Disaffected young white males [citation needed] may be over-represented among thieves who steal for reasons other than the book's immediate resale value.
According to Paul Constant, a Seattle book-store employee, "I know a few booksellers who have literally been driven a little bit crazy at the thought of their inventory evaporating out the door, and with good reason: An overabundance of shoplifters can put bookstores out of business.
One local bookstore owner can famously talk about shoplifters with total strangers for hours, with the detail and passion that some people reserve for sexual conquests.
"[1] "Shoplifting is a particular problem," said Patricia Van Osdol, owner of Wellington Books in Portland, Oregon.
[5] Ron Rosenbaum, an author and New York Observer columnist, wrote in 1999 that Barnes & Noble had a list of these authors whose books are the most frequently stolen from that book-store chain (or perhaps the Union Square store in the chain, where his source, "a helpful clerk", worked): Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Georges Bataille, William S. Burroughs, Italo Calvino, Raymond Chandler, Michel Foucault, Dashiell Hammett, Jack Kerouac, Jeanette Winterson, but none more frequently than books by Charles Bukowski.
[8] St. Mark's Bookshop (which closed in 2016) in the East Village of Manhattan, like Barnes & Noble, used to move frequently-stolen titles behind the counter.
At that bookstore, as of late 2009, the books behind the counter included works by Amis, Bukowski, Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac.
[1] As of late 2009, Danielewski's House of Leaves was the most frequently stolen book from Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California, according to a store manager there.
An official from a prison library responded that dictionaries and poetry were the most frequently stolen types of books at that institution.
[7] According to a 1991 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, studies showed that the "casual thief", defined as "not a professional but more than a one-timer", accounted for 70 to 75 percent of shoplifting.
[17] An individual serial thief may steal thousands of dollars' worth of books over multiple visits to a store.
As with any retail store, some anti-theft measures, such as security cameras and greeting patrons, can reduce theft and help sellers identify thieves.
[3][13] In addition to reporting crimes to the police, in some places, it is possible to ban suspected thieves from entering the stores or to recover certain expenses through non-criminal legal action.