On the trail of the great book heist

Up to 170 valuable Russian classics were stolen from European libraries. Were petty criminals or bigger forces behind the crime? By Philip Oltermann

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On 16 October 2023, a young man and woman sat down in the back row of the second-floor reading room of the university library of Warsaw, Poland. Their reading cards carried the names Sylvena Hildegard and Marko Oravec. On the desk in front of them were eight books that they had ordered up from the library's closed-storage 19th-century collection: rare editions of classic works of poetry, drama and fiction by two greats of the Russian canon, Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. They studied the books closely, taking photographs on their phones and measurements with rulers.

When the duo did not return from a cigarette break and the invigilators checked their desk, they found that five of the eight books had gone. One of the missing Pushkin works was a narrative poem about the adventures of two outlaws, The Robber Brothers. It was as if the thieves had wanted to send a message.

In the days that followed, an investigation of the library's stocks revealed that a further 74 books of Russian literature had been stolen in the weeks, or months, leading up to the final swoop. The thieves had avoided detection by replacing the books with what one newspaper described as "high-quality facsimiles" of the originals. Most books in the Warsaw library are fitted with a magnetic strip that raises an alarm at the exit. But older books went without this, as an expert had advised that the glue on the magnetic strip could damage the paper.