Literary Larceny : Volumes are vanishing from bookstores everywhere--some taken by organized rings working for secondhand dealers. The thieves are booknapers and their ranks are growing.

They slip into bookstores with magnets, hidden pockets, foil-lined baby buggies and other gimmicks that can be used to steal entire stacks of books.

Or they rely on bare hands and bravado.

At the Samuel French Bookshop in Hollywood, one thief wandered in and asked for a Disney animation title that didn’t exist, then used an in-store pay phone to make an unusual call. As employees eavesdropped in amazement, the man dialed Information for the number of a used-book shop, then called the store and asked, “What was the name of that book again?”

With revised instructions, he found several copies, stuffed them under his shirt and headed for the door. Confronted, he dropped the goods and fled.

Other stores aren’t so lucky. Merchants say organized rings of thieves--allegedly working for a handful of secondhand book dealers or swap-meet vendors--have blind-sided them in recent years.

“You put out a stack of 10 or 15 books and a few minutes later, it’s gone,” says Melissa Mytinger of the Northern California Booksellers Assn. Used-book dealers deny involvement, but retailers’ annual losses are so steep--into the six figures at some stores--that a few merchants on both coasts have resorted to keeping popular titles behind counters or under glass.

In New York, it’s Kafka and Malcolm X that disappear. In Chicago, it’s Bibles. Los Angeles-area merchants have trouble hanging onto Thomas Bros. guides and photo collections.

“There are certain stores that we know are behind this and they literally send people out with shopping lists,” says Gwen Feldman, past president of the Southern California Booksellers Assn.

One in particular “probably has half my stock,” complains a Westside retailer.

In New York City, the stolen-book peddlers operate even more brazenly. They sell from sidewalk stands set up outside the very stores that are pilfered. Yet police rarely take action, merchants say.

Los Angeles authorities, on the other hand, possess a little-known weapon that could shut down shady book operators.

But apparently it never gets used.

In some ways, the whole idea of organized book theft seems ridiculous. During the April riots, for instance, when looters arrived at a Sunset Boulevard strip mall with a Circuit City, Trak Auto parts and Crown Books, guess which store was left untouched?

And when Times reporters sold expensive new books to various secondhand shops in the area, profits were often paltry: Sidney Sheldon’s latest bestseller ($23 retail) and Roddy McDowall’s new photo collection ($65) brought a combined $7. A $75 bird book fetched $23.

But it adds up, Feldman says, and books make easy targets: A shop owner will “miss a Nikon camera if it’s stolen. You’re not going to miss a copy of Dr. Seuss.”

A few years back, criminals reached the same conclusion. Shoplifting went haywire. It was as if Evelyn Wood had suddenly turned to a life of crime.

Employees at a Bay Area store would nab people trying to walk out with entire boxes of merchandise. Clerks at Chatterton’s in Los Angeles spotted guys who crammed so many books in their clothes that they appeared pregnant. And those were just the people who got caught.

When stores switched to computer inventories, they found even more theft. “There were some owners who always knew they had a problem, but when they went on computer, they were just shocked,” Feldman says. Smaller shops were losing $10,000 to $30,000 a year; at high-volume stores--some owned by major chains--the tab was closer to $100,000.

“It went from petty pilferage to a serious situation,” says Robert Contant, co-owner of St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City.

The phenomenon baffled booksellers. The rise in theft seemed to coincide with increases in unemployment, homelessness and drug abuse. Merchants say most of those caught are addicts or street people scrounging for cash to buy dope or food.

But not always. At South Coast Plaza, for example, security officers nabbed a well-dressed brother-sister team. The books were returned and no charges were pressed.

“They come in all shapes and sizes,” says Joel Sheldon, president of Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. “You cannot necessarily eyeball it.”

And urban locales aren’t the only ones hard hit.

“We’ve had to put in security systems pretty much everywhere . . . even in the suburbs,” says Michael Grant, vice president of Hunters’ Books, which operates 13 stores in California. “I don’t even send expensive books to our La Jolla store any more. They disappear.”

