The Man Who Loved Books Too Much Read online

  Without the support of Ken Sanders and John Gilkey, this book would not have been possible. Both these men answered my endless questions, a feat of exceptional patience and generosity, for which I owe them profound thanks.

  Among the many others quoted in these pages, I particularly appreciate the help and expertise of rare book dealer John Crichton and Detective Kenneth Munson. My thanks go as well to all the collectors I interviewed, especially Celia Sack, Joseph Serrano, and David Hosein. And to Malcolm Davis, who shared with me the ancient tome that drew me into the world of rare books and then to this story.

  Having the opportunity to work with Sarah McGrath was a stroke of luck. For the intelligence and insight she brought to the editing of this book, I am deeply grateful. My appreciation extends as well to Marilyn Ducksworth, Michael Bar-son, Sarah Stein, and the rest of the people at Riverhead. I would also like to acknowledge Nan Weiner, outstanding editor of San Francisco Magazine, who published my original article about John Gilkey and Ken Sanders.

  My sincere appreciation goes to literary agent Jim Levine. For his vision, savvy, and faith in this book, I owe him a huge debt of gratitude. I also appreciate the hard work and dedication of Danielle Svetcov and Lindsay Edgecormbe, both also of Levine Greenberg.

  Writing is usually a lonely endeavor, but for almost a decade I have enjoyed the tremendous good fortune of being part of the writing group North 24th. Heartfelt thanks to fellow members: Leslie Crawford, Frances Dinkelspiel, Katherine Ellison, Sharon Epel, Susan Freinkel, Katherine Neilan, Lisa Wallgren Okuhn, and Jill Storey.

  I thank everyone at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, particularly Natalie Baszile and Melanie Gideon. I am indebted as well to Andy Keiffer, Ursula Bendixon, and Waltraud Bendixon, and to my parents, Lyle and Sidney Hoover, for their help and encouragement.

  While writing this book, I have been grateful for my children, Sonja and Julian, whose incessant hunger for stories of book theft often kept me going. And to John, for his support and unflagging belief, I owe special thanks and love.

  Notes

  A fellow writer once described to me the experience of falling into “research rapture.” While working on this book I succumbed, wholeheartedly. While I relied heavily on the written word (books, periodicals, Internet resources, and so forth) for historical information about the antiquarian book trade, face-to-face interviews (with dealers, librarians, collectors, and others) constituted the majority of my research. Scenes from the lives of Ken Sanders and John Gilkey, especially, were drawn almost exclusively from my conversations with them, with additional information culled from interviews with their relatives, friends, and colleagues. Court documents and police records were also invaluable. And every month or so, I would come across another report of book theft in the press, which underscored for me how prevalent the crime is and how, for all its history, it is still a modern story.

  Prologue

  1 Leslie Overstreet, Curator of Natural History Rare Books, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, e-mail correspondence with the author.

  2 Bock was controversial because he was a physician/metaphysician who believed that botanical parts corresponded to human body parts and processes. Barbara Pitschel, Head Librarian, San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum, e-mail correspondence with the author.

  3 John Windle. Interview with the author.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid. “There’s a famous story about a scholar in the early nineteenth century going into a fish shop in Germany. He saw them tearing pages out of a Bible to wrap the fish in—and it was a Gutenberg Bible.”

  6 Ursula Bendixon and Waltraud Bendixon. Interview with the author.

  7 Copenhagen: “Twists, Turns in Royal Library Book Theft Case.” www.denmark.dk (official website of Denmark). May 28, 2004.

  Kentucky: “Transy Thieves Took Names from Film.” www.kentucky.com. October 11, 2005. This theft was unusually violent. On December 17, 2004, a young man phoned Transylvania University’s special collections librarian, BJ Gooch, to arrange a visit to the rare book room. Once there, the man asked to see some of the library’s finest books. He’d heard about the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, but wanted to know what other treasures lay in the library, and even called a friend to join him. Gooch had already decided which books to pull from the locked metal flat files and the glass case that held some of the more wondrous texts. Shortly, the friend arrived, wearing hat, scarf, and sunglasses, which made it almost impossible to see his face. Gooch had a bad feeling about the pair, but didn’t expect what followed. As she reached into one of the drawers, they shot her with a stun gun, then tied her up and ran off with several rare items, including the Darwin, two rare manuscripts, and sketches by Audubon. “I lay there on the floor, weak as a newborn baby, while they ran off,” she said. A few days later, the young men took the loot, worth about $750,000, to Christie’s auction house. Their flimsy, improbable story raised suspicions, and the two were caught, along with two other friends who’d planned the heist. All four were sentenced to time in prison. University of Kentucky rare book librarian BJ Gooch. Interview with the author.

  Cambridge: “Biblioklepts,” Harvard Magazine, May 1997.

