Book 'em

AMONG THE MANY bookplates pasted into the volumes of Harvard's Widener Library, one stands out in its severe simplicity. ''This book was stolen from Harvard College Library," it says. ''It was later recovered. The thief was sentenced to two years at hard labor."

The bookplate commemorates the legacy of Joel Clifton Williams, an aspiring scholar and one-time Harvard graduate student who was discovered stealing books from Widener in 1932. Investigators recovered nearly 2,000 books from his Dedham home, all of which received the surprising bookplate upon their return to the library. Newspaper accounts described him in the terms frequently applied to biblioklepts: He was shy, ''bookish," an absent-minded professor. His story hearkens back to Flaubert's novella ''Bibliomanie," about a similarly quiet man willing to commit murder to acquire books.

At the same time, Williams is the forerunner of contemporary criminals such as Stephen Blumberg, whose 1990 arrest led to the discovery of more than 20,000 pilfered volumes in his Iowa home. And this summer, the well-known map dealer E. Forbes Smiley III was caught in Yale's Beinecke Library with an X-acto knife, a rare map in his jacket pocket, and a briefcase full of pilfered cartographic treasures. He since has been indicted for theft of maps from atlases in the collections of Yale, the Boston Public Library, and other institutions.

It isn't hard to understand what motivates people to steal books. Among the stalls at the 29th annual Boston International Book Fair at Hynes Convention Center next weekend, there will be many volumes with the power to steal collectors' hearts. Fairgoers will browse such wonders as Thoreau's copy of ''Leaves of Grass," with marginal notes written by Whitman, and a copy of the first edition of James Joyce's ''Ulysses," published in Paris in 1922. There will be 18th-century volumes in rich, gilt leather; crumbling typescripts from the likes of Dashiell Hammett; hand-bound volumes of presidential autographs and Colonial charters.

Such books offer us a sense of direct access to the past; they invite reverie and dislocation. With their weight in our hands and their scent in our nostrils, we reflect not only on the stories they tell and the images they share, but on the printers and artists who made them, and the readers who came before us.

It's this very experience, of course, that drives thieves like Williams and Blumberg to steal. Even the acts of profit-driven thieves still have bibliomania at their root: In such cases, after all, it is the passion of collectors, whether innocent or complicit, that invites the damage.

In times of conflict, too, books have their predators. Rare Judaica stolen by the special cultural commandos of the SS has appeared from time to time in the international book trade. The fate of many unique Muslim manuscripts held by Iraqi museums and libraries, which were looted and destroyed by Ba'athists seeking to obscure the regime's infamous record in the wake of the US invasion in 2003, remains uncertain. Like thieves and profiteers, looters recognize the value of books, the role they play in proclaiming the humanity of their victims. Books not only beguile, they also accuse.

So the collecting of books and their victimization are closely intertwined. It's not surprising that the topic is a touchy one among librarians, bibliophiles, and booksellers. Too little conversation takes place among the book world's constituencies, and too little cooperation results.

This isn't to say that people working within each sphere-the book trade, the library community, and the world of collectors-don't try hard to do the right thing (indeed, most of them are ardent preservationists). But does the needed conversation take place among these overlapping groups? Are they asking each other the tough questions: Who polices the world of books? What does the theft of books tell us about the rare books trade? About the value of books in society?

The critic Roland Barthes made a distinction between the book as ''work"-bound, closed, perfect, and utterly dead-and ''text" that transcends the physical object. ''The metaphor of the text," he wrote, ''is that of the network" (this in 1977). Thanks to the Internet, text increasingly conforms to Barthes's notion. But it's worth pointing out that the material things called books, too, are nodes in a network of sensuous experience that stretches around the globe and backward into time. In handling books, in caring for them, and in knitting them into the life of society, we embody our past, making our corporeal selves a kind of interface for history. It's this embodied culture that the theft of books disrupts.

Matthew Battles will moderate ''Declared Lost," a free symposium on stolen books, on Saturday at 10 a.m., in the Boston Public Library's Rabb Lecture Hall.

Matthew Battles is the coordinating editor of the Harvard Library Bulletin and the author of ''Library: An Unquiet History."