The Man Who Loved Books Too Much Read online

  Sanders took a deep breath, then launched into a bizarre incident that had occurred at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in 2003, held in San Francisco. The fair was at the Concourse Exhibition Center, a lackluster, warehouse-like building situated on the edge of the city’s design center, just blocks from the county jail—between showcases for the domestic trappings of wealth and a holding pen for criminals. It was a location that would turn out to be fitting. With about 250 dealers and 10,000 attendees, the city’s fair is the largest in the world. “That big ol’ barn goes on forever,” is how Sanders described it. On opening day, as usual, collectors and dealers were giddy with a sense of possibility. Sanders, however, warily paced his booth. He was surrounded by some of his finest offerings—The Strategy of Peace, inscribed by John F. Kennedy, and a first edition of the Book of Mormon—but his mind was not on his books. Several days before the fair, while sitting in his Salt Lake City office, surrounded by dusty piles of books and documents, he had received a phone call from a detective in San Jose, California. The detective said that the thief Sanders had spent three years trying to track down (and by then Sanders had a hunch it was one thief, not a gang) now had a name, John Gilkey, and that he was in San Francisco.

  A couple of days before the fair, Sanders received a mug shot of Gilkey. He had imagined what the thief looked like, but this was not it.

  “I can tell you one thing,” he said. “He didn’t look like Moriarty to me”—referring to the fictional character whom Sherlock Holmes called the “Napoleon of crime.”

  The photo showed a plain-looking man in his thirties with short dark hair parted on the side, a red T-shirt under a white buttoned shirt, and an expression that was more despondent than menacing. Sanders’s friend Ken Lopez, a tall Massachusetts dealer with shoulder-length hair and an open pack of Camel cigarettes in his T-shirt pocket, was, as far as they knew, Gilkey’s latest victim (he had ordered a first-edition Grapes of Wrath). Shortly before the fair opened, Sanders and Lopez talked about handing out Gilkey’s photo to all the dealers, even making a wanted poster for the doors of the fair. But Sanders reconsidered. Gilkey’s victims, many of whom were at the fair, might one day be called to identify him in a lineup, and Sanders didn’t want to risk contaminating the process. All he could do was remain vigilant and wonder if Gilkey would be brazen enough to show up at the fair.

  “I was thinking that he would be attracted to a good fair like a moth to a flame,” he said. “And he would be there to steal books.”

  The San Francisco fair had been open less than an hour when Sanders locked eyes with a man he didn’t recognize. This was not so unusual. Sanders often forgets names, even faces. But this encounter was different.

  “I looked at that guy, and he looked right back into my eyes,” said Sanders, “and I got the weirdest goddamn feeling.”

  It was not the mug shot he was thinking of. That had already faded from his memory. Something else had snagged his attention, a strange, sure sense that flooded him in a slice of a second. Sanders’s daughter, Melissa, was helping a customer at the other end of the booth, and Sanders turned to ask her to take a look at this dark-haired, ordinary-looking man he suspected was Gilkey. But when Sanders turned around to point out the man to Melissa, he had vanished.

  Sanders rushed down the aisle, past four or five other booths, bumping into a couple of collectors along the way, to his friend John Crichton’s booth. Still stunned, he paused to catch his breath. “I think I just saw Gilkey,” Sanders told him.

  “You’ve got to relax, old man,” Crichton said, reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. “You’re getting paranoid.”

  SO IT WAS with all of this in mind that I wandered through the New York fair, waiting for my scheduled meeting with Sanders at his booth, and wondering, as I observed the scene around me, if any of these people were like Gilkey. What about the elderly man at a counter a few feet away looking back and forth from one blood-red leather-bound book to another almost identical one? Or the dark-suited couple whispering to each other as they ogled a book on nineteenth-century French architecture? It was hard not to view everyone with suspicion, but I tried to keep my imagination in check as I approached my first booth.

