The Man Who Loved Books Too Much Read online

  My interest in Sanders’s story, and Gilkey’s, how they lived such different lives, and how they were intertwined, was now what possessed me. I was still trying to determine what made Gilkey so passionate about books, why he would put his freedom on the line for them, and why Sanders was so determined to catch him, why he would put the financial stability of his store on the line for it. So I made a goal to spend more time with each and to further explore the territory in which they overlapped: collecting.

  Every collector, by definition, seems to be at least a bit obsessed, a little mad (one of my favorite books about collecting is called A Gentle Madness). To a collector, one is never enough, and when a collection is complete, another is imminent, if not already begun. The accumulating never ends. Even though Sanders says he doesn’t collect anymore, he does admit that stocking his store is a form of vicarious collecting and that the stock is only part of his cache; he has a warehouse he refers to as “the catacombs,” where thousands more books are stored. He sells books every day, but he buys even more. Gilkey is equally focused. Even when he isn’t actively stealing books, he is researching them. Given the right circumstances, I wondered, how far might he or any obsessed collector go?

  I found one answer in history. Don Vincente was a nineteenth-century Spanish monk who stole from the library of his Cistercian cloister in northeast Spain, as well as from several other ancient monasteries.1 After disappearing for a time, he resurfaced as the owner of a remarkably well-stocked antiquarian book shop in Barcelona, where he had a reputation for buying more books than he sold, selling only those he considered the most pedestrian, and keeping the rarest for himself. One particular volume obsessed him: Furs e ordinacions fetes par los gloriosos reys de Aragon als regnicols del regne de Valencia (Edicts and Ordinances for Valencia), printed in 1482 by Lamberto Palmart, the first printer in Spain. In 1836, upon its owner’s death, the book was offered at auction. It was thought to be the only existing copy, and Don Vincente was determined to acquire it. Although he offered all the money he owned, Augustino Patxot, a dealer whose shop was near Don Vincente’s, outbid him. Don Vincente appeared to have lost his senses, mumbling threats in the street, and did not even take the reales de consolación, a small payment the highest bidder had to give to the next highest according to custom at Spanish auctions. Three nights later, Patxot’s house went up in flames, and the next day his charred body was found. Soon, the bodies of nine learned men were also found, all of whom had been stabbed to death. Outbursts at the auction had made Don Vincente an obvious suspect. When his house was searched, the Furs e ordinacions was found hidden on a top shelf, along with books that had belonged to the other victims. He confessed to strangling Patxot and stabbing the others only after the magistrate assured him that his library would be well cared for once he was incarcerated. In court, when the judge asked the accused why he hadn’t ever stolen money from his victims, he replied, “I am not a thief.” Of having taken their lives, he said, “Every man must die, sooner or later, but good books must be conserved.” His lawyer argued that his client was insane. In addition, the lawyer noted with great import that he had just discovered that another copy of the book was in Paris, and argued that because of this, it could not be proved that the copy found in Don Vincente’s house was Patxot’s. His client, utterly despairing, cried, “Alas, alas! My copy is not unique!” He was heard repeating this phrase up until the time he was executed in 1836 in Barcelona.

  His story inspired one of Gustave Flaubert’s first short stories and his first published work, “Bibliomanie,” written in 1836, shortly before his fifteenth birthday.

  As my visit to Salt Lake City came to a close, Sanders asked how I was going to portray him in the magazine story I was working on. “As crazy as Gilkey?” he asked. It was not the first time he had posed this question. Sometimes, in the midst of an interview, he would slow down, as though it had just occurred to him that I might not perceive what he was telling me in ways that would benefit him. He seemed torn between his desire for recognition and his distrust of me. I admired his unconventional life, bold opinions, iconoclastic nature, artistic friends, enthralling stories, and dedication to his children and to his books, but the same wariness and suspicious nature that helped him in his work as a “bibliodick” were now a barrier between him and me. I tried to reassure him that I was painting a positive portrait of him.

  Gilkey, on the other hand, had not asked how I was going to portray him. Had he inquired, I would not yet have had an answer. As crazy as Gilkey? Sanders had asked. Was Gilkey crazy? If so, what was the diagnosis? With all the information I had collected, I was still lacking clear answers. Sanders and Gilkey had shared with me their histories, their desires, their motivations, but all this information did not add up to bold portraits sharply in focus.

  Back home, I read in the newspaper that John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, was going to read that evening from his new book at a bookstore in San Francisco. I remembered that Gilkey had mentioned planning to attend. I considered going as well, but decided against it. I didn’t want to endure another awkward encounter in public. Besides, Gilkey and I were scheduled to meet the following Wednesday at the Goodwill store on the corner of Mission and Van Ness streets in San Francisco.

  I called Gilkey’s cell phone to confirm our meeting, but he didn’t answer, nor did he return my message. I called a second time, but again, no response. This was unusual, because he was always careful to be on time for every meeting and to notify me well in advance if he could not make it.

  The next week, I received a collect call.

  “Mrs. Bartlett?” said the only person other than telemarketers who calls me that. “This is John Gilkey.”

