[HN Gopher] Cracking the case of London's elusive, acrobatic rar...
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Cracking the case of London's elusive, acrobatic rare-book thieves
Author : RickJWagner
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-04-05 11:43 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vanityfair.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vanityfair.com)
| cs702 wrote:
| I used to think the Mission Impossible movies were far-fetched.
| Apparently not:
|
| _> The thieves, as if undertaking a special-ops raid, had
| climbed up the sheer face of the building. From there, they
| scaled its pitched metal roof on a cold, wet night, cut open a
| fiberglass skylight, and descended inside--without tripping
| alarms or getting picked up by cameras ... "This is not
| something ordinary burglars try to accomplish."_
|
| Wow.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Hate to be the whiny HN poster with an off-topic complaint about
| scrolling or whatever, but:
|
| Pull quotes do not belong on the web. They are out-of-place
| anachronisms from print publications, intended to entice a reader
| flipping through pages of a magazine, which does not translate to
| how people read on a browser. There should be stronger
| stigmatization of pull quotes in digital design than of using
| Papyrus and Comic Sans, on the same level as pop-up ads and auto-
| playing video.
|
| Pull quotes _demand_ that the reader draw their eyes away from
| the article text just to re-read something they just read seconds
| ago, or are just about to read. These quotes scream with font
| size increased +10pt, and random words capitalized. They slow
| down reading, break concentration, and destroy the flow and
| pacing of the writer's craft.
| akurzon wrote:
| I completely agree. They've always felt unwieldy and annoying,
| emphasizing some bit of text from a few paragraphs ago that I
| had just read and was no longer related to what I'm reading
| now.
| jdsully wrote:
| The work well in dryer sections like historical background or
| technical explanations to indicate "Hey! More Exciting Stuff
| Below".
| rgovostes wrote:
| Technical sections seem like precisely the place where
| concentration is important and the reader doesn't want to be
| distracted.
|
| If you feel the reader doesn't want to read technical
| content, omit it. Make it collapsible or give a link to jump
| over it. Or just put it on a different page. The web permits
| things that print does not.
|
| It's weird to be apologizing for your content and your choice
| of document structure by scrambling it up with pull quotes
| because "it gets better, I swear."
| jdsully wrote:
| Sure it would be great if the whole piece could be
| exciting, but sometimes a bit of background knowledge is
| necessary to understand the remaining content. A great
| writer could no doubt make it exciting on its own, but most
| of these articles are written by run of the mill
| journalists and copywriters on a very limited time budget.
|
| I know I've continued reading because of these callouts so
| it definitely does work on some people.
| devindotcom wrote:
| How strong your antipathy! Many people think pull quotes look
| good and serve a purpose, print or digital. I agree with them.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Here's a screenshot from one of your articles:
| https://i.imgur.com/5AJ5mut.png (Crudely made on iOS, sorry.)
|
| When am I supposed to read the highlighted text? Is it when
| it was pulled out and strongly emphasized? Or when it appears
| again, separated by a single paragraph, in the flow of how
| you originally composed the article?
|
| Or in this one: https://i.imgur.com/DnhsI8n.jpg -- the pull
| quote comes after what I've just read, instead of before it,
| so I may have the pleasure of reading it twice. Both copies
| of the text are on my screen at the same time. Can you
| imagine if a podcast every few minutes repeated a sentence
| that was just spoken seconds ago, only at 4x volume, and then
| just resumed as if nothing happened?
|
| (A comment about this second example: The paragraph directly
| after the pull quote starts, "The FCC took on this
| question..." Which "question" am I supposed to interpret this
| as? The one in the pull quote or the one in the previous body
| paragraph? The pull quote has not only screwed up the
| ordering of the text, but added ambiguity merely through its
| presence.)
|
| If your intent is to appeal to readers who just flick through
| the page to read the headlines, why not write in bulleted
| form like Axios? If your intent is to look attractive, a
| text-heavy format is not ideal.
| codemac wrote:
| Can you state the purpose? It's really not clear to me in
| digital.
|
| As a reader that actually likes to read, they are
| distracting, they are frustrating to accidentally read and
| reread, and pull me out of the story.
|
| In digital formats, if these are much past the fold say maybe
| one to two screen lengths down, what purpose could they
| possibly be serving to the reader? I can't figure them out at
| all.
|
| You should reward the reader, not distract and waste their
| time with duplicate content.
