The Steal by Rachel Shteir

advertisement containing hints on how to steal Steal This Book from the nine stores in America carrying it. In Boston at BookMart, “second aisle on the left is the best bet.”
    A June memo from the FBI’s New York office to the Washington office revealed that the government regarded Steal This Book as “a manuel [ sic ] for revolutionary extremists . . . foisted on the reading public by Grove Press.” And “In view of the contents of Steal This Book , Internal Security Division of Department being queried for an opinion as to whether authorship, distribution, and/or publication constitutes a violation of Federal Law.”
    Regardless of its legality, Steal This Book incited controversy and censorship everywhere. In Coldwater, Michigan, a librarian resigned after the board objected to, among other things, his adding copies of Steal This Book to an exhibit about the Chicago Seven, as the mayor put it, “where a ten-year-old could see them.” No more than midwestern libraries, the American literary establishment was not ready for Steal This Book. In July, Esquire writer Dotson Rader convinced John Leonard, then New York Times Book Review editor, to let him review the book. Rader called the book “a hip Boy Scout handbook,” used its phobic reception to condemn the timidity of the publishing industry, and described Hoffman as a countercultural Thoreau. “It reads as if Hoffman decided it was time to sit down and advise his children on what to avoid and what was worth having in America.” Steal This Book “possesses its own peculiarly righteous morality.”
    Basking in his one positive review, Hoffman descended on Boston, where, accompanied by a reporter, he shoplifted a Currier and Ives coffee table book, giving the clerk at the downtown bookstore the finger after learning that it did not carry Steal This Book . In Cambridge, he visited the Harvard Coop, where he demanded that the manager move Steal This Book from his office to a display in the front of the store: “Where the f——do you keep it—in the safe?”
    In the wake of Steal This Book , Hoffman became a celebrity. He also seemed to have stimulated a shoplifting craze. A Sunday New York Times Magazine article, “Ripping Off: The New Lifestyle,” led with the lyrics from the Jefferson Airplane song “We Can Be Together”: “In order to survive we steal cheat lie” was one lyric, followed by “We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young.” The article then jumped to a scene in which a Harvard Divinity School dropout smokes pot and extols shoplifting’s virtues. “Ripping off—stealing, to the uninitiated—is as rapidly becoming part of the counterculture as drugs and rock music,” it warned.
    The article pits Harvard sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (“Stealing is stealing even if you call it revolution”) against Hoffman’s passionate contention that any crime the individual “liberator” commits will never add up to the volume of stealing the big corporations are doing: “Saying that shoplifting accounts for high prices is like saying that people using colored toilet paper are responsible for the ecological mess. All our ripoffs together don’t equal one price fixing scheme by General Electric.”
    That fall, two yippies claimed that Hoffman stole ideas and research for Steal This Book from them. One of the malcontents wrote an article for Rolling Stone about how the über-ripper-offer ripped him off. Time and the New York Times covered the kerfuffle and the tribunal Hoffman held in Manhattan to air the charges against himself.

“OUR SO-CALLED SHOPLIFTING CASE”
    While Hoffman was a media creation, protected by publicity, reveling in it, and talking about shoplifting as a revolutionary act, in the real world, at the exact same time, an ordinary human being was chewed up for allegedly having committed the crime and by the publicity surrounding it. Being in the spotlight cost him his job, defamed him, and affixed a