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Copenhagen Police Claim Breakthrough in Danish Royal Library TheftCopenhagen police have rounded up hundreds of rare books, maps, and documents stolen from the Danish Royal Library between the late 1960s and 1978 in an effort that could have finally solved the decades-old crime. A police spokesman said that a 68-year-old woman and her son and daughter-in-law had been taken into custody in connection with the theft, according to a December 11 Associated Press release. The Copenhagen Politiken newspaper reported that the woman was the widow of a philologist who had worked in the library’s Oriental Collection. She and the others came under suspicion several months earlier when they attempted to sell several books, including the only existing copy of a 1517 volume registered as belonging to the Royal Library, through London auction house Christie’s. Library Director General Erland Kolding Nielsen told Reuters that “the suspect had apparently tried to remove a registration code, but we could still make out that the book belonged to us.” More than 3,200 books were stolen over a 10-year period—among them works by John Milton, Immanuel Kant, Martin Luther, and the astronomer Tycho Brahe—but only about 1,800 have been recovered so far. Nielsen said about 100 had been auctioned, including a first edition of Thomas More’s Utopia that sold for the equivalent of $244,500. “This is a remarkable time for me,” Nielsen added. “The case has been open for 25 years. I never imagined I would live to see it solved.” Posted December 12, 2003. |
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