Stealing the Communist Manifesto

When searching for the top ten list of the most stolen books, I got many differing accounts. Some say Bukowski, Thompson, Palahniuk. Some say Kafka, J.K. Rowling, the Bible. Some sources don't even list titles, just authors. Then there's some book called Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, which doesn't surprise me. I think the decade has a lot to do with it, which explains the variation, but a statistic like this is hard to prove in the first place.

Somehow I thought the Communist Manifesto made that list. I thought, if there's any book you have to steal, it's got to be this one. It has a typical red cover and two yellow price tags. The book costs $2.

Thousands of revolutionaries built empires on the spine of this trashy paperback. Some of them had to steal it. They were rebels, right?

I took the copy into the dressing room, buried under a pair of jeans and stuffed the book into my pocket. It fit perfect.

I took it out and took off the stickers. If an employee suspected anything, I was afraid they'd find the stickers, so I peeled the yellow tabs back. Wondered where to stick them and thought, leaving them in the room would be suspicious as well.

So I bent down and slapped it under the dressing room bench. Beneath it were hundreds of stickers.