Softly spoken, with wisps of white hair framing his bespectacled face, Peter Bellwood looked every inch the donnish enthusiast as he requested rare and valuable maps from the library’s collection of antiquities.

However, hidden up the sleeve of his loose-fitting knitted jumped was a sharp craft knife.

No sooner had he established his credentials of respectability – often by handing in a £50 note which he claimed to have found on the reading room floor – than he set to work gently razoring priceless plates from their leather bindings.

In a series of six visits over a period of six months in 2000, Bellwood, 52, denuded the collection at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth of more than 50 irreplaceable prints which he sold on the black market for more than £70,000.

His tome-raiding days were finally ended yesterday when he was jailed for four and a half years by a judge at Swansea Crown Court.

When that sentence is complete, the Danish Government hopes that he will stand trial on charges of stealing some of the world's rarest maps from the Royal Library in Copenhagen where he had been caught on CCTV apparently razoring pages from a 16th-century atlas.

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