The Man Who Loved Books Too Much Read online

  “If it wasn’t for you there,” he added, “he probably would have called the police. Or harassed me . . . I did get a book from him, but that’s why I told him just now that I was just looking. I got Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, but he got it back.”

  Well, then, no harm done.

  “The second time I went in there, I asked him if I could take a look at some books,” said Gilkey, referring to the time he stopped by Crichton’s shop to try to sell the Winnie-the-Pooh books in an effort to raise money for an attorney. “I knew these books were valuable and I knew I could get a couple thousand dollars out of him . . . so I went to him, and he immediately offers five hundred. There’s no way. . . . They’re worth close to ten thousand. . . . So I knew immediately the police were talking to him, otherwise he would have offered more. That gave it away. He was onto me.”

  What Gilkey failed to mention, but what I would later learn, was what happened when Crichton did not want to buy the Pooh books.1

  Gilkey had asked, “Since you’re not interested in these, is there something else you might want?”

  “Yes,” said Crichton. “In fact, I’m looking for a first-edition Mayor of Casterbridge in brown morocco.” He was referring to the book Gilkey had stolen from him.

  Gilkey, deadpan, didn’t flinch. “No,” he said. “I don’t have one of those.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Crichton. “Because that is the one book I’m really looking for.”

  “I’m sure,” said Gilkey, and he walked out.

  “Those stories you told me back there,” I said, referring to Gilkey’s numerous claims that he’d been ripped off, “did you tell them for Crichton’s benefit?”

  To my surprise, Gilkey admitted that he had. “What goes around comes around. I was just evening the score.”

  The problem, as Gilkey saw it, was that he had evened the score too many times with too many dealers in the Bay Area. “I’m pretty much well known,” said Gilkey. “I probably won’t be able to go back in these stores, not in San Francisco. Probably L.A., New York. Just not San Francisco. I probably never can do this again. I mean, if I were to do crime like that, I never could do it again ’cause they know my method of operation. Even if somebody else does it, they’d think it was me.”

  Never again. Never again. Gilkey seemed to be trying to convince himself as vigorously as he was trying to assure me. I started to pack up my things, but he was reluctant to end our conversation.

  “There’s a book fair coming up in San Francisco,” he said, referring to the annual public library sale. I thought he might be suggesting I go, but I didn’t want to run into any dealers with him again. I suggested that instead we meet the following Wednesday. This time, I made sure the meeting would be at Goodwill.

  10

  Not Giving Up

  I called Crichton and explained why I had accompanied Gilkey to his store. He was gracious and understanding and told me that he had decided not to make a scene or throw Gilkey out because he didn’t know who I was. As far as he knew, I had no idea Gilkey was a thief. Or maybe I wasn’t a journalist but a fellow con artist scouting for a swindle. Crichton had decided to play it safe.

  When I met with Crichton in his shop the next week, it was with a mixture of impatience and bemusement that he relayed the story of how Gilkey had stolen from him. He had since become more assiduous about all orders, not that any diligence is foolproof. “I’ve had guys come in here with three-piece suits,” he said, “and the next thing you know they’re conning you. You always have to be ready for someone, but I tend to trust someone until I have reason not to.

  “I’ve been in the business for twenty-five years. . . . The books have become more valuable, so they’re more vulnerable. Theft is very profitable. But I don’t dwell on these guys,” said Crichton. “Sanders dwells on them.”

  Back at my desk, I e-mailed Sanders to let him know what had happened at Brick Row. I assumed that with his love of stories, his curiosity about Gilkey, and his persistent fascination with book thieves, he would appreciate the news. As awkward as the trip to Brick Row had been for me, I was glad I’d gone.

  Several hours later, shortly before I went to sleep, I checked my e-mail. There was a message from Sanders. He had been my guide through the world of collecting, and I was eager to read his reaction.

