Neil Strandberg, the manager of operations at the Tattered Cover in Denver seconded this bit of reader profiling. “Our arrest record is very male,” he said.

Image Credit... Illustration by Enric Jardí

There is a certain hip factor to stealing a book, said Mark Z. Danielewski, whose novel “House of Leaves” is commonly shoplifted at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, Calif., according to Allison Hill, the store’s president and chief operating officer. “In ‘The Savage Detectives,’ Roberto Bolaño writes about visiting various bookstores and stealing books,” Danielewski said. “I never stole a book, though. I always found there was a pleasure, weirdly enough, in saving for and paying for something.”

Some authors don’t share that pleasure, however. At Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colo., one writer was even busted stealing his own books. Christopher Ohman, who was a manager at the time, said: “I think he felt somewhat entitled to the copies. In some ways I can kind of understand that logic. I mean, it’s a commonly held misconception that authors get as many copies of their books as they want, and that’s not always the case.” (Ohman conceded that the author’s alcohol problem may also have had something to do with it.)

Although there’s no hard statistical evidence on most-stolen titles, The Telegraph of London reported last year that Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel “The Virgin Suicides” was said to be “the most shoplifted book of modern times.” Eugenides had heard this for many years. “I just assumed that the book appealed to the young and sticky-fingered to a certain extent,” he told me, with some amusement. Years ago, Eugenides was at a literary conference with Paul Auster, another top choice among literary thieves. “Paul and I argued about whose book was stolen more,” Eugenides said. “He claimed he was stolen a lot, I claimed I was stolen a lot. Back and forth. It was one of those deep intellectual conversations.”

Were there fisticuffs?

“No, no,” he said. “We had no way of adjudicating the argument. That was the problem.”

Auster, for his part, isn’t sure why his books are popular to steal. “It could be that my work appeals to the criminal element,” he told me. “When I was young many of my friends stole books from bookstores. They’d wear trench coats with lots of pockets, and they’d jam them in like Harpo Marx. Of course they didn’t understand that these stores were important resources.” He lamented the demise of Bookforum, formerly located near Columbia University. “I’m just so worried about bookstores in general right now. I don’t want any more of them to fold up.”

Books are not the only items disappearing from stores. Allison Hill of Vroman’s in Pasadena recalled the time someone tried to take a security camera. Ohman, the former manager at Boulder Book Store, remembered full-size framed art prints mysteriously vanishing from the bathroom walls. “There’s nothing in here that no one’s tried to steal,” said Bercu of Austin’s BookPeople. “Plants, chairs, lights — if you can touch it, someone will steal it, or attempt to.”