The ‘Literary Litterbug,” an Arvada man ticketed in April for dumping thousands of books along a section of U.S. 287 south of Longmont pleaded guilty in Boulder County Court on Thursday to three counts of littering.

Prosecutors dropped three other littering charges against Glenn Pladsen and a county judge sentenced him to 30 hours of community service and ordered him to pay $1,725 for clean up and court costs, court records show.

A Colorado state trooper investigating the case ticketed Pladsen, 62, after witnessing him toss books out of the window of his vehicle on U.S. 287 in April.

Pladsen, who couldn’t be reached for comment on Friday, told the Times-Call in April that he was tossing the books because he couldn’t figure out another way to get rid of them.

He said at the time that he acquired thousands of books after a Boulder used bookstore closed about eight years ago, and he sold them online for a while but was unable to compete with Amazon.

The books, many of them romance novels, had been dumped on U.S. 287 between Arapahoe Road and Lookout Road beginning in November of last year. They had been concentrated near Isabelle Road but sometimes as far north as Longmont.

The book mystery garnered attention in newspaper articles, TV news segments and pages of online speculation, and frustrated Colorado Department of Transportation workers who had to clean them up over and over again.

Pladsen claimed that he had no idea newspaper stories had been written about the books, and didn’t think he was causing any harm.

John Bear: 303-684-5212, bearj@timescall.com or twitter.com/jonbearwithme