Scissors and Cake

The British Library Reader Bulletin
IN THIS ISSUE
The Library's news on a conviction for theft
LIBRARY THIEF CONVICTED

Mr Farhad Hakimzadeh, a former British Library Reader, is due to appear at Wood Green Court today (Friday 21 November). Hakimzadeh has pleaded guilty to ten counts of theft from the Library, and asked for further charges to be taken into account. He has also admitted theft from the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Sentencing in this case is expected later today and you may have seen coverage of the case in this morning's press.

Hakimzadeh used considerable skill, deceit and determination to steal leaves, plates and maps from collection items. In many instances his thefts were initially difficult to detect. The items he mutilated are mainly 16th, 17th and 18th century items, with a lesser number of 19th and a few 20th century items. The predominant subject area is the West European engagement with Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul [Mughal] empire (roughly the area from modern Syria to Bangladesh), and western travel and colonisation / exploration.

Readers should be assured that theft from the British Library is an extremely rare occurrence. As Readers will appreciate, we are a library, not a museum. We are committed to making our collections available in the interests of scholarship and research, and to do this an element of trust is necessary. Hakimzadeh fundamentally betrayed this trust.

I know that Readers will share the anger we feel about this crime. The Library takes very seriously its duty to protect the collections for your use, and for the generations of Readers to come. We have zero tolerance of anyone who harms our collections and will pursue anyone who threatens them with utmost vigour.

The successful prosecution of Hakimzadeh follows a thorough and detailed investigation by Library staff and the Metropolitan Police. This led to the recovery of some of the items stolen by Hakimzadeh, and civil proceedings are now underway to recover further items and to seek financial compensation.

The Library has been heartened by the generous co-operation it has received during this investigation from a number of institutions and from other libraries in this country and abroad.

Should any Reader have a concern about the security of a collection item, please do speak to a member of Reading Room staff.

Dame Lynne Brindley

Chief Executive Officer

The British Library

While it must be true that most art thieves have a studied area of expertise, I am posting the above mainly so you can all see the context for the following sentence: "The predominant subject area is the West European engagement with Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul [Mughal] empire (roughly the area from modern Syria to Bangladesh), and western travel and colonisation / exploration." Also NB that the CEO of the BL is a Dame. Apparently, the heads of Oxford and Cambridge UP's are also either Dames or Sirs, depending.

So what have I been up to, you ask, if not slicing out items from sixteenth-century books? Let me tell you , it's been positively dialectic over here, what with the highbrow and then the lowbrow and back to highbrow again with nary a stop in between for the decidedly middlebrow pleasures of dissertation work. I imagine myself nimbly skipping over the mis en abyme that is Spenser, but alas, I feel that is both inevitable and that we need to give more studied considerations for the reasons Spenser's Chaucerian imitation in the Shepheardes Calender manifests itself in specifically lexical ways (you like that? Yeah.).

Anyway, I digress. Instead, a quick digest:

Highbrow: Impressing the Tsar, contemporary ballet from the Eighties Future at Sadler's Wells.
Lowbrow: Bonfire night! Fireworks! Really close to my head!
Highbrow: Contemporary Chinese art at the Saatchi Gallery. I hope Mr. Saatchi likes his contemporary Chinese art, since it may be a while before he can sell it at anything other than a loss.
Lowbrow: A trip of Odyssey-like proportions on the night bus back from Brixton.
Highbrow: Delirium an adaptation of the Brothers Karamazov from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Not the best play I've seen here, but perhaps the most ambitious and certainly the most exciting and therefore one of my favorites. The production's focus did, um, wobble a bit with the introduction of some interpretive dancing in the second act but what can you do? They get an A for effort.
Lowbrow: Louche drinks and arguments about Freud and Chaucer with a bookseller/would-be-writer in Joycean hat and glasses. A friend of John Shurmer-Smith's, obviously.
Highbrow: Tea tasting at Samuel Johnson's house, courtesy Twinnings Tea. I sat in an uncomfortable chair for thirty minutes and learned why only Philistines drink anything but Twinnings. Then I myself drank a lot of Twinnings tea, most of which was quite nice.
Lowbrow: Taping for a BBC sit-com. To be honest, I found the show to be insipid and the taping process tedious. But, on the plus side, I don't think I'll ever have the urge to go to one of these things again.
Highbrow: Two Vaclav Havel one-acts at a theater in Richmond it took forever to get to on the Tube (it didn't help that there was "a body on the tracks at Victoria station"-- I didn't need to know that!).
Lowbrow: BOWLING! I remain obsessed with the British take on classic American culture, especially since it usually involves playing really good music and drinking decent German beer.

Going to Edinburgh with the students this weekend; it is supposed to snow. And Ben is coming in just four days!

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