What’s the estimated cost of 1,000 signed copies of Dreams From My Father and Audacity of Hope?
(Guardian) — When police seized an estimated 5,000 books from Occupy Wall Street’s “People’s Library” during the eviction of the camp at Zuccotti Park on 15 November, it drew condemnation from a host of writers and organisations, including the American Library Association and authorSalman Rushdie. […]
But when the librarians arrived to survey what remained of the books, some signed copies given by authors, including one donated the previous day by Philip Levine, the US poet laureate, they found “it was clear the books had been treated as trash”, they said.
At an emotional press conference on Wednesday, the librarians laid the torn and damaged books they were able to recover from the garage on a table taking up much of a cramped room in an office block in Madison Avenue.
It was a sorry sight. Only 1,273 books — a third of the stock — were returned to them, they said, and around a third of those were damaged beyond repair. Only about 800 are still usable. About 2,900 books are still unaccounted for.