Booksellers admit they are virtually powerless to stop thieves. “We probably get ripped off every day,” says Helen Hennessey, 63, who three years ago chased a velvet-jacketed booknaper outside her Santa Monica store and tackled him on the Third Street Promenade. “They may be in the store for two hours before they make their move. But as soon as we turn around. . . . “

And electronic security systems don’t necessarily help. If a thief passes through with more than one book, the sensor sometimes jams, retailers say. Magnets, foil-lined bags and other devices are believed also to confuse some systems. Many booknapers, however, skip the high-tech approach: They surreptitiously pile books up near the front of the store, grab the stack and bolt.

“Even if you’re caught, so what?” says St. Mark’s Contant. “There’s no prosecution for it.”

Most book retailers say they long ago gave up trying to take shoplifters to court, citing lack of interest from law-enforcement authorities: “If we catch someone,” adds Chatterton’s Tony Russo, “we just get the books back and that’s it.”

But the real culprits, booksellers say, are secondhand book shops that allegedly buy the merchandise. They, too, seem unstoppable.

San Francisco police, for example, ran a sting in which undercover officers sold “stolen” merchandise to a Polk Street store called Rooks and Becords, and even had the shop’s co-owner give them lists for other books, says Police Inspector Richard VanKoll.

Police busted a co-owner, won a conviction and revoked his license to sell secondhand goods. But when he applied for a new license, with his partner as president, the city’s permit-appeals board--which was chaired by a loyal store customer who couldn’t believe Rooks and Becords was crooked--allowed him back in business, VanKoll says.

The new store is three times larger than the old one, fumes Gary Frank of The Booksmith, which supplied the merchandise used in the sting: “I basically paid for a lot of that store and it sickens me.”

Los Angeles police, meanwhile, say they aren’t even aware of a big trade in stolen books. “If we have a problem, it’s not epidemic,” LAPD spokesman Arthur Holmes says. And besides, “when you’ve got a homicide rate as high as ours . . . we just don’t have the manpower (for book stings).”

New York City authorities also give the problem low priority. Outside St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village, for instance, sidewalk peddlers openly ply books--many of them still bearing St. Mark’s telltale stamp--at half off prices inside the store.

Such scenes are common in Manhattan. Gary Johnson, director of loss prevention for Barnes & Noble Inc.--which also owns B. Dalton and Bookstar--says New York is the chain’s biggest headache. Los Angeles ranks second.

Part of the trouble is New York City’s free-speech law: Book peddlers, unlike other street vendors, don’t need licenses to operate and, until recently, didn’t even have to show identification if questioned by authorities. “The problem is really getting out of hand,” says Bill Griffin, supervising inspector of the city’s four-person peddler squad.

As the situation worsens, some stores won’t display more than a single copy of certain titles--and others post printed signs telling customers to ask for the book at the counter. “For some reason, we can’t put out Kafka,” Contant says. “I guess the peddlers want a little intellectual cachet.”

West Coast booksellers recount horror stories of their own.

In Marin County, a dishonest flea-market vendor operated so freely that he even took special orders, sent underlings to steal the books, then phoned customers when the merchandise came in. He became so well-established that customers brought him thank-you gifts at Christmas, says Elaine Petrocelli, who claims the vendor regularly stocked stolen hard-to-find travel books from her store. He later was arrested on shoplifting charges at a Tower bookstore in Sacramento and paid a fine. Now he is rumored to be working in Southern California.

L. A. book-theft rings also reportedly dispatch thieves to fill special orders. Book Soup owner Glenn Goldman says he was in one such store when a booknaper delivered a pricey art book and the proprietor snapped at the man for bungling the assignment: “Go back and get Volume One. We can’t sell half a set.”

Used-book dealers here adamantly deny suggestions that they deliberately take in stolen books or send out people with lists of titles to swipe. And some evidence backs them up.

For instance, when Pasadena police recently tried to sting an allegedly notorious book fence, they came up empty-handed. Agents offered “stolen” books to the store in question but the bait was refused, says a source familiar with the investigation. The store also was one of two shops to inquire if a book was stolen when a Times reporter offered merchandise for sale.

Other dealers say they don’t intentionally buy stolen books, but concede they don’t always know what they are getting.

