subs. (thieves’).—1.  A pocket-book; (2) a newspaper, letter, &c. Whence TO READ = to steal; READER-HUNTER (or -MERCHANT) = a pickpocket, a DUMMY-HUNTER (q.v.); READERED = advertised in the Police Gazette; WANTED (q.v.).—PARKER, GROSE, VAUX, BEE.

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  c. 1819.  Old Song, ‘The Song of the Young Prig’ [FARMER, Musa Pedestris (1896), 82].

        And I my READING learnt betime,
    From studying pocket-books, sirs.

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  1828.  BADCOCK (‘Jon Bee’), Living Picture of London, 286. For this purpose they had an old pocket-book, or READER, now put into one pocket, now into another.

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  1829.  Vidocq’s Memoirs, ‘On the Prigging Lay’ [FARMER, Musa Pedestris (1896), 107].

        I stops a bit: then toddled quicker,
  For I’d prigged his READER, drawn his ticker.

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  1834.  W. H. AINSWORTH, Rookwood, III. v. None knap a READER like me in the lay.

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  1842.  P. EGAN, ‘Jack Flashman’ (in Captain Macheath).

        Jack long was on the town, a teazer;
Could turn his fives to anything
Nap a READER, or filch a ring.

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  1859.  G. W. MATSELL, Vocabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon. ‘A Hundred Stretches Hence,’ 124. The bugs, the boungs, and well-filled READERS.

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