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

Although Gilkey’s copy was worth a fraction of that, as his first valuable book, it held a special place in his heart. He put it on top of his piano and admired it. He liked the feel of the clamshell box it arrived in, how it was covered with a soft, textured fabric. He wished all covers were like that. The book was published in two volumes, in spring green wrappers (paper covers), with “Nabokov” printed on the top edges, “Lolita” in the middle, and “The Olympia Press” at the bottom edge. It was a simple design, elegant. Unlike the other books he had collected, he read Lolita , but found it “disgusting.” I sensed that he told me this in order to win my respect—he may be a criminal, but he has morals. His disgust with the story of Lolita , however, did not affect his feelings about the book, because he was looking forward to its value increasing over time. This was not because he had any intention of selling it, but rather because it would give his collection greater status. Also, it was number four on the Modern Library’s list of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. 11He had just started reading and collecting books from this list, which he came across while researching rare books, and had decided that he wanted them all.

Gilkey added that he had used his own American Express card to buy Lolita , but I hadn’t asked.

A few months after Lolita arrived, Gilkey and his father were staying at a hotel in Beverly Hills when he decided to use bad checks from the same checkbooks he had used at the Burbank book fair, this time to purchase foreign currency. He was arrested and put in jail for forty days, then sent back to Modesto under house arrest, during which time he wore an electronic ankle bracelet.

About a year later, on New Year’s Eve 1998, he wrote another bad check to cover gambling losses at a casino. Again he was arrested.

“I just wanted some extra change, and I lost,” he said, as though this might be a satisfactory explanation.

Gilkey didn’t get out of prison until October 1999. When he did, he was feeling cheated and ready to be paid back. It was a cycle he would run through repeatedly: being sure he will never be caught, being arrested, doing time, then being released with a sense of entitlement and an eagerness for revenge that set him back on the same cycle. Having spent so many months behind bars, he felt as though he were running out of time.

“Once you’ve done time, you start to feel that way,” he said. So he made a promise to himself and his aging father, who was almost eighty.

“I’m going to build us a grand estate.”

4

A Gold Mine

When, at the start of 1999, Ken Sanders received a letter from the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America asking him to vote on whether to dissolve the southwest chapter to which he belonged, it was out of pure orneriness that he voted against the change. 1With only seventeen members, it was one of the smallest, and unlike larger chapters, it didn’t hold fairs or meetings. Soon he discovered that he was the only member who had voted against dissolution, and although the votes in favor were enough to shut it down, the board decided otherwise. And since every chapter needs a representative and a president, they asked Sanders which position he would prefer to fill—a fair request, he thought, given his vote.

“I don’t care—as long as it doesn’t have to do with money,” said Sanders, who has had financial problems for much of his life. “Whatever you do, don’t make me treasurer.”

He began his term as representative.

“The next thing I know I’m supposed to be at the board of governors’ meeting in New York City. What the hell is that?!” said Sanders. He found out on the seventeenth floor of a Rockefeller Center building at his first board meeting, where they put him on a membership committee. Shortly thereafter, they also assigned him the position of security chair, about which he knew nothing.

A few weeks later, sitting at his desk, perched in a loft overlooking his store, Sanders got a call from the secretary in the ABAA’s New York office.

“Have you vetted the pink sheets yet?” she asked.

“What pink sheets?” said Sanders.

He hadn’t opened the box she sent him, assuming it was full of reference materials. When he pried it open, he uncovered a problem much bigger than abandoned pink sheets, the term for theft reports sent by dealers.

Since 1949, the ABAA has worked to promote and maintain ethical standards within the trade. There are now 455 bookseller members, and to join, each of them has to have been in business for at least four years, undergone intense scrutiny, and been recommended by ABAA members. 2Until Sanders started working as security chair, when someone stole books from an ABAA dealer, that dealer would fill out a pink sheet and mail it to ABAA headquarters in New York. There, copies would be sent out with the next mass mailing, whenever it happened to come about, so that all members could be on the lookout for the stolen books. This would take considerably longer than the time it would take a thief to saunter out the door of one bookstore with a first edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five , for example, tucked into his coat and into the door of another, where he could sell it and walk away with several thousand dollars (depending on its condition, whether or not it’s inscribed, has an original dust wrapper, etc., it’s valued at up to $6,500). The box of pink sheets Sanders had inherited contained some that were over a year old but had not yet been distributed. He knew that at that point it was probably too late to send them out to dealers around the country.

What the hell good is this doing anybody? thought Sanders. The job hadn’t come with instructions, and he knew little about technological options. “You know that scene from Kubrick’s 2001 where the apes are grunting around the black monolith?” Sanders likes to say. “That’s me and my computer every morning, seeing if it will work.”

But he wanted to find a way to broadcast news of thefts immediately. First, he started using a private ABAA online discussion list to reach members. Then he campaigned the board of governors, declaring with characteristic zealous-ness, “I’m the security chair, dammit, I want a security line! I want a way to contact everyone, and since over half the membership doesn’t subscribe to the discuss list, I need something else!” So although Sanders calls himself “a Luddite in cyberspace,” he convinced the Internet committee to create a stolen-book database and an e-mail system to alert the hundreds of members of the ABAA and, soon thereafter, members of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), which includes two thousand booksellers in thirty countries.

In November, about six months after the e-mail system had been set up, John Gilkey was reading the San Francisco Chronicle when an advertisement caught his attention: Saks Fifth Avenue was hiring salespeople. The next day, he dressed in a shirt, tie, and slacks from a too-tight pin-striped suit, and took the ninety-mile train ride from Modesto to San Francisco.

Saks Men’s Store sits just outside the center of Union Square, on a block with glittering sidewalks and neighbors like Armani, Burberry, and Cartier. It is a high-rent district that attracts big spenders, something that Gilkey found attractive. He figured that by working in a place like Saks, he would come in contact with wealthy clientele, “no riffraff.” He also assumed that since it was a quality place specializing in luxury goods, he would get paid more, maybe even earn commissions and discounts. He was right on all counts. (Saks declined my repeated requests to respond to Gilkey’s claims.)