  In formal, even language, not the sort of writing I was accustomed to receiving from Sanders, he spelled out how enraged he was by my trip to Brick Row. Despite my having consulted him before going, which he seemed to have forgotten, his disgust was plain. He closed the e-mail with a chiding request: I don’t want to hear about your sick games ever again. It was a shutting down of communication. Sanders, the hero of this story, was turning out to be more intractable than Gilkey, the criminal. I lay awake much of the night, fearing that all my hard work had been for naught, that I had lost my story.

  About a week after I received Sanders’s e-mail, Gilkey walked into Acorn Books on Polk Street, a large bookstore with a selection of rare titles, and was recognized by employee Andrew Clark. Clark had worked at Brick Row in 2003 and had taken the phone order for The Mayor of Casterbridge. He approached Gilkey.1

  “Please come this way,” he said, leading Gilkey to the front counter.

  “What’s this about?” asked Gilkey.

  Clark grabbed a camera from behind the counter. “You’re going to have to leave,” he said, “but first I’m going to take your picture.”

  Gilkey didn’t budge, but instead looked into the camera. Click. “You can’t make me leave,” he said, agitated but not irate. He protested a little more, but eventually acquiesced. Whenever caught, he seems resigned to his fate, almost as though he has expected it.

  Looking back, Gilkey considered the banishment absurd. “They don’t know what’s in my mind,” he told me later. “I was there to actually pay for a bibliography.” He thought that being ordered out of the store may have been a civil rights violation, and he intended to add that bookseller to the list of people he may sue.

  In conceiving rationalizations, as with stealing books, Gilkey was unrelenting.

  After a week or so, I called Sanders to hear his take on the Acorn Books incident and kept my fingers crossed, hoping he wouldn’t rip into me. He must have either forgotten his anger or decided to forgive me, because he was cordial. He told me about another recent theft, which did not, apparently, involve Gilkey. It was one more example of a book thief walking away unpunished.

  The story went like this: The staff of Borderlands Books in San Francisco had caught a man trying to sell them some choice first-edition science fiction books—The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, and Out of Space and Time—which they recognized as having been recently stolen, along with ten others, from a science fiction bookseller in Portland, Oregon, named Bob Gavora. After consulting with Sanders, Gavora had spread the word to fellow science fiction booksellers about the theft, and Alan Beatts, owner of Borderlands Books, was one of them. He had worked in security at Tower Records for several years before becoming a bookseller,2 and had a tougher, rougher attitude about theft than did many of his colleagues. He didn’t just retrieve the books, he forced the alleged thief to sign a statement saying where and how he bought them (supposedly from a man on a street in Ashland, Oregon) and provide his driver’s license and contact information. For a good half-hour, he scared the hell out of him. Shortly thereafter, the suspect mailed the remaining stolen books back to Gavora, along with a four-page letter insisting that he had not stolen them. Still, the district attorney general advised Gavora that without further proof that this was the thief, there wasn’t much of a case, and Gavora declined to press charges.

  A few months after Sanders told me this story, Gavora said he’d heard that the suspect had been arrested in Olympia, Washington, for attempting to sell a book to the same store from which it had been stolen, and was later, once again, released.3

  “Of course” was Sanders’s r
eaction to the update. Even when thieves take valuable books, their crimes are usually treated relatively lightly in court,4 probably because the same traits that helped them get away with stealing books in the first place—politeness, education, solicitousness—also help them convince judges that they aren’t the sort of people who would ever again do such a thing. One exception is the case of Daniel Spiegelman, the thief I’d heard about at the New York fair who’d stolen an astonishing variety of materials (a thirteenth-century textbook on Euclidean geometry; twenty-six presidential letters and documents; a 1493 edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle; twenty-six medieval, Renaissance, and early modern documents; and much more) from Columbia University and tried to sell them to dealer Sebastiaan Hesselink of the Netherlands.5 Not all the items were recovered; some were sold, others damaged, many lost forever. The prosecution requested leniency, but instead, the judge imposed a stiff term and cited why:

