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

Saks would turn out to be an almost ideal working environment for Gilkey, offering him opportunities to speak with people who belonged to a world he desperately wanted to be a part of. Almost ideal, however, because while these people had money, they weren’t necessarily well educated or in possession of large libraries, as he knew he would be, given the same means.

Sitting in the Saks employment office, Gilkey completed the application, noting his brief experience working at a Robinson-May department store in Los Angeles. He must have seemed perfect for the job: polite, experienced, and not too badly dressed. Where they asked for his name, he neatly filled it in, but when he reached the part of the application where he was supposed to write whether he had ever been convicted of a crime, he left it blank.

He was asked to start the next day.

WHENEVER I HAVE ASKED Gilkey to describe the allure books have for him, he struggles, but ultimately settles on the aesthetic. “It’s a visual thing, the way they look, all lined up on the shelf.” He once suggested an almost sexual attraction to books. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a man, but I like to look.”

As Patricia Hampl wrote in a book about beauty’s bewitching qualities: “Collecting is not a simple matter of possessing. It’s a way of looking: a looking that is itself a kind of craving. To look this way is to be possessed, lost.” 3

Collectors talking about the books they have just acquired, or the ones they haven’t been able to get their hands on, or those snatched away by another collector, sound a lot like lotharios reminiscing about lovers. At a San Francisco book fair, Peter Stern, a gray-haired Boston dealer clad in a tweed jacket, with a plaid scarf around his neck, said he doesn’t collect anymore, but occasionally a book will catch his eye. When this happens, “I ache to buy it. I want it desperately.” 4But acquiring the object of his affection changes everything. “The moment I own it, even if it’s for a few seconds, that’s enough. I could sell it the next minute, and I don’t even remember it sometimes. I’m looking forward to the next book.”

It is not uncommon to read pronouncements from besotted collectors that make the “mania” in “bibliomania” seem an understatement. “Too few people seem to realize that books have feelings,” wrote collector Eugene Field, who wrote The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac in 1896. “But if I know one thing better than another I know this, that my books know me and love me. When of a morning I awaken I cast my eyes about my room to see how fare my beloved treasures, and as I cry cheerily to them, ‘Good-day to you, sweet friends!’ how lovingly they beam upon me, and how glad they are that my repose has been unbroken.” 5

AT SAKS, Gilkey was in a world of tasteful luxury. He had been assigned to work in the Men’s Store on the first floor, in “men’s furnishings,” where meticulously folded garments of fine cottons, silks, and wools sat in floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted wood cabinetry. He would start his day checking the floor, clearing away any detritus left by the previous day’s shoppers. He would stroll past hand-stitched Borrelli shirts (starting around $350) and Etro ties ($130 and up), and chat with fellow workers. Because it was the holidays, when Saks customers can’t seem to get enough luxury goods, the floor was usually packed. They needed extra help, “floaters,” to work in various departments, which is why Gilkey was hired. He enjoyed the job and took special pleasure in spying local socialites and celebrities, such as Ann Getty and Sharon Stone, who was then married to San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein. Gilkey prided himself on being a good employee, always on time. He was friendly and thought that everyone at Saks, “especially the people in the loss prevention department,” were nice to him. He had snowed even the watchdogs, and I could imagine how. His decorous way of speaking, deferential affect, and calm demeanor would be valuable assets on the sales floor, where big spenders would be accustomed to being treated with such regard.

In addition to consulting Gilkey about their purchases, customers sometimes asked to open instant credit accounts. He would dutifully take down their information—names, numbers, addresses, and so on—and when they would tell him that they needed higher credit limits, he would call the business office and communicate their requests. When the office checked a customer’s credit rating and decided to grant a more generous limit, increasing it from, say, $4,000 to $8,000, Gilkey noticed.

This was a part-time job, only two or three days a week, but even if Gilkey had been working full-time, his salary would never have afforded him what he wanted. One day, while he was opening a new account for a customer, he realized what he held in his hands. A gold mine, he thought. Whenever he opened the instant accounts, he could put the audit copy in his pocket, go out to lunch, and write the information on a separate piece of paper, which he could refer to later when placing orders over the phone. That day at lunch, he did just that. He walked down the street to the Westin Hotel, took the elevator to the second-floor lobby, which offered some degree of privacy, and wrote down the credit card numbers listed on the instant account. The next day, he did it again. So it went, through the holidays. He was careful not to take every account record, however, hoping to avoid raising suspicions.

It was not long before Gilkey realized that he had yet another source for credit card information. In those days, customers’ entire credit card numbers were printed on receipts. Each receipt included a copy for the customer and a copy for the auditing department at Saks. Salespeople were asked to cross out the number on the customers’ copies, but the audit copies remained fully intact. According to Gilkey, when salespeople were rushed, they sometimes threw away copies, so even if, from time to time, he were to forget to turn one in, it would not be noticed.

Gilkey didn’t use the information to buy anything right away. He needed to wait enough time so that customers notified of fraudulent activity wouldn’t trace the last use of their cards back to Saks. He would save the account numbers for a rainy day. Holding off spending, he harvested five to ten receipts a week.

5

Spider-Man

Ken Sanders Rare Books is located on the edge of downtown Salt Lake City in a four-thousand-square-foot former tire shop endowed with high ceilings and abundant sunlight. The store is chockablock with so much old, beautiful, and bizarre printed matter—books, photographs, broadsides, postcards, pamphlets, maps—that a quick in-and-out trip takes more willpower than the average book lover can summon. The first time I visited, Sanders, dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, showed me around.

Standing near the entrance, he gestured toward a room to the left, where he keeps the rarest of his books. Although he is not religious, many of these are Mormon texts. This is Utah, after all, where demand for such books is high, and as he reminded me, he needs to make a living. Next, he directed my attention to the glass case separating the rare book room from those who might be inclined to tuck a nice little volume into the waistband of their pants (a common hiding place for book thieves). Inside the case were several books he loves: first editions of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac, in a display Sanders had set up the week before for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ginsberg’s Howl .