There Is Beingness A Lowlife Too And Then There's Stealing Books From An Ancient French Monastery

Back inward the day, stealing from a church building or monastery mightiness effect inward your getting skinned alive.
From Cabinet magazine:

Inside Jobs
Geoff Manaugh

The books in addition to manuscripts were disappearing from a room no i seemed to live entering. Its doors were almost never opened, the room itself unopen to populace view. There was no believable explanation for where the materials mightiness live going, thus the to the lowest degree believable reasoning before long took hold. It was the piece of occupation of the devil, the residents said. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 poltergeist. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 symbolic human activity of God meant to communicate something, if merely they could translate the signs.

This was, later all, a monastery—indeed, i of the world’s most picturesque, Mont Sainte-Odile, perched high inward the mountains of France, nearly on the edge alongside Germany—and its library was vanishing into sparse air. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 manuscript here, a jump mass there; five, six, a dozen, all chop-chop adding upward to nearly a K telephone commutation pieces of church building scholarship missing from the shelves in addition to tables.

When the police line were live on notified, they chose non to perform an exorcism. Being a secular institution, they instead installed a hidden surveillance camera, and, inward May 2002, the truth came to light. It was non a ghost at all, but an applied scientific discipline instructor from Strasbourg. He had been entering the room through a long-forgotten hole-and-corner passage, access to which was hidden within i of the bookcases. Unseen—indeed exclusively unsuspected—he was able to take the library’s priceless collection slice past times piece, emerging from the walls to accept entire shelves of books at a time.

Perhaps to a greater extent than spectacular than the teacher’s indirect method of approach was how he came to know the passage was at that topographic point inward the kickoff place. According to the Guardian, this otherwise law-abiding engineer kickoff learned nigh the road “after discovering a forgotten map inward populace archives” revealing how the monastery’s attic was covertly joined to the library on a lower floor. This jeopardy regain of a discarded flooring conception made him i of the real few people inward the basis who knew the architectural connectedness existed at all; it had long agone ceased existence used past times the monks themselves, having fallen into a solid soil of fail resembling spatial hibernation.

Bringing the passage dorsum into service as a reliable cast of internal circulation was not, inward fact, easy. According to some paper accounts, doing thus required scaling the exterior walls of the monastery, in addition to thus navigating a precipitous attic stairway. According to others, the human posed as an overnight invitee staying inward some other part of the monastery that had been converted into a hotel; carrying a suitcase, he would skid into a room alongside access to a hidden passageway, climb downwards a rope ladder, in addition to thus move into the library through the fox bookcase. Some reports also claim that he had to locate “a hidden mechanism” tucked within the wall that would effort the dorsum of the bookcase to flip open, allowing entrance into the library. Regardless of how he ultimately gained access to the books, his actions transformed the confines of the monastery into a form of three-dimensional puzzle. Indeed, the real fact that these accounts diverge suggests something of an epistemological dubiety at the pump of such crimes: that a burglar tin flame misuse a slice of architecture thus radically it becomes almost impossible to narrate what truly took house there.

Map of monastery in addition to adjoining hotel. This map was obtained in addition to used past times an amateur sleuth who visited the monastery inward May 2011 looking for its hole-and-corner passages. 
Courtesy adventurecycletour.wordpress.com.

Half a basis away, some other prolific mass thief establish as furtive ingress through like spatial means. An avid lock picker, skillful counterfeiter, in addition to methodical planner committed to researching the targets of his heists, Stephen Blumberg stole an estimated 20 i K m dollars’ worth of rare books in addition to manuscripts from institutional archives in addition to academic libraries or thus the United States.

His conception for hitting the rare books collection of the University of Southern California inward Los Angeles was characteristic: researching the history of the building, Blumberg had learned that a serial of disused dumbwaiters had in i lawsuit functioned to deliver books betwixt floors. The dumbwaiters were no longer active, but the shafts within the walls of the library yet offered a straight connectedness to mass stacks that were otherwise inaccessible to the public....MORE

The author is author of Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 Burgler's Guide to the City which nosotros visited inward 2016's "A Burgler's Guide To The City--How a Criminal Sees the World".