I couldn't help but thin

Bartlett's book reminds me most of another book I read a few years ago: The island of lost maps: a true story of cartographic crime, which follows another thief, Gilbert Bland Jr. - who spent years stealing rare maps from libraries across the United States.
Over the last few years, there have been a number of books that investigated the point where culture and crime collide. Simon Worrall's The Poet and the Murderer details the story of Mark Hoffman, who in the 1990s was identified as the forger behind a poem that had shown up at a Sotheby's auction as a long lost work of Emily Dickinson (but was in fact a fake). Jonathan Lopez's The Man Who Made Vermeers examines the life of Han van Meegeren, a Dutch painter who history best remembers as a forger of Vermeer paintings. Art fraud is a popular topic for this type of true crime, another recent title is Provenance : how a con man and a forger rewrote the history of modern art. Described by the publisher as an "extraordinary narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate deceptions in art history" it tells the story of an artist who produced reproductions of famous paintings and the con man who successfully passed them off as real.
Finally, if those crime titles don't leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, this one certainly will: The Billionaire's Vinegar: the mystery of the world's most expensive bottle of wine by Benjamin Wallace examines the story of a particularly expensive - and particularly questionable - bottle of very old wine.

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