Rare copy of To Kill a Mockingbird stolen from Blue Bicycle

The owner of Blue Bicycle Books is looking for a rare signed copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird that recently went missing from the store.

Blue Bicycle owner Jonathan Sanchez told police the book was probably stolen between May 12 and May 19. The book was displayed on a shelf in front of the cash register and is valued at $1,750.

The book went missing just a few months before the scheduled release of Lee’s long-awaited sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, which comes out July 14.

“It’s a missed opportunity because of Go Set a Watchman coming out. There’s always interest in that book, though,” Sanchez says. “For us, with rare books like that, sometimes it’s more about just having them for the store so people can come in and get excited about books.”

Sanchez says he has notified rare book dealers about the missing book, but he doesn’t have any leads yet.

Recently, someone stole the iconic blue bicycle that had been parked in front of the store for years with books stacked on its pannier rack. Sanchez posted about the missing bicycle on the Blue Bicycle Facebook page on April 11, and on April 12, an alert citizen spotted it locked to a rack nearby at the Visitors’ Center. Police took the bike off the rack and returned it to Blue Bicycle.

“It was such a recognizable bike, and 40,000 people saw the Facebook post,” Sanchez says. “We started locking it again.”