  8 John Windle. Interview with the author.

  Chapter 1

  1 John Carter, ABC for Book Collectors, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), p. 118.

  2 Nicholas Basbanes, Among the Gently Mad (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), p. 81.

  3 Quoted ibid., p. 72.

  4 M. S. Batts, “The 18th-Century Concept of the Rare Book,” The Book Collector, 24 (Autumn 1975), p. 383.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Readers interested in delving more deeply into this subject might enroll in one of several rare book schools in the world. The oldest and most famous is at the University of Virginia, which offers courses for adults on topics concerning old and rare books, manuscripts, and special collections. (Others are in England, New Zealand, and California.)

  7 Collecting has traditionally been a men’s game, but changes are afoot, according to dealer Priscilla Juvelis of Kennebunkport, Maine. As she observed in an interview with the author: “There was always this group of profoundly wealthy people, some of whom happened to be women, who collected books because that’s what people with inherited money did. . . . What has changed dramatically in the twenty-seven years I’ve been in business is that when I started in 1980 there were no women who were heads of libraries’ special collections, with very few exceptions. And there weren’t women rare book librarians. . . . Now there are women heads of special collections. There are women faculty members who insist on teaching Harriet Beecher Stowe as something other than a curiosity. . . . There are a number of women collectors out there who want to collect women authors, writings on women’s rights, and the women collectors I have sold these materials to have money of their own, disposable incomes. . . . The atmosphere changed dramatically.”

  8 Since Updike’s death in early 2009, the interest in and thus the value of his books have risen, as is almost always the case when a famous author dies.

  9 Ken Sanders. Interview with the author.

  10 Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, p. xix.

  11 Ibid., p. 59.

  12 Ibid., p. 62.

  13 Ibid., p. 25.

  14 Frognall Dibdin, The Bibliomania or Book Madness (Richmond, VA: Tiger of the Stripe, 2004), p. 15. Dibdin further noted that back in his day, the early nineteenth century, collectors were mad for (in order) “I. Large Paper Copies; II. Uncut Copies; III. Illustrated Copies; IV. Unique Copies; V. Copies printed upon Vellum; VI. First Editions; VII. True Editions; VIII. A general desire for the Black Letter” (heavy, ornate black type, the earliest of which were from the Gutenberg presses). Dibdin himself “craved uncut copies. To any sensible person, a book with uncut bolts is an abomination because it cannot be read, and yet there are many book collectors who will pay a premium for a book which is thus virgo intacta.”

  15 Rita Reif, “Auctions,”
New York Times, April 1, 1988.

  16 John Windle. Interview with the author.

  17 The suspect, Daniel Spiegelman, claimed he had supplied weapons to the men responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing, which meant that if extradited to the United States he could have faced the death penalty. The Netherlands’ extradition treaty clearly specifies that if the offense is punishable by death in the country requesting extradition, it may be refused. After no definitive connection to the Oklahoma City bombers was established, Spiegelman was extradited to the United States, where he faced trial and was sentenced to sixty months in prison, three years of supervised release, and three hundred hours of community service. See Travis McDade, The Book Thief: The True Crimes of Daniel Spiegelman (New York: Praeger, 2006), pp. 58-60.

  18 Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, p. 29.

  19 California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation inmate locator (telephone service).

  20 “Brutal Trade of Rare Books,” The Age, February 19, 2003.

  Chapter 2

  1 Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, pp. 411-414.

  2 One of the most compelling recent explorations into collecting is Collections of Nothing, by William Davies King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  3 UC Santa Cruz confirmed that Gilkey graduated.

  Chapter 3

  1 Modesto Convention and Visitors’ Bureau. “Area Information History.” http://www.visitmodesto.com/areainfo/history.asp.

  2 “Stanislaus County Is ‘Picture Perfect.’” http://www.visitmodesto.com/films/default.asp.

  3 U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Criminal Justice Information Services Division. “Crime in the United States 2007.” http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_08_ca.html.

  4 Celia Sack. Interview with the author.

  5 Gilkey offered another childhood memory. He said he watched a lot of television, and one of his favorite shows was Amazing Stories. The episode he remembers best is “when the mother keeps telling her son he’s crazy to collect so much stuff. So one day the boy loaded up his car with his belongings and left. Years later, his collections were worth millions of dollars.” John Gilkey. Interview with the author.

  6 Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the famous sex researcher, who was a collector, wrote: “Most of us like to collect things. . . . If your collection is larger, even a shade larger, than any other like it in the world, that greatly increases your happiness. It shows how complete a work you can accomplish, in what good order you can arrange the specimens, with what surpassing wisdom you can exhibit them, with what authority you can speak on your subject.” As quoted from Kinsey’s An Introduction to Biology (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1926), in Geoff Nicholson, Sex Collectors (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 236-237.

  7 As quoted in Janine Burke, The Sphinx on the Table (New York: Walker, 2006), p. 290. Burke cites Max Schur, Freud, Living and Dying (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1972), p. 247.

  8 As quoted in Burke, The Sphinx on the Table, p. 7. Burke cites Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 398.

  9 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 67.

  10 Rick Gekoski, Nabokov’s Butterfly (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 12.

  11 In 1998, the members of the editorial board of the Modern Library released a list of what they considered the one hundred best novels in English published since 1900.

