A $2.5 Million Book Heist Proves the Printed Page Is Still Sacred

The heist played out like something out of Mission: Impossible. Only not with top secret CIA data, but rather very old, very precious books, those soon-to-be arcane artefacts of human history.

When nothing lasts forever, physical books have a heroic way of staving off decay. It's why antiquarian tomes, superseded by our shift to the digitization of information, now transcend the sum of their parts to become highly valuable items for collectors. Is it surprising to learn that the haul of antique books, stolen from a warehouse near London's Heathrow Airport, on January 29, together are worth some £2 million?

Like some of the art world's most high-profile thefts, three thieves allegedly rappelled into the warehouse, where various collectors' books were being stored before a trip to the 50th California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Oakland, California. The robbers made off with 160 valuable, historical publications. Among the stolen masterpieces: a second edition copy of Nicolaus Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium from 1566 , an edition of Dante's Divine Comedy published in 1569, and copies of books by Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Leonardo da Vinci.

London's Met police told Motherboard that detectives are continuing their investigation into the burglary. No arrests have been made.

Brian Lake, a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, told The Guardian that "nothing like this" has ever before hit the rare books trade. Seeing as such recognizable, one-of-a-kind books would be difficult, if not impossible to sell on an open market, it's likely the robbery was at the behest of a conniving collector desperate to get their hands on the rare books.

It's got us thinking: How much is analog information worth? In an age of "alternative" or fake news, when the spectre of the Trump administration removing previously public data from government websites make scrabbling efforts to keep real, verified, scientific information on the internet all the more urgent, information has arguably never been so democratized, yet contentious.

"Information could provide a sort of recipe to build, in the best scenario, a faithful replica of a past event, thing, or organism," as Riccardo Manzotti, a psychology professor at the Institute of Human, Language and Environmental Sciences at the University of Milan, wrote in an op-ed published last year on Motherboard. At the same time, Manzotti argues, information "is more akin to a kiss than to a coin. When you give someone a coin, some stuff moves from your pocket to theirs. When you give someone a kiss, nothing changes place."

The sort of books stolen near Heathrow are cherished for their age, cultural importance, and essentially, their priceless contributions to humanity's collective knowledge. Are they coins or kisses? We pay a price either way, whether that's hundreds of thousands of pounds or the singular pain of unique, printed pages, lost for good.