“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.
(…)
“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.”
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