  He was calling me from a pay phone at Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, the prison where I had first interviewed him. He said he had been arrested in Modesto on the day I’d noted Berendt’s reading, and explained that he had been put back in prison because of the Brahms postcard he sold.

  “They offered me three and a half months, and I turned that down,” he continued, explaining that he had instead been sentenced to nine and a half months. This was not the only time Gilkey had refused one sentence only to find himself, after protesting the unfairness of it, with a longer sentence. “I’m gonna go to the board to try to clear this up,” he said, sounding resigned more than angry. “I’m innocent this time,” he added. “That’s the funny part.”

  Of course.

  Gilkey said that after police raided his Treasure Island apartment, they returned to him several items they could not prove were stolen, including the Brahms postcard he had taken from Roger Gross. In his mind, this justified his contention that the items were not stolen.

  “They gave it back to me,” he said. “So what am I supposed to think?”

  I was contemplating the convoluted logic of Gilkey’s defense, when a recording interrupted our conversation: This call may be recorded or monitored.

  When I told him I might visit him in prison, he was more than welcoming.

  “Do I need to sign anything?” he asked.

  I had decided to be more frank about my views of his stealing. I told him that I had spoken with dealers whose books he’d stolen, and that some said they hadn’t had insurance, so they suffered the losses themselves.

  “Well, if I were a better person . . . but I’m in jail right now, of course,” he said, acknowledging that he might not be that better person. “I’d say that’s the nature of the business. That’s how I feel now. As a business owner I certainly wouldn’t want to lose five hundred dollars. But if you open up a business, things like that are going to happen. ’Cause, like, a liquor store, it’s probably gonna get robbed once a month. So if you want to open up a business, you gotta be prepared for stuff like that.”

  Stuff like that happens. That he made it happen was irrelevant to Gilkey. As he stated his views, his voice sounded the way it did when he told me about thefts he’d pulled off successfully
. He spoke in short, staccato sentences, brimming with braggadocio, like a gangster in a 1940s movie. I couldn’t help thinking that he was not connecting the dots, that he was not able to see how his criminal actions had put him where he stood, with a pay phone at his ear, guards at his back. I suppose I wanted him to make that connection. I asked him if he could imagine a life without books.

  “Yeah, I can,” he said. “I mean, I can’t collect books unless people donate them to me.”

  Clearly, he considered actually buying them out of the question.

  “Eventually,” he admitted, “I think I should try to get another rare book. At this point I don’t know how I would do it.”

  As robust as his powers of imagination may have been, he seemed incapable of considering a future devoid of rare books. Neither, it would seem, could he stop thinking of devious ways of getting them.

  “To be honest,” he said, “I did think of a criminal idea to get them. But I don’t think it’s feasible.” He elaborated, “I was thinking something like insurance fraud,” adding, as if in justification of his confession, “I am just being honest.”

  He continued, in spite of the frequent Big Brother-like reminder that the call might be monitored, revealing shifting impulses of dream, doubt, caution, and pride: “Insurance fraud to get all one hundred books [from the Modern Library’s list] at one time. And that may or may not work. I probably won’t do it. I mean, I did think of the idea.”

  I asked Gilkey if he thought what he had done was right or wrong.

  “In terms of a percentage basis,” he said, “it’s not like I’m one hundred percent wrong. I’d say it’s more like sixty percent wrong and forty percent right. I mean, sure, that’s their business, book dealers, but they should make books more accessible to people that like them.”

  Seeming to anticipate my reaction to this, he added, “That’s the kind of warped thinking I have.” But just as quickly, he returned to his self-centered logic. “I mean, how am I supposed to build my collection unless I’m, like, this multimillionaire?”

  Gilkey had a wish that he could not afford to grant himself, thus those who kept him from doing so, dealers, were to blame. What must it be like, I wondered, to view the world in such a way, to feel entitled to all one desired and to be able to justify to oneself any means of obtaining it? If this were truly how Gilkey perceived the world, and every conversation with him confirmed this feeling (I could not think of any reason for him to have presented these views to me as any sort of disguise; after all, they were not flattering), then perhaps he was mentally ill. He was aware that stealing books was illegal, and yet he continued to steal them, because he did not equate illegal with wrong. Was this a permanent state of mind, or could he change? He didn’t seem to want to. Instead, he kept his mind on his collection, imagining how it would elevate his position in society. Gilkey would be regarded as a man of culture and erudition, just like the woman in the wealth management advertisement I had seen who was pictured leaving a rare book shop. Everywhere he looked—movies, television, books, advertisements, clothing catalogs—were images that confirmed our culture’s reverence not for literature, per se, but for an accumulation of books as a sign that you belonged among gentility. Through his collection, Gilkey would occupy a revered place in an envied world. Maybe he was just a little more mad than the rest of them.

  The recorded message interrupted again. This call may be recorded or monitored.

  I asked Gilkey why he had left so many books out in the open in his apartment in Treasure Island, and he chuckled.

  “Yeah . . . I was so stupid, I didn’t pack them away and I left them in the bookcase. Cost me fifty thousand bucks in books. . . . I didn’t think they would come and look.”

