I Stole Books as a Teenager and to This Day I Do Not Regret It

I was once a thief. The only thing I ever stole was books. I’m still glad today that I did it.

Admitting I stole isn’t easy for me. No one wants to be robbed, and thieves are rightly punished by the law and shunned by society. The reason that I dare to tell you about it today is that it was thirty years ago. Enough time has passed for me to acknowledge my past.

I know that it is wrong to steal, but there are two reasons why I can forgive myself. I will come back to both reasons in the course of this article.

But first, let me tell you the story of how I came to steal books.

A bookworm in a land of milk and honey

When I was sixteen, I had had enough of delivering newspapers after school and was looking for another job. I didn’t have to look for a long time, because many of my classmates worked at a book wholesaler on the side. The pay was good, and they were always looking for new pupils who wanted to earn something.

I applied and was accepted. From then on, I worked two to three times a week for up to four hours.

My task was simple. Booksellers from all over the country sent their orders to the wholesaler, who put the books they wanted on pallets in their central warehouse and sent them to the dealers.

My job was to put together the orders from smaller booksellers. To do this, I took an order form and a trolley from the foreman and looked for the ordered books in the warehouse.

The shelves were sorted by publishers, and each title had a code consisting of letters and numbers, which I used to find the particular book on the endless rows of shelves.

I collected the books of an order on my trolley, and when I was finished, I took the assembled books to the packing station where someone else prepared them for shipping.

During my working hours, I kept noticing books that I would have liked to read myself, but which I could not afford with my pocket money and what I earned with my job. I could have bought one or two books a month, but nothing more. But on these endless shelves, I found dozens of books that I really wanted.

However, I did not dare to take books from there. Sometimes there were random checks at the exit when we went home. I would never have risked getting caught stealing.

But sometimes I had to work in another part of the company. There was a large hall where all the books that were returned by the booksellers because they had slight damages ended up.

There we had to check every single book to see if it was really damaged. If it was, we marked it across all pages with a grease pencil and threw it into a large container. These books were then picked up once a day and destroyed.

All books that we could not find any damage were returned to the central warehouse, where they were put back into the racks to be shipped again as part of an order.

In this hall, there were no security checks and no spot checks.

It did not take long before I found the first of the books I wanted so much. It hurt me in my soul to know that it would be destroyed. No one would ever read it, and no one would be able to make money with it. It was trash that would be written off as a loss by the company.

The book was “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann.

Without thinking, I put the thick book in my waistband and covered it with my sweater. Then I went to the toilet and deposited it in my locker on the way there. Every employee had a locker in the changing room. Nobody could look at it, just you.

I was incredibly nervous and afraid of being caught and losing my job. When I smuggled the book out of the yard under my sweater after work, I expected every second that my foreman would follow me and ask me to lift my sweater.

But this did not happen. I had gotten away with the theft.

In the months that followed, I worked in this hall from time to time. I didn’t always find a book that interested me, but I took it if I saw one. My sense of wrongdoing disappeared with time. It didn’t feel wrong anymore, because I was stealing waste.

Why I don’t regret my thefts to this day

I didn’t steal anything anyone else wanted to sell. The idea that hundreds of books were simply destroyed every day because they were not pretty enough to be sold made me sick.

The books were not donated, nor were they sold anywhere cheaper as rejects. If I hadn’t taken those books, no one would ever have read them.

But there is another reason why I do not regret stealing the books. Some of them changed my life forever.

The first was the book mentioned above, “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann. The disputes between the characters Settembrini and Nafta were the first to make me aware of the contradiction between religion and science. They made me an advocate of the scientific principle.

The trigger why I later turned to history, history of science, and science theory was this book.

But reading this indigestible classic also awakened my interest in German literature in general and eventually led to me taking newer German literature as a minor subject at university.

Another book that had a lasting influence on me was Raymond Hull’s “How to get what you want.”

That was my first contact with the topic of personal development. I was eighteen years old when I read in this book how to set goals and achieve them. It took me years before I began to apply the principles explained in this book, but since I read it, the subject never left my mind.

Had I not had the chance to steal these books, I would never have read them or read them much later in my life. That is why I am still glad today that I did it.

I stole trash and got a world view.

You can judge me, but I have no regrets. These thefts have brought many good things into my life, and they have not harmed anyone.

What do you think? Should I burn in hell, or would you have done the same?

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

Receive weekly updates, and don’t miss any of my articles.

subscribe here http://bit.ly/ReneJunge

Read also: