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Sitting at a British Library desk in July 2006, a reader carefully consulted the fraying pages of A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile by Thomas Herbert Bound by a spine of deep green leather, lavishly illustrated and with the faint musk of old paper, the seventeenth-century text sat wedged between two grey cushions Delicately flipping a page,the reader halted The text had jumped incoherently from one word to the next They leant forward to peer at the page numbers One of the precious leaves had – neatly, almost imperceptibly – been sliced away   A browse through the rest of the book revealed yet more absences: illustrations, title pages, text Nearly an entire section on ‘the language of the Persians’ had disappeared This was no coincidence, no historic damage Somebody had been meticulously stealing from this book, one page at a time   In January of that year, British Library staff had been alerted to a similar disturbance: a missing map of the New World from another rare text Such an operation, involving a sharp blade and vigilant avoidance of CCTV cameras and staff, could only have been carried out by an expert with comprehensive knowledge of the text and of the library itself Five readers had recently consulted the work and each, in a letter, was asked for information – all to no avail That is, until a few months later, when it was noted that one of these five had also recently read the damaged Herbert An investigation into this individual and their peculiar love of books was just beginning: it would take months to follow his paper trail; it would take a forensic team of librarians to analyse the thousands of books he had accumulated; it would become a tale of secrecy, duplicity and obsession The common denominator: Farhad Hakimzadeh   Born in Iran in 1948, Hakimzadeh was a man of scholarly and philanthropic reputation He was educated in Germany as a child, then studied at MIT and Harvard Business School After returning to Iran, Hakimzadeh worked on a communications project for the government and joined his family’s manufacturing business But he