but not in this guy's house!) Also, look for a piece by our maps columnist Derek Hayes on the desk Barack Obama uses in the Oval Office (why maps? read it and see), a nutty story about a lost Mormon journal; a preview of a contemporary book arts show in Seattle; and, as they say, there's much, much more.