  Gilkey’s honesty emboldened me. I asked him where the rest of the books were.

  Apparently forgetting he had told me he didn’t own any books anymore, he said, “They’re stored away. They [the police] took a lot of them . . . but I’ve still got some.”

  I asked if they were with his family, or perhaps in a storage facility.

  Gilkey thought a moment. “Um . . . I’ve got them actually at an auction house, on hold. I keep changing venues. Keep thinking I’m going to sell them when all this boils over. I kinda pretend I’m gonna auction [them] off.”

  Gilkey said he had only a few minutes left to talk. He had told me that in 1994, he bought Lolita and The Return of Sherlock Holmes “on my own credit card.”

  I felt the pressure of time running out, so I challenged him again, reminding him that he said he didn’t like to spend any of his own money.

  “This is the thing,” he said. “On the American Express card, they have a supplemental purchase plan. So I bought like fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of items, and I only had to pay three hundred a month.”

  I was about to express my doubts about his willingness to make payments, when he rushed forward and confessed.

  “I had another little plan behind that, so I essentially did get them free.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said sheepishly, “I told them I lost my American Express card, and that there were unauthorized charges on it.”

  In less than five minutes, Gilkey told me that he had bought a couple of rare books, that he had paid for them in monthly installments—and then that he had not paid a dime. Instead, he had claimed to American Express that the charges were not his.

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess they really want me off the phone now.” We said good-bye.

  I hung up and wondered if anyone else knew about his American Express scam. The credit card company? The police? Why did he tell me? Why wasn’t he afraid I would notify anyone? Should I? Was I obligated to, legally? I was pleased he had given me this information, but I didn’t want to be in the position of turning him in. I put off making any decisions until I could find out what my obligations were, even though I knew that what bothered me was a matter not only of legal duty but of ethical responsibility. Did I need to tell dealers? Would it do any good, since I had no idea where the books were? I decided it was best to talk to a lawyer before making any decisions.

  LATE THAT FALL, I visited Heldfond Book Gallery, one of Gilkey’s victims. I had spoken with Erik Heldfond on the phone, and he suggested I meet with his wife, Lane, since she was the one who had dealt with Gilkey.

  When I walked into the store, Lane was helping a couple of British men who appeared to be regulars. I didn’t want to interrupt a possible sale, so I wandered around the store. Most of the books had gorgeous covers, and they sat facing out, rather than spine-to-spine, as if they knew their best sides. That day there was a spectacular first-edition Thunder-ball by Ian Fleming, a copy of The Dial with the first appearance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Richard Avedon’s In the American West, and many first-edition children’s books, such as Green Eggs and Ham, Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Elves and Fairies, Peter Pan and Wendy. From her perch on a chair behind the counter, Lane glanced at me a couple of times with a suspicious look, and I wondered if she thought I might be a shoplifter. When the customers were gone, I approached the counter and introduced myself.

  “Remind me what publication you’re from,” she said curtly, looking me up and down. Erik had told her I was working on a story about Gilkey, and she was clearly displeased. “Do you have a business card?”

  I explained that I had left my cards in another bag, but that I was writing a story for San Francisco Magazine. She wrote down my name and phone number on a piece of scrap paper next to the cash register. I doubted she needed my number. The gesture seemed to be a way for her to inform me that she was no fool; she intended to look me up.

  After Lane gave me the once-over, she reluctantly agreed to talk to me. She recounted the story of Gilkey’s placing the order, how he’d tried to disguise his voice by covering his mouth when he picked up the books, and how she had identified him in the online photo lineup. I knew most of the story already from talking with Detective Munson
and Sanders. But they had not communicated to me one key detail: Lane Heldfond was angry. With few exceptions, dealers do not get rich from selling rare books; for most of them, a five-thousand-dollar loss is huge. Three years after the theft, she was still livid with Gilkey, and now it was clear that she was unhappy with me as well.

  “What you’re doing, is, well, it might be glorifying him,” she said, noting the publicity that serial killer Charles Manson received: “Everyone knows who he is.”

  It was a bit of a stretch, I thought, to link Manson, the murderer, with Gilkey, the book thief, but I knew what she was getting at. They were criminals who received attention she thought unworthy for their deeds.

  “This business is a labor of love,” Lane said, and with her hand on her heart, she added, “It gets you here. I feel such anger for this guy.”

  Lane didn’t want to talk anymore, so I put my notebook away. But as I was about to walk out the door, she stopped me.

  “You know,” she said, “we have really special books here. A lot of book-loving people who come in, they’ve never seen books like this, and chances are, they’ll never see them again for the rest of their lives. We’ve worked hard for fifteen years, first buying eight-dollar books, hoping they’ll go up, then eighty-dollar books, and so on. We’ve worked to build a gem of a shop, something unique. . . . We want these books to be with people who love them, people who pay for them, who appreciate them. . . . Gilkey makes me so angry. You feel violated. When he stole those books, he took them from me, from him,” she said, indicating her husband, and then in a lowered voice, turning for a moment toward her daughter, a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nine or ten who was helping her dust the bookshelves, she said, “He took them from her.”