“There’s about a hundred different ways to get a book,” says one dealer. New titles are typically review copies or gifts that somebody doesn’t want and the retailer won’t take back without a receipt. And people sometimes bring in boxes or trunkloads of books, he adds, so there’s no way to keep track of everything.

Questions also arise over claims that used-book dealers direct “organized rings” to steal from retailers. Some thieves seem rather unsophisticated.

At stores that carry both new and secondhand books, thieves sometimes steal from the new-books side and immediately try to sell to the used-books side.

Other would-be booknapers walk around in 90-degree heat wearing overcoats, an instant tip-off to all but the most thick-headed retailer. “The people we catch aren’t especially astute,” says Vroman’s Sheldon. “They do dumb stuff.”

Finally, when it comes to publicly naming the handful of secondhand stores that supposedly mastermind local book thefts, no retailer will speak on the record.

Yet, all insist the problem is very real. One is so fed up that he offered to hire a private investigator if a reporter wanted to run a sting against certain stores. (The offer was declined.)

Most retailers have opted for more conventional means of fighting back--but with limited success.

L.A.’s popular Book Soup, with losses close to $100,000 in 1991, hired full-time security, ins alled surveillance cameras and put high-risk titles behind glass. This year’s thefts appear to be halved, Goldman says.

Other stores, unable to afford such measures, have lowered shelves and changed store layouts to keep a closer watch on customers. A few follow the New York method of keeping certain books behind the counter, but retailers say that strategy is self-defeating: “A book is something customers need to touch and look at,” says Book Passage’s Petrocelli. If it’s inconvenient, they don’t buy.

Which leaves booksellers in a bit of a bind.

In Los Angeles, however, there is another possible solution.

The L. A. city code requires secondhand stores to keep numbered bills of sale for every book they buy--complete with the seller’s name and address, and the titles of the books. Stores also must ask whether the book is stolen and, after buying it, immediately mark the item with the bill-of-sale number in case it must be traced.

Each unmarked book could be considered a separate violation, police say, punishable by a maximum $1,000 fine and/or six months in jail. The city could also act administratively to revoke the store’s secondhand book dealer license.

None of the five used-book shops visited by Times reporters follow the code. None keeps very detailed records and only two bothered to ask if the new books being offered were stolen.

At one L. A. store, the clerk reached into his wallet to make the payment--no questions, no paperwork. And the owner said the police bill-of-sale form is “rather tedious” and “I don’t think you’ll find too many booksellers who use it.”

Indeed. The owner of another store merely requested the seller’s signature, explaining later that, “I looked at you and made a judgment that (the book) probably wasn’t stolen. If we started taking down a lot of information on every person, it’d be a pain in the ass.”

A Hollywood used-book store has sellers fill out a card stating that “the books I am selling . . . are my own personal property or are review books.” Space is also provided for the seller’s name, address and driver’s license number, but nobody asked for any identification. As at the other stores, books weren’t marked with bill-of-sale numbers.

However, violations of the city’s bill-of-sale law are rarely, if ever, enforced.

“I’ve been here 16 years and I’ve never seen or heard a complaint against a used-book store,” says Detective Mark Myrdahl, who runs the pawnshop detail. “If we or the Police Commission board receive a complaint, we will investigate it.”

But perhaps not right away. He says the four-officer pawnshop unit oversees about 2,800 secondhand dealers.

The Hit List Types of books most likely to be stolen from stores, according to published reports and bookseller interviews:

New York City: Franz Kafka, Dr. Seuss, Malcolm X, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, art and photo books, gay/lesbian titles.

Chicago: Bibles, the American Heritage Dictionary, Bruce Weber erotic photography, computer reference guides, coffee table art books.

Los Angeles: Thomas Bros. maps, art and architecture books, Annie Liebovitz photography, movie-industry references, interior design titles, Princess Diana biographies, any bestseller.

Washington, D.C.: Black authors.

Sacramento: Bruce Weber, “African Art,” gift picture books.

San Francisco: Miles Davis biographies, cookbooks, bestsellers, art and photography, earthquake picture books.