Allison Bartlett - The Man Who Loved Books Too Much - The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

Before our meeting, I had read about where Gilkey grew up, hoping it might provide clues about the man and his motivations. He was born in 1968, in Modesto, California, a medium-sized town in rural San Joaquin Valley, which has since grown to nearly two hundred thousand people. 1The first settlers arrived during the Gold Rush, their pockets empty and their heads filled with dreams of striking it rich, but like most immigrants drawn to California in the mid- 1800s, most of them did not find their fortunes panning for gold. Over a hundred years later, Modesto developed into the idealized suburb popularized by native son George Lucas in American Graffiti . Today, the town solicits the television and film industries to use its “all-American” appearance as a backdrop. 2Behind the fresh-scrubbed façade, however, is a town with one of the highest rates of car theft in the United States, 3air quality that’s often hazardous, and, according to 2007 statistics from the FBI, more rapes, violent crime, larceny, and property crime per capita than New York City. It is fitting that a man like Gilkey, intent on constructing his own false front, should have grown up in a place like Modesto, where the public image is so misleading.

Taking sips from his bottle of orange juice, Gilkey told me that he grew up the youngest in a family of eight. His father worked at Campbell’s Soup Company as a transportation manager, and his mother was a housewife.

“My parents were just a normal couple, I guess. My mom’s a homemaker. She loves to take care of children, take care of the house, that’s all she likes to do. My father worked all the time. Eight to five, to bring in the money. My father did a lot of the gardening. My mom used to like to go to garage sales. Just regular stuff, I guess. Just regular family stuff.”

When I asked Gilkey about when he started collecting books, he said, “I kept a collection of Richie Rich comic books in my bedroom.”

Richie Rich was an odd-looking character who wore short pants and a large bow tie, but was a pleasant and likable boy from a family with bottomless wealth. The allure for kids was the fantasy of great riches and instant gratification. Richie Rich could get whatever he wanted with minimal effort. That Gilkey, a man whose dream is to be wealthy and refined, would have collected not Superman or X-Men or Fantastic Four but Richie Rich seemed the kind of detail a B-movie writer might propose to a director. Gilkey seemed unaware of the irony as he explained the attraction.

“I liked the kid, wearing a bow tie . . . and the colorful cover. Nice stories, easy to read. He was so rich. [He was] just playing baseball with Pee Wee or Freckles, doing the things that kids do. But they were rich, they had vaults and all that, where all the money was, diamonds and jewelry, treasures. I guess everybody wants to be rich.”

Maybe, but not everyone wants desperately for others to see him as rich. It was this aspect of Gilkey’s collecting that set him apart from other collectors I had met and read about. For them, however gratifying it might be to have the admiration and envy of others, it is not the driving incentive of their collecting. There are, undoubtedly, those who collect to impress (Sanders likens them to African big-game hunters: “Take aim—boom—you’ve got a trophy!”), but I had the sense that it was usually secondary to other reasons. One collector I met was delighted to show me her extensive and varied book collection. 4She had been gathering them for over a decade, but no one had ever asked to see them before. “None of my friends get it,” she said. Her growing library was a private pleasure, pure and simple. Gilkey had other motivations, as his enthusiasm for Richie Rich indicated.

I wouldn’t be able to name a single issue of a comic book I read as a child. Occasionally, I glanced at my older brother’s issues of MAD or a friend’s Archie s, but I was not interested in comics. I did collect, though. Huddled on my childhood shelves were glass animals, carnelian stones I had dug up at the beach, ceramic animals that came packed inside my mother’s boxes of tea, and, for reasons that now escape me, the striped paper straws that Pixy Stix candy came in. The difference, however, between my desire to accumulate and the true collector’s was that I added to each assemblage with mild pleasure, not fevered focus. The haphazard, infrequent expansion of my collections gave me a sense of constancy (another carnelian! bigger than the others, but like them) and confirmed identity (no one I knew collected these objects; it was my thing)—two common satisfactions of childhood. But eventually, after I’d amassed a couple dozen of each object, I would forget about them. I was easily sated, something probably no collector would say about himself. My only true passion as a child was an intense study of ballet, where what I collected were strained muscles, blisters, and, more than anything, a deep sense of purpose and joy. Throughout those years, I was drawn to classmates who were troublemakers, those who talked back to teachers and pulled off pranks that landed them in the principal’s office. (I’ve heard that two of these kids ended up in prison.) I never dared disobey, but got a secret thrill from their doing so. Being around Gilkey was similarly exciting, although instead of the visceral thrill I remember having as a kid, it was an intellectual one. I couldn’t fathom what it was about books that made him continually risk jail time for them.

Going over Gilkey’s childhood seemed to be a good way to begin satisfying my curiosity. He told me that one afternoon when he was around nine or ten, he climbed into the family station wagon with his parents and sister Tina, and headed toward downtown Modesto, to Montgomery Ward, where he was about to commit his first crime. Wandering through the department store, he admired the thirty-nine-cent Hot Wheels cars and action figures like Superman and The Incredible Hulk, but kept browsing. No one in his family was looking when he picked up a catcher’s mitt, and they didn’t notice it on the way out. Once outside the store, he held up his prize.

“Look what I just did,” he said.

They looked, said nothing, and continued walking through the lines of cars in the parking lot. When they got home, Gilkey, a right-handed boy, realized that the catcher’s mitt he had just swiped was a lefty.

When I asked Gilkey why his parents hadn’t punished him, he shrugged.

“I wasn’t surprised they didn’t say anything,” he said. “I’d just get in more trouble if I returned it.”

I couldn’t let this one go, but when I asked further questions about it, Gilkey seemed puzzled by my insistent probing. Maybe the memory, like most family legends, had taken on its own kind of logic over the years. For him, there was no mystery to it. Still, telling me about snatching the mitt seemed to have jogged similar memories, because Gilkey was off and running. He told me that his family had a penchant for stealing from one another. He claimed his sister and brother had stolen some of his books while he was in prison. He said he and one of his brothers stole from a sister when they were helping her move from one apartment to another. He claimed that another sister and brother had both stolen from their mother’s belongings. Apparently, this familial filching was going on even a generation before.

“My father’s mom collected books,” said Gilkey. “She gave him the books, but his sister stole some.”

I returned to the main subject I was there to learn about: Gilkey’s book collecting. When I asked if his parents had collected, he said that at an early age he learned from them that seemingly worthless objects could grow in value, so if you could get them cheaply, all the better.