  In callously stealing, mutilating, and destroying rare and unique elements of our common intellectual heritage, Spiegelman did not simply aim to divest Columbia of $1.3 million worth of physical property. He risked stunting, and probably stunted, the growth of human knowledge to the detriment of us all. By the very nature of the crime, it is impossible to know exactly what damage he has done. But this much is clear: this crime was quite different from the theft of cash equal to the appraised value of the materials stolen, because it deprived not only Columbia, but the world, of irreplaceable pieces of the past and the benefits of future scholarship.6

  However moving this commentary on the nonmonetary value of books was, and as positive as it was in setting precedent for sentencing book thieves, it’s unlikely to deter others, especially any like Gilkey. No matter how dire the punishment, it’s virtually useless in thwarting crimes of passion.

  Nor is the perceived futility of catching thieves much of an obstacle for those who passionately want them behind bars. By the time Gavora contacted Sanders for advice about the theft of his books, Sanders had concluded his six-year term as security chair of the ABAA, but Gavora, knowing his reputation, chose to contact him, not his replacement. (As Sanders himself admits, “I do have a natural tendency whenever I get involved in something new to plunge into it, and I pretty much go off the deep end every single time. It’s a pattern that’s repeated itself throughout my life. [Pursuing thieves], it was a good thing; relationships with women, it tends to be a bad thing. I’m very unsuccessful at that.”) And Sanders, ever eager to help catch a thief, gladly stepped back into his old role.

  I was beginning to relate to Sanders in his obsessiveness. This rare book world had become almost all I thought about. My desk and bedside table were now crowded with books about people like Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick, a botany professor who bought so many books in the 1930s that his Nebraska house exceeded the building code maximum load.7 When he died in 1952, at age eighty-three, it was on an army cot he used as a bed in his kitchen, surrounded by ninety tons of books. Might Gilkey steal that many if he could get away with it?

  I was also devouring information on the much better known Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, who is legendary for his love of books.8 (His family said that by the age of five, he had read all the books in his father’s library. Even if the facts were stretched, the general idea wasn’t.) When his earliest collection was destroyed by fire in 1770, he began replacing it with an even more expansive one. As the minister to France, he took time out to scour Parisian bookshops and ordered books from London and other European cities. In Jefferson’s home library in Monticello, he grouped the books according to size: the smallest on the top shelves, the midsized in the middle, and the truly voluminous on the tall bottom shelves.

  In 1814, when the British army burned the Congressional Library in Washington, Jefferson offered to sell his substantial collection of 6,700 volumes. The books were hauled in wagons from Monticello to Washington, where they became the foundation for the Library of Congress. Perhaps there were too many volumes to keep to the simple small-medium-large arrangement at home, because Jefferson proposed a classification scheme he adapted from Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning, in which books were organized within the broad categories of Memory, Reason, and Imagination, poetic divisions I’d like to see bookstores adopt today. It might take longer to find what you’re looking for, but in browsing, who knows what you’d find.

  The more I read through the stacks in my house about Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick, and the many other collectors who have written copiously about their beloved books, the more I thought about the role these men (and a few women) have played as preservers of cultural heritage. In the words of Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, a collector who died in 1979, “Mad or sane, they salvage civilization.”9 I couldn’t get enough of them.

  Of course their salvaging of civilization hasn’t always been popularly motivated. Some of these men have been remarkably selfish. One of the stories that kept me up late was that of Guglielmo Libri (1803-1869), one of the most highly regarded guardians of cultural heritage, who pilfered probably as much as he preserved.10 Libri, an Italian count with a prophetic name from a family of old Tuscan nobility, was responsible for a loss of stunning proportions. A mathematician, journalist, teacher, adviser to the French government, and authority on the history of science, he moved easily in French, Italian, and English academic circles, and in 1841 was put in charge of cataloging historical manuscripts in France’s public libraries. In this role, he was allowed in any room, at any hour, and often requested access through the night, ostensibly to conduct research uninterrupted. (When one librarian refused permission, Libri challenged him to a duel.) His reputation as a venerable scholar protected him long after suspicions rose about his thinning the collections. As the cataloger of the French libraries’ vast holdings, he knew which manuscripts had not yet been recorded, and these proved irresistible to him. He was seen climbing ladders to reach the highest shelves, where the rarest works, often unbound and uncataloged, were stored. The man was not only voracious but cunning. He borrowed valuable editions of books and replaced them with less valuable copies. After removing libraries’ markings by sanding the paper on which they were stamped, he would sell the originals at generous profits. Many of the manuscripts were priceless, ninety-three of them dating from before the twelfth century. In the end, his collection’s worth was estimated at six hundred thousand francs (more than 1.5 million euros in today’s world). He was finally caught in 1850, and sentenced to ten years’ solitary confinement, after which he returned to Italy, where he lived for the rest of his life. I have serious doubts that this dueler for books lived that life without stealing more books.

