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

“I used to go to garage sales when I was younger and wait in the car with my dad. I didn’t really care about them, but then my parents would come back with stories. ‘Look what I got for a quarter, and I bet it’s worth seventy or eighty dollars. . . . They’re just giving it away!’ ”

They brought home their finds and set them on shelves or in boxes, along with the rest of their beloved collected objects, and waited for their value to climb. 5

At DVI, Gilkey had told me that his family owned thousands of books, and now he remembered some of his favorites, “a couple of leather-bound Time-Life books, especially the Western series.” He said, again with no apparent awareness of irony, that another favorite, Crimes and Punishment , an illustrated crime encyclopedia not to be confused with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment , still stands on the shelves, whereas a set of one hundred law books his parents bought do not. “We took them off the shelf to make space for other books,” he said.

“If you have a bookcase,” added Gilkey, “the more you put on them, the more it builds up, the more it’s worth, the better it looks. . . . With books, it looks beautiful, you can read it if you want, and it’s part of the ambience of a house, isn’t it? And it will go up in value. Shouldn’t every house have a bookcase? It’s just the pleasure of . . . Say you have somebody who’s never seen you before, and you take them in and say, ‘Here’s my library.’ ” 6

Here’s my library? I had always thought of my books as fairly private things, not for display, but the ability to show them off seemed crucial to Gilkey. Then again, a wall in my living room is covered with bookshelves, and everyone who visits can see what I have read. If I am honest with myself, I must admit that to some degree my books are badges: there’s the faded spine of James Joyce’s Ulysses (willing to persevere! it shouts), Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (she doesn’t just read Americans and Europeans!), Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (look, a feminist classic!), etc. So, was the difference between my interest and appreciation of books and Gilkey’s only a matter of degree? There must be more to it than that. And what about the criminal side of his collecting? When I asked him about it, Gilkey told me how his use of credit card fraud began.

Sometime in 1996, according to Gilkey, he was with a friend at the Red Lion Doubletree Inn in Modesto. “I found a credit card receipt on the floor,” he said. “I told him I was going to see if I could charge a few things using the number, but he said it would never work. A couple hours later, using the hotel pay phone, I got a bunch of stuff: a watch, a pizza, and a poster of the movie Psycho .”

Gilkey got away with these thefts because he had not stolen the credit card itself, in which case the card’s owner could have alerted authorities and canceled all charges. Instead, by using the number off a receipt, its owner wouldn’t hear about the charge until the next bill. In the end, it was the retailer who would get stiffed. Even when the retailer has insurance, book dealers later told me, the deductible is often considerable, sometimes equaling what was stolen.

The “friend” whom Gilkey mentioned as his accomplice was likely his own father, whom he had already told me he always hung around with. He went on to describe his fraudulent purchases as though they were larks, why-the-hell-not pranks, but the ease with which he pulled them off stuck with him. “It was that easy,” he said, a phrase that he would repeat almost every time he told a story of book theft. At the time, he was working at the Modesto Post Office, for $11 an hour.

“That was enough money for some things,” said Gilkey, “but not enough for books.”

SOMETHING TOLD ME that for Gilkey, no matter how much money he had, it would never be enough for all the books he craved. Sigmund Freud described collecting antiquities as “second only in intensity to his nicotine addiction.” 7He explained that the drive and pleasure in any kind of collecting comes from the sense of conquest. “I am by nature nothing but a conquistador,” he wrote, “an adventurer, if you wish to translate the term, with all the inquisitiveness, daring and tenacity capable of such a man.” 8

The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the former, the bookshelf is a kind of memoir: there are my childhood books, my college books, my favorite novels, my inexplicable choices. Many matchmaking and social networking websites offer a place for members to list what they’re reading for just this reason: books can reveal a lot about a person. This is particularly true of the collector, for whom the bookshelf is a reflection not just of what he has read but profoundly of who he is: “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they can come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them,” wrote cultural critic Walter Benjamin. 9

GILKEY CAME ALIVE in this way in the spring of 1997 when he went to his first antiquarian book fair. He told me he had recently lost his job as a mail sorter at the post office, and his father had left his mother. Father and son, now as inseparable as favorite brothers, went to Los Angeles, where they were thinking about renting a place together. One morning, while reading the Los Angeles Times , Gilkey noticed an advertisement for a book fair in Burbank and decided to check it out.

Wandering through the fair, he was impressed by the number of dealers. His plan was to find some good books and to “get” about a thousand dollars’ worth of them. He was in awe of the collections. I could own those , he thought. Having recently attended the book fair in New York, I understood his awe. Being among such ravishing books, and so many of them, is intoxicating enough for the average book lover—but for Gilkey, it was an important, memorable high. The experience increased not only his appetite but his confidence in his ability to get what he wanted, how he wanted. He spotted a room where dealers specialized in horror books, one of his favorite genres, and selected three first editions: The Dunwich Horror , by H. P. Lovecraft, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby , and Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales . He “paid” for the books with bad checks and a maxedout credit card.

Gilkey figured it was a matter of getting in and out fast, before anyone could figure out what he was up to. He was successful. Along with books, he picked up a copy of Firsts , a magazine about book collecting. Later, flipping through it, he came upon an advertisement for Bauman Rare Book Shop, which appeared to have “some very nice books” for sale. He called and asked them to send him a catalog, which arrived in a couple of days.

Gilkey described how he leafed through the catalog and began to seriously consider what it would be like to own a collection of books like those on its pages. He called Bauman again and asked for book recommendations. They mentioned a first-edition Lolita , a title he recognized. They explained that the book came with a green octavo shell (a protective box that’s a common accessory for rare books). Gilkey had never heard of such a thing, but he liked the way it sounded. Plus, he thought, it wasn’t that expensive for a book of its type, about $2,500. He placed the order, and Lolita arrived in two or three days.

Before, Gilkey had managed to acquire several collectible books, but this was the first one he regarded as truly valuable, not only because of its price (the other books Gilkey had picked up were under $1,000 each) but also because of its historical significance, its notoriety. Lolita , Vladimir Nabokov’s provocative story of a middle-aged man’s lust for a young girl, was first published in Paris in 1955 and has ranked high on banned-book lists ever since. In 1959, the author inscribed a copy to fellow novelist Graham Greene, “For Graham Greene from Vladimir Nabokov, November 8, 1959.” An accomplished lepidopterist, Nabokov also drew a delicate sketch of a butterfly, labeling it with what might be the most lyrical of inscriptions, “green swallowtail dancing waisthigh.” As an association copy (one that an author gives, often with an inscription, to someone of particular interest), over time its value soared. At a Christie’s auction in 2002, Greene’s copy sold for $264,000. 10