  Straight ahead was Aleph-Bet Books, where I was drawn in by an enticing array of children’s books, first editions of many that I recognized from my childhood, like Pinocchio, although this was a first edition in Italian, which at $80,000 cost around twenty thousand times more than my own childhood copy at home (a Golden Book). The booth was packed with hungry collectors, but I managed to get the attention of co-owner Marc Younger, who explained to me why so many fairgoers had crowded his booth. People have an emotional attachment to books they remember reading as children, he said, and very often it’s the first type of book a collector seeks. Some move on to other books, but many spend a lifetime collecting their favorite childhood stories. He showed me the first trade edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit ($15,000).

  “It’s an interesting story,” he said. “No one would publish it, so she [Beatrix Potter] self-published two hundred and fifty of them. They go up to a hundred thousand dollars.”

  Next, he pointed out a first-edition The Cat in the Hat, priced at $8,500. It looked pretty much like a new The Cat in the Hat to me, and he confirmed that it can be difficult to identify first editions of children’s books, in part because the edition is not always noted. Apparently, you have to look for other clues. Younger explained that when first published, The Cat in the Hat’s boards (a term for covers—I was learning the lingo) were covered in flat paper, but that later they were glazed (shiny). I was starting to feel like an insider. At the next flea market, I could be on the lookout for a first-edition The Cat in the Hat.

  Younger then agreed to show me something more rare. He had two letters from L. Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz books, to John R. Neill, who illustrated many of them. “Usually it’s the really extraordinary things that do well,” he said, “like these.” Younger expected them to go for $45,000 to $60,000. So many of his books (not to mention the letters, original illustrations, and other ephemera) seemed like “really extraordinary things” that I walked away with a kind of book-fever setting in.

  Across the aisle from Aleph-Bet were the largest books I’d ever seen: sumptuously illustrated volumes of natural history, as big as coffee tables and twice as thick, which the dealer, a bow-tied gentleman who spoke in hushed tones, called elephant folios. Based on size and weight, they were aptly named, and I wondered where, other than museums, such books would be useful, or even practical to lug from a shelf, for example, to a table. After admiring a darkly lush, eerie floral illustration in one of the elephant folios, “The Night-Blowing Cereus,” by Robert John Thornton (1799), I left and headed in the other direction, to a booth where I got to see a rare first edition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony ($13,500) and a valuable copy of Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids, Watson and Crick’s first and second DNA article offprints, signed ($140,000).

  The New York fair guidebook indicated that Sanders was in booth D8. Making my way there, I stopped by several more booths. At Bruce McKittrick Rare Books of Philadelphia, owner McKittrick was charming anyone who stopped by with his rapid-fire musings on books. His booth attracted more people than any around it, but that may also have been due to the champagne he poured. He told me about Pietro Aretino, a sixteenth-century Italian writer whose oeuvre included erotic books. In 1524, he wrote a collection of sonnets to accompany the engravings of sixteen sexual positions by Marcantonio Raimondi (who based his images on a series of paintings by Giulio Romano, a student of Raphael’s). It remains one of the most famous examples of Renaissance erotica.

  “The original editions of his books are so rare and were read to death and were extremely scandalous,” said McKittrick, “not just slightly pornographic. Not like eighteenth-century French soft porn. In Venice, in the 1520s, so many wanted it, the stuff just disappeared.”

  He said people pirat
ed Aretino’s work, and at the fair he was selling a mid-seventeenth-century fake of a pirated copy.

  “A fake of a fake,” he said. “Very interesting.”

  Before the fair, I had learned that there are probably as many definitions of “rare” as there are book dealers. Most tend toward the cheeky. Burt Auerback, a Manhattan appraiser, is quoted as having said, “It is a book that is worth more money now than when it was published.”2 The late American collector Robert H. Taylor said that a rare book is “a book I want badly and can’t find.”3 On the occasions that people answer seriously, they all agree that “rare” is a highly subjective moniker.