  SHORTLY AFTER GILKEY told me about being kicked out of Acorn Books, he started talking about how impressed he was by the ways the San Francisco library protected its books. Apparently, one time he had simply wanted to make a photocopy from a book, but the librarian wouldn’t let him. The only way I could imagine this happening was if Gilkey had attempted to take a book from a secure area, or if he had tried to leave the library with it. A few months later, in conversations with dealers about Gilkey, I must have mentioned my concern that he might someday steal from the library, because when I called his parole officer to confirm what Gilkey had told me about the terms of his parole, etc., he said he was not at liberty to discuss Gilkey but noted that at a recent parole hearing, with Gilkey present, someone had mentioned my concern that he might steal from the library. Word had traveled. I realized I had to be careful about what I said if I wanted Gilkey to continue talking to me. At that point, after months of interviews and research, I was elbow-deep in this story, and I had no intention of losing contact with either Gilkey or Sanders. We were all tenacious hunters—Gilkey for books, Sanders for thieves, and me for both their stories. What I had not anticipated was that my role would become more complicated. No longer the objective observer, I had stepped into the plot.

  11

  This Call May Be Recorded or M
onitored

  When I was in Salt Lake City visiting Sanders, he told me a story about the time he visited author Wendell Berry, whom he admires greatly. Speaking in a cadence in keeping with both the rhythm of the place and the language of its people, he rendered a keen portrait not only of Berry and a Kentucky tobacco farm but also of himself.

  “Wendell Berry has a place in the world and he knows it. I think in his youth he did wander away from the hills of Kentucky, but he came back home, and as he put it, ‘Ever since then I’ve been growin’ me a wilderness.’ He invited me out there. . . .

  “He’s a working man, and it was harvest season, and he was helping the neighbors bring in the tobacco. . . . I’d never seen a tobacco plant in my life. Those things are monstrous! Huge aliens with leaves the size of this whole table and stalks almost as big around as this glass. [After work, harvesting tobacco,] we’d go back to his porch and watch the fireflies and sip bourbon. At six o’clock the next morning, do it all over again. Then Sunday, Wendell took me to his woods. . . . He has this sense of his place in the world and he practices what he preaches.

  “I came back to Salt Lake feeling: This is my home, I was born here, I come from a long line of Mormon ancestors, but I don’t feel that kind of kinship, I don’t feel a part of this place, somehow. I feel like an expat in my own land. I don’t feel that connection. I don’t think I ever will.”

  Sanders may have felt disconnected from Salt Lake City, but it seemed to me that by tending his store, he had been growin’ himself a wilderness of another kind, inhabited by an eclectic range of books and a continual stream of people who loved them. This was a world of his making, one he irrefutably belonged in. Sanders surely knows as much about his rows of books as Wendell does of his neighbor’s rows of tobacco plants; when handed an old, obscure volume, he can sometimes sense its value in the same mysterious way a tobacco farmer might sense coming weather by catching certain scents in the air. Sitting with Sanders, listening to his stories, watching him help customers hunt down titles (The Phantom Blooper and “any Roman classics in Latin” were two requests that afternoon), it was I who was the outsider. I envied his lifelong attachment to this world perhaps as much as he envied Wendell Berry’s.