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| I imagine they're used for SEO now as search engines may weight
| that text more heavily. This is achieving the same end goal you
| pointed out of the original pull quotes.
| rgovostes wrote:
| I doubt it has anything to do with SEO. Some crawlers might
| try to extract section headings from content based on font
| size, but in this case the pull quote may even confuse this.
|
| Vanity Fair didn't want to optimize search rankings based on
| "The crime boss was 'A CRIMINAL STAR in Romania,' going by a
| variety of nicknames, among them 'PIG HEAD' and 'GODFATHER.'"
| My bet is that they long ago told the web design team to make
| a theme that captures the feeling of their print magazine.
| The designers thoughtlessly included pull quotes in this
| theme. The CMS was adapted to allow insertion of said quotes.
| The person who prepared this article for publication added
| them hastily, scrolled 30% of the way down, picked two
| sentences that are near each other and are both about the
| same thing (Romanian criminals, not rare books), and moved on
| to the next assignment.
| wincy wrote:
| It's probably just something the journalists of today
| learned from their bosses, who learned from their bosses,
| or learned in journalism school.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about website formatting, back-button
| breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be
| interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then
| friendly feedback might be helpful._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| We all find such annoyances annoying, but having a subthread
| like this upvoted to the top of a thread (which happens
| routinely) is like an invasive species taking over an
| ecosystem. That's why the guideline exists.
| stevesycombacct wrote:
| I find that the same issue is made worse when using a service
| like Instapaper to store content for reading on other devices
| later. The pull quotes read like an emphasized point, when in
| fact they're just text I'm about to re-read or have already
| read. This breaks the flow of reading by pulling me away from
| the author's intended order and pushes me to some other part of
| the article.
|
| Removal of pull quotes entirely would be a Quality of Life
| improvement in such a case.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/h4pAD
| lefstathiou wrote:
| Book collecting is a niche hobby that spans the global middle
| class to the ultra wealthy (as opposed to baseball cards which
| are mostly an American thing). A rare book is easy to hide, easy
| to move, unrecognizable to most and quite liquid.
|
| In October, someone dropped a box of books on the sidewalk in
| front of a library that was closed during Covid (along with its
| outdoor book drop which was locked). Many people had already
| rummaged through it by the time I got there with my 5 month old
| strapped to my chest. I came away with an autographed first
| edition, first printing of the intelligent investor. Hidden in
| plane sight.
| sjtindell wrote:
| Wow super cool, you could probably fetch a pretty penny if you
| made the pilgrimage to Omaha, Nebraska for the yearly Berkshire
| conference. The acolytes there might even make you a priest or
| something!
| twox2 wrote:
| Great find! I'd love to see it if you don't mind sharing a pic!
| [deleted]
| lefstathiou wrote:
| Happy to, please shoot me an email (mine is in my profile).
| cfontes wrote:
| Wow, that is indeed a great find.
|
| https://www.biblio.com/the-intelligent-investor-by-graham-be...
| ahelwer wrote:
| The focus on the acrobatic nature of these thefts is kind of
| funny. You can find these skills & equipment (safely scaling a
| wall, rappelling down a rope, ascending a rope, hauling a load up
| a rope) in any climbing gym in the country, especially ones
| located near glaciated mountains where crevasse rescue skills are
| practiced.
| jameshart wrote:
| Well, I'm sure there are many rare-book-specializing criminal
| gangs who draw their membership almost exclusively from off-
| duty trained crevasse-rescue teams in heavily glaciated parts
| of the world, but we don't tend to get so many of them around
| West London.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > we don't tend to get so many of them around West London.
|
| how many of them do you need? they were only burglarizing one
| place at a time.
|
| and it seems like if you're going to be a rare book thief,
| london would be a reasonable place to set up shop.
| jameshart wrote:
| I don't understand this studied attitude of worldly
| nonchalance here. 'Oh of course, everyone should know there
| are dozens of rare book experts with alpine rescue skills
| operating in London. Everybody knows that's the obvious
| business to get into given the ridiculous cost of commuting
| from zone C. It was only a matter of time before one of
| them went rogue and joined a Romanian criminal gang.'
|
| Does the fact someone carried out this crime, in this way,
| not surprise anyone even a little bit?
| pc86 wrote:
| Of course it does, it's just that people on HN need to
| pretend to never be surprised about anything, ever, and
| to always be "in the know" about everything discussed
| here.
| wdb wrote:
| Fascinating, I am going to read it in more detail. Most of the
| time these are thefts on order that's at least my limited
| experience
| pc86 wrote:
| How much experience with rare book theft do you have?
| eye8one2 wrote:
| Just capitalism canibalizing itself. Nothing new. Same thing is
| happening in the US except it's catalytic converters.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| You talk as if there's an alternative.
| [deleted]
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Catalytic converter theft in the US is driven by drug-addicted
| homeless populations who sell them for scrap money, and don't
| care if they get arrested, because the big coastal cities are
| basically not prosecuting theft right now.
|
| My neighbors (Seattle) have caught thieves working their way
| down the street jacking these out of cars, and the police
| didn't even bother to respond.
|
| It's really not the same.
| kleer001 wrote:
| Thievery doesn't depend on an economic system or a political
| system, it's truly agnostic. Agnostic to the point that we can
| consider it basically parasitism. And parasitism is only
| slightly younger than life its self.
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Ocean's Eleventh Volume
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(page generated 2021-04-05 23:01 UTC)