Download Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It AudioBook Free
No one experienced ever tried a caper like this before. The products were maintained in a secure room under continuous scrutiny, deep in the congested building with guards at the exits. The team chosen for the job included two old hands known only as Paul and Swede, but all depended on a fresh face, a kid from Pinetown, North Carolina. In the Depressive disorder, some fellows were willing to try anything - a good heist in the uncommon e book room of the New York Public Library. In Thieves of Booklet Row, Travis McDade explains to the gripping tale of the most severe book-theft ring in American background, and the intrepid detective who helped bring it down. Author of The Booklet Thief and a curator of uncommon books, McDade changes painstaking research into a wealthy portrait of Manhattan's Booklet Row in the 1920s and '30s, where structured crime fulfilled America's cultural treasures in dark and congested retailers along gritty Fourth Avenue. Traders such as Harry Silver, a tough native of the Lower East Area, became experts in knowing the value of books and recruiting a pool of thieves to grab them - most of them unemployed men who drifted in the Bowery or huddled around fires in Central Park's shantytowns. When Paul and Swede helped bring a fresh recruit into his shop, Silver trained him for the largest score yet: a first release of Edgar Allan Poe's Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Small Poems. Gold's recruit cased the rare-book room for weeks, looking for a weakness. When he found one, he struck, resulting in a breathtaking game of wits between Silver and NYPL special investigator G. William Bergquist. Both a fast-paced and true-life thriller, Thieves of Booklet Row provides a fascinating go through the history of criminal offense and literary culture.
