EIGHT thousand books worth at least £250,000 have gone missing from the British Library since it moved to new headquarters on London’s Euston Road.

Everything from 16th-century tomes in Latin to the first adventures of Dennis the Menace have vanished.

It is part of a long list of thefts from museums and libraries over the past eight years revealed by a new crime audit.

The haul varies from CDs of music the Rolling Stones recorded in the 1960s and a 100-year-old Manchester City football programme, all taken from the library, to the tooth of a sperm whale and three tail bones from a dwarf dinosaur snatched from the Natural History Museum and a Greek marble head worth £25,000 that has disappeared from the British Museum.

Scotland Yard detectives are still looking for three Renaissance sculptures of the entombment of Christ worth a total of £280,000 stolen from the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum at Christmas.

They were taken in one of three thefts from the museum last year. A Meissen figure of a gardener from the 1750s, worth £3,000, was among the items stolen from the ceramics room.

But who on earth could have been behind the theft of three lottery balls from the V&A’s Theatre Museum in Covent Garden last year? Police are also investigating an £85,000 theft of Chinese jewellery, mirrors and ornaments, some 1,400 years old, from the British Museum last October.

A man is on police bail after being arrested at the museum under allegedly suspicious circumstances last month.

The scale of the thefts is revealed in inventories of missing items released under the Freedom of Information Act. By far the longest list is from the British Library, which moved to its £511m Euston Road headquarters in 1997.

The biggest confirmed theft is not of a Shakespeare folio but of comics such as Eagle and The Dandy. Dan Dare, hero of Eagle, is missing along with the first appearance of Dennis the Menace from the March 17 1951 issue of The Beano.

The thief — believed to be a contractor — who took Desperate Dan, Dennis and other comic adventures from a storage area got away with a haul worth £17,000.

The library said the comics topped the list of 43 items identified as stolen since 1997. Others include an Ozzy Osbourne CD and a collection of maps of Britain printed in 1626 and valued at £15,000. The prime suspect for the latter theft is an Essex man jailed for 4½ years in December after stealing 50 maps from the National Library of Wales.

But 7,905 other books and documents are reported missing because they are not in the correct position on the library’s 400 miles of shelves.

The oldest item listed as missing is a collection of works by the Roman poet Horace, printed in 1508. Also missing are liturgies drawn up by Johann Bugenhagen, a German Lutheran reformer, in 1540.

There is something for every taste on the list: from a study of Victorian tombs in the cemetery at Woking, Surrey, to a Ford Cortina manual.

The library insists the books are not necessarily stolen. They could have been misplaced on the shelves, the shelfmarks may have become detached from the spines of books, or the library’s catalogue of 160m items may not have been altered to reflect a changed shelfmark.

“We have a constant process of auditing our collection,” said a spokeswoman. “More than 2.8m items are consulted in our reading room every year so it probably means most of these books were put back where they should not have been.”

During its new audit the library found two books, each worth £100,000, that had been misplaced.

Martin Dyke of Henry Sotheran, the London antiquarian bookshop, said: “It is impossible to give a value to most of these missing books. Books aren’t necessarily valuable because they are old. It depends on their condition, where they were published and what printing process was used.”

But Euan Kerr, editor of The Beano, said: “There has been a monumental growth in the value of comics. A first issue of The Dandy from 1937 can fetch £20,000. The thieves knew what they were looking for.”

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