Pax Arcana
I have never stolen anything in my life — except the hearts of the millions of tweener girls who fawn over my every move on this site — so I’m not really sure what inspires the choices of the common shoplifter.
When it comes to books, there’s a former bookstore employee in Seattle who has a pretty good idea. In fact, he once grabbed a list from a potential shoplifter that laid out what he should be stealing:
Once, a scruffy, large man approached me, holding a folded-up piece of paper. “Do you have any Buck?” He paused and looked at the piece of paper. “Any books by Buckorsick?” I suspected that he meant Bukowski, but I played dumb, and asked to see the piece of paper he was holding. It was written in crisp handwriting that clearly didn’t belong to him, and it read:
1. Charles Bukowski
2. Jim Thompson
3. Philip K. Dick
4. William S. Burroughs
5. Any Graphic Novel
This is pretty much the authoritative top five, the New York Times best-seller list of stolen books. Its origins still mystify me. It might have belonged to an unscrupulous used bookseller who sent the homeless out, Fagin-like, to do his bidding, or it might have been another book thief helping a semi-illiterate friend identify the valuable merchandise. I asked the man whether he preferred Bukowski’s Pulp to his Women, as I did, and whether his favorite Thompson book was The Getaway or The Killer Inside Me. First the book chatter made him nervous, but then it made him angry: He bellowed, “You’re just a little bitch, ain’t'cha?” and stormed out.
The author, Paul Constant, says the books on the list conform pretty much to his own experience with shoplifters, who are often driven by the same vague nihilism and purposeless lashing out at the world that causes them to show up at WTO conferences and throw stuff for reasons not entirely clear to them.
Have I mentioned they’re mostly young white men?
The list of popular books is surprisingly static, although newer artists have earned their place in the pantheon with Hunter S. Thompson and the Beats: Palahniuk, Murakami, and Danielewski have become hugely popular antisellers in the last five years. I’ve had hundreds of dollars of graphic novels—Sandman, Preacher, The Dark Knight Returns—lifted from right under my nose all at once. Science fiction and fantasy are high in demand, too: The coin of the realm is now, and has always been, the fiction that young white men read, and self-satisfied young white men, the kind who love to stick it to the man, are the majority of book shoplifters.
Look, angry white men. If you really want to stick it to the man, just put on a Pax Arcana Tag Cloud T-shirt and go back to your blog and link to this site. We’re totally punk. In fact, we almost called this blog a ‘zine, but the tweener girls in our focus group didn’t know what that meant.
Flying Off the Shelves [The Stranger]
