Book Thieves: Theft and Literary Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Australia

Book thieves were a familiar figure to the reading public of Australia and other English-speaking nations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their exploits were covered in books about books, library and medical journals, and in newspapers that reported their appearances in court, and treated them as a humorous oddity in other coverage. This article examines the historic concerns and assumptions about book thieves, as well as what these tropes reveal about prevailing discourses regarding thieves more generally. The book thief – invariably constructed in the popular imagination as a middle-class male – was a classed and gendered figure, one at odds with contemporary understandings of theft as an act committed by members of an uncultured criminal class. By scrutinizing the development of popular conceptions of the book thief as an entity clearly distinguishable from the ordinary thief, I demonstrate the centrality of literacy and literary culture to how thieves themselves were read.     

The Local: A History of the English Pub. By Paul Jennings.

ABSTRACT

The period between 1950 and 1975 marked a dramatic shift in food retailing in Britain with the introduction of self-service stores and supermarkets. It also witnessed a significant rise in shoplifting, which many contemporary observers blamed on the introduction of self-service retailing. Using material from the retail trade press, newspaper reports, contemporary academic and marketing studies, and the publications of consumer associations, this article reflects on the fractured nature of the public discourse surrounding shoplifting in the early post-war period and looks at the factors that made self-service food retailing such a potentially problematic innovation. We argue that an ambivalence arose because shoplifting was regarded as a ‘housewives' crime’, and because of some of the specific characteristics of the self-service innovation. The introduction of self-service retailing not only fundamentally altered the relationship between consumers and retailers, and between consumers and goods, but had the effect of throwing into question existing definitions and perceptions of consumer crime. This article will show that there was considerable public debate and disagreement over who was to blame for the sudden surge in the crime, over what could be done to prevent it, and over how to treat those accused and convicted of shoplifting. Some of the ambiguities in public responses to shoplifting evident in our period were witnessed in the earlier experiences of the nineteenth-century department store. Then, as in the 1950s, public debate on the causes of shoplifting occurred within the context of broader critiques of consumerism.