Travis McDade,

Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $27.95

When Jerome Kern's book collection was auctioned in January 1929, collectible book fever was so high that it set price records that lasted 50 years. Percy Bysshe Shelley's revised poem "Queen Mab" sold for $68,000 — the equivalent of $913,000 today.

But used books don't grow on trees. It was an open secret on Book Row that many suppliers of collectible books were filching them from library shelves. In the spectacular theft at the center of Travis McDade's "Thieves of Book Row," robbers nabbed "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" and Edgar Allan Poe's "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems" from the New York Public Library. The Poe book is so rare that McDade, the curator of rare books at the University of Illinois College of Law, says he cannot estimate its value.

That thief was Samuel Raynor Dupree, a novice accompanied by more experienced biblioklepts he knew only as Paul and Swede. With names like that, McDade's story takes on the quality of a 1930s gangster film.

McDade does a superb job of drawing a complete picture of the environment in which the gang operated. Charles Romm was a respected book dealer who had connections to less respectable dealers, who managed a rotating cast of book thieves. In a scheme that stretched to the 1800s, a fleet of ne'er-do-wells and slightly nefarious scholars walked into libraries, pocketed books and removed markings that indicated ownership.

The man who brought this practice to an end was G. William Bergquist, the New York Public Library's chief investigator. McDade tries to make a hero of Bergquist, but the criminals are almost universally more interesting than the library lawman.