  Chapter 4

  1 Ken Sanders. Interviews with the author.

  2 Susan Benne. E-mail interview with the author.

  3 Patricia Hampl, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (New York: Harcourt, 2006), p. 52.

  4 Bibliomania: A Documentary Film of the 34th California International Antiquarian Book Fair. Directed and edited by Paul Ryall, 2003. An Antiquarian Booksellers’Association of America Production of a Session Seven film.

  5 Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), pp. 97-98.

  Chapter 6

  1 Ken Sanders. Interview with the author.

  2 According to Sanders, a complete copy was recently sold for more than $1 million.

  3 James Thorpe, Henry Edwards Huntington: A Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

  4 www.huntington.org (website of The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens).

  5 Barbara Pitschel, Head Librarian, San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum. E-mail correspondence with the author.

  6 For a thorough account of the world’s violence toward books, see Fernando Baez, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York: Atlas, 2008).

  7 Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, pp. 42-43.

  Chapter 7

  1 This was before the availability of Wi-Fi.

  2 John Milton, Areopagitica.

  3 Walt Whitman, “So Long,” Leaves of Grass.

  4 Quoted in Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, p. 20.

  5 Tony Garcia. Interview with the author.

  6 Ken Lopez. Interview with the author.

  7 Kenneth Munson. Interview with the author.

  8 Ken Sanders. Sequence of events reported in interviews with the author.

  9 Kenneth Munson. Interview with the author. Munson explained that suspects will often use the physical details of someone they’re close to when describing a nonexistent accomplice. In Gilkey’s case, Munson assumed it was Gilkey’s own father he was describing.

  Chapter 8

  1 This is a common misconception, stemming probably from the fact that his 1876 The Hunting of the Snark is one of the earliest books by a famous author for which the jacket still exists. Earlier jackets from the 1830s by relatively unknown authors are still around.

  2 Ken Sanders. Interview with the author.

  3 Arnold Herr. Interview with the author.

  4 Kenneth Munson. Interview with the author.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Confirmed as standard procedure for prisoners residing in the Reception Center by San Quentin State Prison public information officer Lieutenant Samuel Robinson.

  Chapter 9

  1 John Crichton. Interview with the author.

  Chapter 10

  1 Andrew Clark. Interview with the author.

  2 Alan Beatts. Interview with the author.

  3 Bob Gavora. Interview with the author.

  4 This lax attitude was not always so. In the time of King Henry IV (late fourteenth, early fifteenth centuries) a man named Johannes Leycestre and his wife, Cedilia, stole “a little book from an old church.” His punishment: “Let him be hanged by the neck until his life departs.” Apparently, the fate of Cedilia, like that of most women of her day, was not worth recording. See Edwin White Gaillard, “The Book Larceny Problem,” The Library Journal , vol. 45 (March 15, 1920), pp. 247-254, 307-312.

  5 Sebastiaan Hesselink, interviews with the author, and Travis McDade, The Book Thief (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006).

  6 Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Splendor of Letters (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), p. 15.

  7 Robert Vosper, A Pair of Bibliomanes for Kansas: Ralph Ellis and Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick (Bibliographical Society of America publication), vol. 55 (Third Quarter, 1961).

  8 James Gilreath and Douglas L. Wilson, eds., Thomas Jefferson’s Library (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1989).

  9 Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis wrote this for a speech that was never delivered. Quoted in Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, p. 23.

  10 P. Alessandra Maccioni Ruju and Marco Mostert, The Life and Times of Guglielmo Libri (Hilvesum, Netherlands: Verloren, 1995).

  Chapter 11

  1 Lawrence Sidney Thompson, Notes on Bibliokleptomania, Bulletin of The New York Public Library, September 1944; and Basbanes, A Gen
tle Madness.

  Chapter 13

  1 American Library Association online newsletter, December 12, 2003.

  Chapter 14

  1 Marcello Simonetta, ed., Federico da Montefeltro and His Library (Milan: Y. Press and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2007).

  2 Jonathan J. G. Alexander, “Perfection of Illustration and Ornament,” in Simonetta, Federico da Montefeltro and His Library , p. 17.

  3 According to Freud, the collector’s makeup often includes “an enquiring mind; a penchant for secrecy” and “a propensity for rationalization.” As quoted in Burke, The Sphinx on the Table, p. 196. Burke cites Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), p. 182.

  4 Baez, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books.

  A Note on Sources

  It’s probably no surprise that there are many books about rare books and those who collect them. To read them is to learn the rich history of the book, the varied forms it has taken, and why some periods, genres, authors, illustrators, and presses lend collectible charm to a selection of them. Surprisingly few books, on the other hand, detail the deeds of book thieves. The bulk of this information I found in periodicals and by interviewing those who have had firsthand experience with them. Readers interested in learning more are advised to visit rare book libraries and bookstores, where they will be able not only to see, touch, even read, fine old books, but also to hear for themselves stories that have never been put to paper, never bound into a book.

  While there are several fine memoirs by and biographies of individual collectors, the following books offer readers an expansive view of the rare book world and those who inhabit it: