The Man Who Loved Books Too Much Read online

  What Heldfond said hit home, not only because of how she and her family had been personally affected by the thefts, but also in how she described what is on her shelves. Those books that we “may never see again for the rest of our lives” are more than just beautiful objects, and their physicality makes their contents seem more meaningful, somehow. Her rage was justified.

  I had been thinking about the “thingness” of books ever since my first encounter with the Kräutterbuch and my book fair visit, but something Heldfond had said made me think, too, about the physical book’s place, not just in larger history but in our own personal histories. This was an idea I couldn’t get away from when, several months later, a friend of mine, Andy Kieffer, began extolling the virtues of his e-book. Andy and his wife had each bought an e-book shortly before moving to Guadalajara. They were glad they had, since it’s nearly impossible to find books in English there, and the mail system is unreliable. He found he had no problem reading Chekhov’s The Seagull or Stevenson’s Treasure Island (two texts he recently purchased) on screen instead of between covers, and had now begun carrying the daily New York Times, several issues of The New Yorker, a language dictionary, and some trashy beach reading all on his device at once.

  “I never know in advance what I’m going to want to read,” he explained.

  Fine for him, I thought. I still couldn’t fathom why anyone who does have easy access to traditional books would make the switch. But then I thought of my teenaged children, both so accustomed to reading from their computers much of the day, not just instant messages and e-mails, but also long articles for homework. They will have no objection to reading e-books. At the same time, though, I think that may only strengthen their attachment to the physical books they do keep. One of my son’s high school graduation presents, something I bought at the last minute, is a black pocket-sized copy of the U.S. Constitution (he’s interested in history and law). Out of all his presents, a laptop for college included, it was this inexpensive, tiny book that my usually reserved son literally held to his heart, saying, “I’m going to keep this forever.” And my daughter now has on her shelf my mother’s (and once my grandmother’s) copies of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Anne of the Orchard, and Kilmeny of the Orchard. “When I open those books and start reading, I like thinking about where they have been, who else has read them,” she explained. “It’s like they have more than one story to tell.”

  Physical artifacts carry memory and meaning, and this is as true of important historical texts as it is of cherished childhood books. Sitting in any library, surrounded by high shelves of books, I sense the profoundly rich history of scholarship as something real, and it’s both humbling and inspiring. This manifestation of reality is true of other artifacts as well. We can read about the Holocaust or where Emily Dickinson wrote her “letter to the world” or where Jim Morrison is buried. We can view online photos of all these places. Still, each year, thousands of people visit Auschwitz, The Homestead, and Père Lachaise. I suppose our desire to be near books rises from a similar impulse; they root us in something larger than ourselves, something real. For this reason, I am sure that hardbound books will survive, even long after e-books have become popular. When I walk down the street and almost everyone I pass is sequestered in his own iPod or cell phone universe, I can’t help thinking that our connection to books is still, after all these centuries, as important as it is intangible. It is this connection that makes my parents’ and grandparents’ old books so special to me, and the Kräutterbuch so sublime.

  12

  What More Could I Ask?

  Since Gilkey, who was free once more, was now unwel come at his favorite bookstores, he satisfied his need to be around books by visiting the library, which he did almost daily. He had decided to collect first editions of books by Nobel Prize winners, and the next time we met, he was happy to tell me that he had already found one, by Dario Fo, who won the prize in 1997. Gilkey had brought it along, a small, slim paperback with a plain red cover, which he handed to me. I noticed that on the back of the book there was what appeared to be a library sticker. When I asked him about it, he mumbled something about how he had bought it at a library sale in Modesto. While we continued to talk, he picked at the label, trying, I presumed, to remove it.

  When I again asked Gilkey where he was storing his books, he said with a shrug and a knowing look, “Technically, I don’t have any books.” I was pretty sure he would have liked to tell me more, but he recognized this particular risk and with uncharacteristic caution was not willing to take it. Gilkey, who dreamed of being admired for his collection, was caught in a trap of his own making. As much as he wanted to show off his acquisitions, the very act would result in his losing them. Every book Gilkey added to his collection could now be only a private pleasure, not for anyone else’s viewing, with one exception: me. I had become his audience of one. He couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me everything, nor show me all of his books, but he could show me small paperbacks that may or may not have been bought at a library sale and talk to me about their significance. The bigger “purchases,” however, would remain in hiding, at least for the time being. Still, I had the sense that if I talked to Gilkey enough, some book-related gem would come out of it, and I was compelled to find it. I was hoping to dig up surprises as fervently as any book collector, so we set up another time to meet.

