The entire operation is indebted to the same things that inspire so many other feats of derring-do: boredom, excessive champagne, and an overwhelming infatuation with another man's spectacles. Inspired by all three, Fletcher scrawled a ransom note with a pen from the bar, and in the midst of some distracting chatter, nicked the glasses from Franzen's face. 

Then, the chase began.

After a few seconds I was already escaping through muddy grass and over sharp metal fences. I thought my freedom had been earned and held my prize in the air shouting and laughing with joy until I realised how many members of the security team wanted them back and, perhaps more importantly, to teach me not to damage their reputation as I felt I'd done. I ran towards the Serpentine Lake - my only route. As I approached it, senselessly and at some speed, I decided to cut through it and I dismantled my BlackBerry so that the circuits wouldn't short. I then ran into the water, wading quickly though the lake along the bank and into thick vegetation. I realised that the copy of Franzen's book that I'd helped myself to was also floating away and I eventually found myself almost shoulder-deep in the water under the branch of a tree, where I stayed for some time.

Just picture the copy of Freedom, a casualty of the heist, floating slowly away from the our hero-culprit. Priceless.

When the helicopters came, Fletcher was as surprised as any sensible human being would have been — "An airborne vehicle with infrared capabilities to track a suspect who'd stolen a pair of glasses?" — but he was on the lam, so he wouldn't let this total absurdity faze him. He treated the whole incident like the frivolity that it was, and when he was caught he even congratulated the officer on his work. 

To his credit, the usually super-serious Franzen seems to be taking the whole ordeal in good spirits. He told NPR yesterday that he would not be pressing charges against Fletcher, and insisted he kept his cool while representatives from the publisher were freaking the fuck out. "I've been laughing about the whole thing," the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying on NPR, "and observing the anguish secondhand."

Fletcher also wanted to make it clear that he has no malice toward Franzen. In fact, he stole the glasses out of admiration. "He is one of the most talented writers out there and I have the utmost respect for the man," he said of the novelist.

To some people, it seems, holding a pair of glasses hostage is the highest form of flattery. 

nfreeman@observer.com

Twitter: @NFreeman1234

Franzen was already having a tough week. The edition of his new novel Freedom that was sent to British stores turned out to be an earlier draft full of rampant imperfection, and it took HarperCollins a week to replace them with the correct version. The uncorrected copies were pulped. 

The glasses theft incident, however, contributed an odd coda to his drama-wracked British tour. The Bookseller said two party-crashers (they claimed to work for Puffin) stepped up to the celebrated American writer at the launch party held at Serpentine Gallery. Then, without hesitation, one of the two punks swiped the glasses from Franzen's face while the other shoved a ransom note in his direction. "$100,000 — Your glasses are yours again!" the note read. The man left a hotmail adress on the note, so Franzen could email him when he decided to pay the $100,000 for his glasses. With that, the thieves fled into Kensington Gardens and Franzen, The Bookseller said, was "stunned."

Naturally, the authorities dispatched a helicopter to find the escaped criminals and the Freedom writer's stolen goods. "Apparently miscreants jumped into serpentine to escape," tweeted Bookseller news editor Graeme Neill, who was referring to the Hyde Park lake. The Guardian cited a tweet by its own Merope Mills, who said the publishing flacks were being "embarrassingly self-flagellating. 'Jonathan — we're SO SO sorry.'" 

The spectacles thief was, at last, apprehended in a bush, and the glasses were given back to Franzen. The Guardian said the writer will not press charges, and HarperCollins communications manager Susanna Frayn called the whole ordeal "a harmless prank."

Whatever the impetus behind the bizarre heist — money, fame, some sort of neo-dadaist cred for embarrassing the literary establishment — it provided us with another Jonathan Franzen anecdote that's emerged from across the pond this week. We expect that he's probably ready to come home.

In modern-day Williamsburg—or Bushwick, or Fort Greene—current nerds and future stars are indistinguishable. Every other kid just off the bus from Oberlin is rocking Holly’s signature look.

Meanwhile, with the success of 3D extravaganzas like Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans, the actual dorks back home in Columbus are sporting the look, too.

Clearly, this can't go on.

On a recent visit to Fabulous Fanny’s, the vintage eyewear mecca on East 9th Street, the store was filled with customers sporting statement frames. If there was any threat to the trend at all, it wasn’t evident.

“My partner thinks they will scale down to smaller lenses, but we sell to so many different people that have their own styles—I really don’t think anything is going out of style,” said Fanny’s co-owner Stanton Blackmer, who was sporting some large tortoise shells himself. “It’s not going to affect us one way or another,” he added. “We have everything. We deal with people who want to create their own style.”

They’ve done well during a time when one's "own" style is often a riff on the classic Ray-Ban Wayfarer.

“The Wayfarer has been around for a long time,” said Eugene Tong, fashion market editor at Details, who rocks some big, honkin’ frames himself. “When the next thing happens and those trend-humpers move on to that, you’ll still get people who wear them. It’s like a pair of 501 jeans. It’s never going to go out of style.”

Anyway, for Mr. Tong, the real threat is obvious.

“The hipsters will kill the trend more than theaters offering 3D glasses in a wayfarer shape,” he said.

Pop will eat itself. Q.E.D.

A question remains: Why do the new crop of 3D glasses look that way in the first place?

Blame Chicken Little—the “first film shown using RealD 3D projection,” said Joshua Greer, the President and Co-Founder of RealD, the company behind the 3D glasses we wore, grudgingly, at Avatar. “The glasses were designed to look like [those] worn by the film's main character.  It was a fun and interesting design that was a great tie-in with the film.  But we knew that we needed a standard designed pair of 3D glasses that could be used for all films.” What’s more, the Wayfarer style was, in part, chosen because it could fit over prescription glasses.

Alas, the folks at RealD have failed to anticipate the current craze for oversized frames.

“I saw Avatar, but not in 3D,” said Williamsburg-resident (and Oberlin grad) David Levin, 25, who’s the tour manager for Brooklyn noise-rockers A Place to Bury Strangers. He wears glasses the size of laboratory goggles. “With glasses my size, the 3D glasses wouldn’t fit over my frames. I felt discriminated against!”

Luckily, 3D movies are totally lame.

mmiller@observer.com