William Jacques received a 3.5-year jail sentence today for the theft of books from the Royal Horticultural Society. He was found guilty on 22 June. The judge told Jacques "You are a Cambridge graduate and should know better, I suppose. This was a systematic and carefully planned theft and you had prepared what, in my view, was a target list, from your research at that library, of books that were worth stealing. ... The effect of your criminality was to undermine and destroy parts of the cultural heritage that's contained within these libraries and make it more difficult for those who have a legitimate interest in these books to gain access to them because libraries have to take inconvenient and expensive steps to stop thefts of this kind."
Good news indeed.