  The discovery of valuable book treasures is not limited to out-of-the-way barns in New Hampshire. San Francisco dealer John Windle told me about going to an auction in London several years ago for the estate sale of a famous book collector whose books, furniture, and other items were up for bid. While reviewing the inventory, Windle opened a bureau drawer. Inside, unknown to anyone—not the auction house, nor his fellow dealers, nor the bidders—lay a copy of William Blake’s illustrated Book of Job, an exquisite volume of twenty-one engravings. An exacting poet, artist, and printer, Blake has always been a favorite of collectors, and the Book of Job is one of his finest works.

  “Tucked inside the Book of Job,” noted Windle, “I found something even more valuable: a four-page broadside also by Blake, ‘The Song of Liberty.’” Like a Russian matryoshka doll, one treasure lay within another, which hid inside another. The chest was priced about $2,000, and the Book of Job inside it was worth $100,000. The broadside hiding between its pages, “The Song of Liberty,” hadn’t been up for auction in forty years, so when Windle held it in his hands, he didn’t know its value. He said he was conscious at that moment that no one else was aware of the broadside’s existence. “Ninety percent of me wanted to put it in my pocket and go to lunch,” he said. “But my conscience wouldn’t let me.” He informed the auction house of his finds. Three months later, “The Song of Liberty” sold for $25,000.

  At our next meeting at Café Fresco, Gilkey told me about how his hunting was going. He had been researching Iris Murdoch, whose book Under the Net was number ninety-five on the Modern Library’s list of “100 Best Novels.” He was particularly interested in her writings on existentialism. He said that he’d read Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and his take on their philosophical leanings was personal.

  “The way they can’t differentiate between right and wrong,” he said of existentialists. “Well, I’ve been thinking that could be me.”

  Gilkey told me he was hoping to visit Los Angeles for a book fair and Arizona for a horror book festival. I asked him if traveling wasn’t awfully risky, suggesting that he might get caught violating the terms of his parole, but he dismissed capture as unlikely. And being around so many books would surely be a temptation too strong for him to resist, but when I asked him about it, he said, “Sometimes it’s tempting to do it again, to be honest, but it’s too much of a risk.” But taking risks, gambling even on his freedom, had never been a deterrent.

  Earlier, Gilkey had agreed to show me the pay phones he used to call in book orders, and now I suggested we visit one.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, �
�this one here is pretty good.”

  Next to the café we’d met in so often, in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, stood one of his favorites. We gathered our things and walked over to it.

  Gilkey opened the Yellow Pages, turned to the rare book pages, and ran his finger across the advertisements.

  “Now, see, I’ve done some of these. . . . Looking back at it, I should have probably stayed away from that one,” he said as his finger drifted down the page. “I’ve been to Kayo, I’ve been to Argonaut . . . Brick Row . . . Thomas Goldwasser. He almost got me in trouble. And here’s Black Oak Books,” he said, with his finger on the ad. “I’ll just call them. It’s toll-free.”

  I thought that perhaps I hadn’t heard him correctly, that he was only going to pantomime a call, but a moment later he was actually punching in the numbers. With the receiver at his ear, waiting for someone to answer, he said to me, “I pretty much remember the phrases I used. I memorized them.”

  I watched, dumbfounded, grateful, and guilty.

  “No one answered,” he said as he hung up the phone. “It’s a little irritating when they don’t. When they would do that, later I would definitely make sure to get a book from them. I’d make it a priority.”

  He searched the ads again. “Brick Row?”

  I couldn’t help myself. “You’re not really going to call them,” I said.

