People who steal books, maps and other items from libraries usually keep them or sell them.  Why else go to the bother of devising a strategy for getting them out of a library and risk being caught?  This seems to be the M.O. for most thieves unless you’re Dale Wasserman.

Wasserman died at 94 and wouldn’t have caught my attention except for the fact that he was the playwright for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Man of La Mancha.  He also wrote a bunch of movie  and TV scripts.  While reading his obituary in the December 27, 2008 New York Times, I also discovered a unique bit about his life.  Wasserman was orphaned before he was 10 and lived with uncles and aunts.  However, he never stayed very long in any one place preferring to ride the rails as a hobo.  (The obituary points out that Wasserman  was a working hobo but not a tramp).

Among many amazing things in this “uneducated” man’s life was his love of reading.  He would steal two books at a time from a library and return them to another one on whatever railroad line he was riding at that time.  He would then steal another two books and start the process all over again.

OK, no librarian condones shoplifting.  And, it’s a pain for a library to mail back books that it didn’t borrow  to another library.  But, you have to love a guy that appreciates books and reading so much that he wouldn’t take away that privilege from someone else.  Dale Wasserman wasn’t a thief.