Farhad Hakimzadeh arrives at court in London with his attorney

I’ve written before about the crucial smell of books, and it’s true that I, along with many of my fellow bibliophiles, have what could be termed a perverse devotion to their scent, form and weight. Anyone else ever been caught red-faced in the antiquarian section, fondling the embossed leather? Some people, however, take it a little far, as witness this story by Terri Judd in The Independent, updating an earlier MobyLives story: Farhad Hakimzadeh was an influential academic, so obsessed by his library that even on his wedding night his wife had to wait for him to dust off his books. No one knew that behind the intellectual façade lurked a wicked defacer of ancient tomes.

A regular at both the British and Bodleian libraries, Hakimzadeh began his career or crime in 2003. He used to wait until the security guards were out of sight before slipping out a scalpel to remove pages from old and valuable manuscripts. The stolen papers were filed carefully in his collection at home. The books he chose must have been quite obscure, because it took several years for anyone to realise what he was up to. Only when a professor noticed some pages missing from a 17th century copy of a travel book by Thomas Herbert did staff at the British Library begin an investigation. It turned out that he had caused £145,000 worth of damage to 150 rare books. On Friday he was sentenced to a two year imprisonment, but that’s not the end of it. Dr Kristian Jensen, head of the British Library’s British collections, has launched a civic case against him. She described his actions as “an attack on the nation’s collective memory of its past.”

So next time you’re in the library, riffling through those heady yellowed pages, remember the story of Farhad Hakimzadeh. You wouldn’t want to be remembered as a bibliopervert, would you?