  The earliest use of the term has been traced to an English book-sale catalog in November 1692.4 But it wasn’t until the early eighteenth century that scholars attempted to define what makes a book rare, with bibliophile J. E. Berger making Monty Python-esque distinctions between “rarus” and “rarior” and “rarissiumus.”5 A book’s degree of rarity remains subjective, and the only qualities of “rare” that collectors and dealers seem to agree on is some combination of scarcity, importance, and condition. Taste and trends play roles as well, however. When a movie adaptation is released, whether Pride and Prejudice or Nancy Drew, first editions of the book often become temporarily hot property among collectors. While Dickens will almost certainly be a perennial choice, Dr. Seuss’s star has risen as the children who were raised on his books have become adults with the means to form their own collections.6

  Walking by a booth with an impressive selection of dust jacket art, I heard a dealer say to a passerby, “Don’t judge a book by its content!” I had read enough about book collectors before the fair to get the joke: Many collectors don’t actually read their books. At first, I was surprised, but having given it some thought, it’s not so shocking. After all, much of the fondness avid readers, and certainly collectors, have for their books is related to the books’ physical bodies. As much as they are vessels for stories (and poetry, reference information, etc.), books are historical artifacts and repositories for memories—we like to recall who gave books to us, where we were when we read them, how old we were, and so on.

  For me, the most important book-as-object from my childhood is Charlotte’s Web, the first book I mail-ordered after joining a book club. I still remember my thrill at seeing the mailman show up with it at our front door on a sunny Saturday morning. It had a crisp paper jacket, unlike the plastic-covered library books I was used to, and the way the pages parted, I could tell I was the first to open it. For several days I lived in Wilbur’s world, and the only thing as sad as Charlotte’s death, maybe even sadder, was that I had come to the end of the book. I valued that half-dream state of being lost in a book so much that I limited the number of pages I let myself read each day in order to put off the inevitable end, my banishment from that world. I still do this. It doesn’t make sense, though, because the pleasure of that world does not really end for good. You can always start over on page one—and you can remember. Whenever I have spotted my old Charlotte’s Web (on my son’s shelf, then my daughter’s), I have recalled how it came to me. It’s a personal record of one chapter of my life, just as other chapters have other books I associate with them. The pattern continues; my daughter returned from camp last summer with her copy of Motherless Brooklyn in a state approaching ruin. She told me she’d dropped it into a creek, but couldn’t bear to leave it behind, even after she’d finished it. This book’s body is inextricably linked to her experience of reading it. I hope that she continues to hold on to it, because as long as she does, its wavy, expanded pages will remind her of the hot day she read it with her feet in the water—and of the fourteen-year-old she was at the time. A book is much more than a delivery vehicle for its contents, and from my perspective, this fair was a concentrated celebration of that fact.

  AT THE REFRESHMENT STAND toward the back of the fair, I overheard one man say he had just seen Al Pacino, and someone else note that he had spotted one of the Antiques Roadshow experts. The appeal of that PBS show (your junk may be really, really valuable!) was also one of the appeals of the fair. Nothing looked like junk, but plenty of the modern first editions looked perfectly ordinary. Several times I wondered, Do I still have that book? Do my parents? Could it be a first edition?

  As I continued to make my way through the fair, the dealers I talked to seemed more excited about the Roadshow man than about Pacino. Still, I took note of every dark-haired man walking by, hoping for a movie star. Pacino certainly would have blended into the crowd better than I, a woman. Most of the collectors were men,7 most well over forty. Many appeared to be scholars or aged hippies or lucky book lovers with inheritances burning holes in their pockets. One man’s red Porsche is one of these guys’ inscribed first-edition copies of Portnoy’s Complaint. When handling any of these books, they cradled them, half open, in both hands, so as not to split the spines or cause any other trauma—no rips or folds or coffee spills. They consulted guides and maps of the fair floor, squinted through spectacles across booths, and stooped to better run their eyes down the spines of books, trying to locate a copy of a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, of which there were only five hundred printed ($30,000), for example, or the very rare first edition of The History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark ($139,000). Those with less extravagant means were probably hunting down more modest prizes, like a first edition of Toni Morrison’s Beloved ($125) or, more affordable yet, a first edition of John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich ($45).8 They also must have been roaming the aisles hoping to be surprised, because that’s any treasure hunter’s dream—in this case, to stumble upon a book whose scarcity or beauty or history or provenance is even more seductive than the story printed between its covers.

