‘The incentive to steal isn’t there’: the lost cause of tracking library theft

The State Library of Victoria’s La Trobe reading room. Lost library books are a small part of the natural attrition of library collections. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian

A curious trend once gripped Australian libraries and it was concerned with matters of the dark arts. “If you were wanting to see library books on the occult and witchcraft, they were often missing,” says Cameron Morley. “Were people who were really into that sort of thing taking the books? Or were fundamentalist Christians taking the books because they didn’t want them to be available?”

The head of public library services at the State Library of New South Wales is today no closer to finding an answer than he was when the thievery was at its height in the 1990s. In any case, it is hard to know whether the books were stolen or lost – and his observation, though widely held, is anecdotal.