A Burglar's Guide to the City — Book Launch!
Event Information
Description
“This is a marvelous wonder-room of a thing, an intricate, deeply researched, and brilliantly-written mad scientist’s tour of crime and how it’s bound to the world we’ve built. Revealing, spectacular and riveting.” — Warren Ellis, New York Times bestselling author of Gun Machine
Studying architecture the way a burglar would, Geoff Manaugh takes readers through walls, down elevator shafts, into panic rooms, and out across the rooftops of an unsuspecting city.
At the core of A Burglar’s Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: how any building transforms when seen through the eyes of someone hoping to break into it.
Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and break-ins, the book draws on the expertise of reformed bank robbers, FBI Special Agents, private security consultants, the L.A.P.D. Air Support Division, and architects past and present.
Whether picking locks or climbing the walls of high-rise apartments, finding gaps in a museum’s surveillance routine or discussing home invasions in ancient Rome, A Burglar's Guide to the City ensures readers will never enter a bank again without imagining how to loot the vault or walk down the street without planning the perfect getaway.
Stop by the Mossman Lock Collection at 6:30pm on Tuesday, April 5, for the launch of Geoff Manaugh's A Burglar's Guide to the City (FSG Originals). The night will kick off with a live Q&A between Geoff and Radiolab's Robert Krulwich, with copies of the book for sale courtesy of the Strand Book Store.
Afterward, enjoy a beer (or two) donated by our friends at Sixpoint Brewery while you wander amidst the Mossman's amazing assemblage of old locking devices, from Roman padlocks and wooden door seals of ancient Egypt to the time locks of 19th-century bank vaults.
Praise for A Burglar’s Guide to the City (FSG Originals):