  At a fair like this, it’s obvious that the allure of any book is in large part sensual. I watched collectors feast their eyes, their hands, their noses. An Englishman placed his coffee cup at a safe distance on the counter before taking a good whiff of a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, then fell into the rabbit hole of John Tenniel’s enchanting illustrations. Watching him, I assumed he simply liked the smell of old books, but later I learned that sniffing is also a practical precaution: mildew can ravage a book, and a good whiff can tell you if there’s any danger of its encroachment.9 As I roamed from booth to booth, book to book, I felt the sensory enticement myself—the feel of thick, rough-edged pages, the sharp beauty of type, the tightness of linen or pigskin covers, the papery smell.

  In my pre-fair research, I learned that this fondness not only for rare books but also for endlessly acquiring them has been alive for twenty-five centuries.10 Around 400 B.C., Euripides was mocked for his appetite for books.11 A few hundred years later, Cicero noted that he was “saving up all my little income” to develop his collection.12 In the “golden age of collecting,” roughly 1870 to 1930, the world was teeming with fevered collectors. They were and are a determined breed, and their desire can swell from an innocent love of books, or bibliophilia, to an affliction far more rabid, bibliomania, a term coined by the Reverend Frognall Dibdin in 1809.13 An English bibliographer and avid collector, Dibdin noted that “what renders it particularly formidable is that it rages in all seasons of the year, and at all periods of human existence.”14 When the books, like those at the New York fair, have pasts—secret, scandalous, or sweet—the attraction is that much more robust. That they also hold history, poetry, science, and stories on their pages can seem almost secondary. The fair was abuzz with people fully in the grip of the spell they cast.

  This spell is made even more potent by stories of discovery that collectors share. One of my favorites happened on a spring day in 1988.15 That morning, a Massachusetts man who collected books about local history was rummaging through a bin in a New Hampshire antiques barn when something caught his eye. Beneath texts on fertilizers and farm machines lay a slim, worn pamphlet with tea-colored paper covers, titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, by an
unnamed author identified simply as “a Bostonian.” He was fairly certain he had found something exceptional, paid the $15 price, and headed home, where Tamerlane would spend only one night. The next day, he contacted Sotheby’s, and they confirmed his suspicion that he had just made one of the most exciting book discoveries in years. The pamphlet was a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s first text, written when he was only fourteen years old, a find that fortune-seeking collectors have imagined happening upon probably more often than they’d like to admit. The humble-looking, forty-page pamphlet was published in 1827 by Calvin F. S. Thomas, a relatively unknown Boston printer who specialized in apothecary labels, and its original price was about twelve cents. But this copy, looking good for its 161 years, most of which were probably spent languishing in one dusty attic box after another, would soon be auctioned for a staggering $198,000. The value of Tamerlane, which caused no stir when it was first published and was never even reviewed, has nothing to do with its literary merit, but rather its association with a seminal author, and every time a copy has been unearthed, the price has skyrocketed. Estimates of how many copies of Tamerlane were printed range from fifty to five hundred, but so far only fourteen known copies have surfaced, most of which are held in public institutions. In the 1890s, a dealer in Boston spied it on another dealer’s ten-cent table, and later sold it for $1,000. In the 1950s, the unassuming text was found by two postmen at the bottom of a trunk of books they had picked up at a yard sale. Six months later, they sold it for $10,000. There may still be a few more on the loose, which is enough to entice any dedicated collector, and now me, toward a box of books in the back of an antiques barn or on a lawn at a yard sale or in a forgotten corner of a thrift shop, through which we will carefully dig in hopes that luck might show her face behind tea-colored paper covers.