  “Maybe just to ask a question,” he said. “Well, okay, maybe not. How about Jeffrey Thomas Fine and Rare Books?” he asked, referring to an ad. “Or Robert Dagg? Here’s Moe’s Books. They’re actually quite good.”

  He settled on Serendipity Books in Berkeley, from which he’d stolen more than once, and dialed the number.

  “Hello. I’m looking for a gift for a wedding. Do you have any rare books by Iris Murdoch? Under the Net, or anything else by Iris Murdoch? Or maybe something by J. P. Donleavy, like The Ginger Man?” (The Ginger Man was number ninety-nine on the Modern Library’s list.)

  While the person on the line searched for a Murdoch or Donleavy, Gilkey, not covering the receiver, said to me, “That’s usually what I do, ask for a book I happen to be reading. Right now, she’s checking. I think I told you, they’ve got thousands of books there.”

  Gilkey continued waiting. I continued watching.

  “Only problem with this phone,” he said to me, “is it doesn’t take incoming calls. So I’d tell them I’m busy and don’t take calls at work. Then later I’d call the store back to make sure the charge went through.”

  Gilkey waited another moment while the woman tried to find a book that might satisfy him. He grew impatient.

  “See, for something like this, where they made me wait and wait and wait, I would definitely make sure they were next on the list.”

  The woman at Serendipity returned and must have asked for his phone number, because he read the number posted on the phone, and his name, because the next thing he said was, “Uh . . . Robert.”

  “I read on the Internet,” he said to her, “that you specialize in Irish writers, especially James Joyce. Could you make a recommendation for a gift from an Irish writer? Oh, I think anything up to five thousand. Yeah, it’s a wedding gift. Or if you have an autograph by James Joyce or Charles Dickens or . . . Okay, if you can just take a quick look. Okay, thank you.”

  I had heard this scenario before, from Sanders and from Gilkey’s victims. They’d described for me Gilkey’s voice while placing an order, his way of demonstrating a measure of book knowledge, his story that he was buying a gift. In tone and content, his enactment seemed almost a parody of itself. It was also going very smoothly. Even though Gilkey was not, I assumed, going to provide the dealer with a credit card number or hotel address, it was a deception I was witnessing, a half-crime—and I was half horrified, half fascinated.

  Gilkey hung up the phone and gave me his take on the call, a blend of disdain for the dealer, pride for himself.

  “See, that would have been perfect because the owner wasn’t there,” he said. “She probably wouldn’t know the correct procedure. She doesn’t even know where anything is. If I wanted it today, I probably would have done it. I’d have given her the credit card number. It would definitely go through. If it didn’t go through, I’d have a spare one ready. I’d have three or four spares in my pocket. I’d order the book and say, ‘What time do you close?’ I’d say, ‘Can you gift wrap it?’ Then they’d stutter around and say, ‘Uh, okay.’ If they close at five, I’d get there around four-fifteen, four-thirty, take a look around, make sure there are no suspicious characters around. Then I’d go in there and say, ‘I’m picking up a book for Robert,’ and hopefully they’d have it ready. Sometimes they wouldn’t have it ready, which would make me a little bit nervous. That’s how stupid they were. They should have asked for the credit card. A few times they would run the number through when I got there. It didn’t make any sense to me. But I signed it, and that’s it. I didn’t do anything suspicious or anything. I just said, ‘Thank you.’ I’d probably take a look at a couple more books and say, ‘This is great. Thank you very much. I’ll probably be back. You have a great collection.’ And then I’d calmly walk out.”

  I nodded, balancing my notebook on the small shelf under the next pay phone, taking in just how replenished he appeared.

  “Obviously,” he said, “I’m not into it anymore. But that would have been the perfect opportunity.”

  Gilkey told me the story of another perfect opportunity as we left the Crowne Plaza and headed to one of his other favorite pay phones, a few blocks away in the Grand Hyatt. He and his father had taken a red-eye to New York and had themselves a few days of what he called “the good life,” using stolen credit cards. The trip, said Gilkey, was “very, very successful.” That’s when he got the Winnie-the-Pooh books he later tried to sell, and a copy of A Streetcar Named Desire worth $3,000. Gilkey was careful to tell me that it was from “a shop” in the Waldorf-Astoria. “You couldn’t believe how easy that one was,” he boasted.

  The third pickup in New York was, he said, “a funny story.” He and his father were staying at the Hyatt near Madison Avenue, where there were several rare book stores. In a listing from one, which Gilkey declined to name, he had picked out a few selections, one of which was a series of travel books. Since he was having trouble deciding on one, he asked his father to choose. The elder Gilkey thought the travel books sounded appealing, so Gilkey called from a pay phone at the Hyatt and placed the order.

  “So I get over there, and they were gift wrapping it,” said Gilkey. “It turns out it’s a seventeen-volume set. It must have weighed like seventy-five pounds. I had to carry it all the way back to the hotel.” He said he didn’t take a taxi because he didn’t want to spend the money. “Very strenuous,” he went on. “I had to keep taking breaks. . . . I kept trudging along, trudging along.”

  Did anyone know about this theft? Did Sanders? The ABAA? When I asked Gilkey which store he got it from, he said, “I better not say.” I heard this response more often now, because he was, in fact, confessing crimes more frequently. He seemed to be growing more trusting of me, and I hoped that he would eventually tell me where the books were stashed.

  In addition to lining his suitcases with rare books and a handful of other collectibles, Gilkey said he and his father spent their time in New York “eating hundred-dollar meals, visiting the Empire State Building, and walking around Greenwich Village. We were eating like kings. I said to my dad, ‘I guarantee you everything, the hotels, the meals, will be free. I guarantee you.’ ”

  The trip was an inspiration.

  “That’s what I wanted to do,” said Gilkey, “plan trips to other cities, especially because New York was amazing. Nothing went wrong.”

  Until their return. Gilkey and his father boarded the plane with suitcases full of loot, but after they arrived in San Francisco, Gilkey discovered that someone had taken his luggage.

  “That was the worst thing that could have happened,” he said. “All those
thousands of dollars’ worth of books.”

  A passenger from San Mateo had the same model of Hartmann luggage, and within hours he had returned Gilkey’s bag. In spite of that experience, as Gilkey relayed the story of his trip to New York, it was clear that it was one of his fondest memories.

  “That’s what I wanted to do. Go to a city, get free hotels, free plane tickets. New York worked out perfectly. I had eighty to ninety credit slips, and I could get one thousand, two thousand, three thousand a slip at least. . . . If you like getting stuff for free, it was the perfect trip. I didn’t feel guilty. Free vacation, free meals, free books. I was excited. I was gonna go mobile from city to city. New York, that was the test run. New York was the future of what I was going to do, because what more could I ask?”

  13

  And Look: More Books!

  After our tour of Union Square’s finest phone booths, I didn’t hear a thing from Gilkey for several weeks. While wondering if he had been caught stealing and was back in prison again, I kept busy. Once, when my daughter was looking for a costume at Goodwill, I drifted over to the bookshelves. This is the type of place where it’s still possible to find a treasure, however unlikely. But maybe I would be lucky. Collector Joseph Serrano had told me about two of his recent finds there: a signed first-edition Willie Mays autobiography for $2.49 (he later saw two copies online, unsigned, priced at $400 each) and a first-edition Booked to Die, the book collector mystery by John Dunning (which Gilkey happened to read in prison), for $3.49 (Serrano estimates it’s worth around $400 to $500). I went straight for a couple of “high spots,” the Stephen Kings: no first editions. No Tarzans, which I had heard were very valuable, either. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t much of anything besides bedraggled airport paperbacks and stained cookbooks. I ran my eyes down one shelf, then another, scanning for hardbacks. Not a first edition among them. There were more bookshelves behind me, but unlike the scowling man in a darkly stained parka next to me, who was diligently searching for something (first editions?), I was ready to give up. I thought of Gilkey, who had been to that Goodwill before, and couldn’t grasp how he or anyone else could keep up the search when it yielded so little. When I returned to the crowded racks of tulle and velveteen skirts my daughter was digging through, I was ready to go. She had had just as scant luck as I had, so we left empty-handed. As we walked out, I saw that the same man was still hunting among the books, building a small stack of them on the floor. What had I missed?