This book belongs to none but me, for there's my name inside to see.

To steal this book, if you should try, it's by the throat you'll hang high, and ravens then

will gather about to find your eyes and pull them out, And when you're screaming, oh, oh, oh,

remember, you deserved this woe. In 2017, the CBC published a piece reporting that Murakami novels were the most stolen

books in Toronto.

Before that, it was anything by Bukowski, Burroughs, and On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

Books are cheap.

They cost about $4 to make.

They cost more for bookshops to purchase, but still,

nowadays stealing books isn't a high crime. One of the bookshops interviewed suggested that the

best solution was that used bookstores only buy books with credit cards and that booksellers

mark their books so that they can be traced. But that's about it.

At most, the RCMP is going to give you a fine.

But what about 500 years ago?

What about when books took 15 months to create?

A time when scribes could only copy two books a year,

working only during the day since candlelight wasn't

sufficient for their detailed work and was far too much of a hazard. Not only painstakingly

copying text, and I mean painstakingly, one scribe at the end of his book wrote,

Now I've written the whole thing, for Christ's sakes, give me a drink.

Another said, it extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs,

it brings forth pain to the kidneys and weariness to the whole body about copying texts.

...