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

In 1975, Sanders and a couple of friends took over a hippie head shop called the Cosmic Aeroplane in Salt Lake City, moved it to a new location, and began selling books. Among those looking for cheap paperbacks were budding collectors. Sanders went about stocking his shelves for them while listening to his favorite tunes, like the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night.” The store was a huge success. At its height, according to Sanders, he and his two partners were pulling in $1.4 million a year in sales and had thirty employees. But the store was not without its struggles.

“The Cosmic Aeroplane was big and sprawling, and shop-lifting was a constant problem,” said Sanders. “The most memorable case involved the wife of an old friend. She began by selling me her knitting-book collection. She’d bring in a bag of books every week or so, then with more frequency and increasing quantity. The funny thing was, the books started getting newer and newer, until it became painfully obvious that she was stealing them from somewhere.”

Sanders sighed. His telling of this story lacked the vigor of others. This woman may have been a thief, but she was also a friend, and the awkwardness of the situation, even twenty-five years later, seemed no less painful to him.

“We began by assigning someone to watch her every time she set foot in the store. The knitting bag she used to transport the books she wished to sell turned out to be full of books again by the time she was done browsing and left the store. Only thing was, the books were all stolen from us. I called around to the King’s English and Sam Weller’s bookstores and discovered that she was a regular at those shops as well. I read off a list of the most recently purchased titles from her to both stores, and, of course, they both had copies missing from their new-book inventories. Next time she came in I called the police and had them waiting outside the shop. When she departed with her knitting bag full of books, I had her arrested.”

The knitting thief was one of a few success stories. Most thieves were never caught, and the anger and frustration they caused Sanders seems never to have completely subsided.

In 1981, the year Sanders left the Cosmic Aeroplane, he would commit his own crime, although it was for a noble cause. Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang , Desert Solitaire , and The Fool’s Progress , had become a friend of Sanders, “in spite of my telling him I didn’t think that Hayduke [protagonist of The Monkey Wrench Gang ] should go around littering the countryside with beer cans. He quietly listened, but I don’t think he gave a shit. One day, he called me, which he almost never did because he hated telephones, and said in his gruff voice, ‘I’m going to be conducting spring rites at Glen Canyon Dam. If you want to talk [about a publishing project Sanders had proposed], meet me there.’ ”

When Sanders arrived, Abbey and a few friends were preparing to drop a three-hundred-foot tapered sheet of black plastic over the edge of Glen Canyon, a symbolic crack in the dam. It was the first national public event for the radical environmental group Earth First! Abbey, Sanders, and the rest of the group escaped arrest for trespassing and left with their appetites whetted for more pranks that might open the public’s eyes to what they considered crimes against the environment.

Sanders had started Dream Garden Press, and in the following few years published Western wilderness calendars with excerpts of Abbey’s writing, the R. Crumb illustrated edition of The Monkey Wrench Gang , and a couple of other projects. He invited Abbey and Crumb to Utah for book signings. One of his favorite stories from this time took place at a university bookstore.

“I had a car full of cartons of books. Two hundred people were standing in line for autographs. There were Crumb and Abbey, dutifully scribbling their names. One guy walks up to Crumb and says, ‘Mr. Abbey?’ And Crumb, before he answers, looks over at Abbey, and they exchange this glance. Crumb looks back to the guy and says, ‘Yes?’ And he signs that copy of the book ‘Edward Abbey’! Then he passed it to Abbey, who signed it ‘R. Crumb’! I would kill for that copy,” said Sanders. “I’m sure that to this day, that guy doesn’t know of the deception. I keep praying that someday that book will wander in here. I’ve been searching for it for twenty years.”

Later, because of disagreements with his partners, Sanders left the Cosmic Aeroplane. This was the same period that his marriage split, and alone he began raising Michael, age nine, and Melissa, age seven.

Sanders kept his family going with a small office and a warehouse of books to sell and in 1996 founded Ken Sanders Rare Books. The white brick building is adorned with two stained-glass windows near the front door. One is of a stegosaurus, Sanders’s favorite dinosaur; the other, pulled from a demolished Catholic church, is of Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Inside, the store is so full that if a fourteen-year-old should ever wander in with a list of books in his back pocket, as Sanders had at Bertrand Smith’s Acres of Books, he would have enough to keep him enchanted for as long as he wished. On the other hand, if he were to consider slipping out without paying for a book, he would regret it. Sanders has chased these guys down streets and alleys and parking lots. He has taken them to court. He has scared them half to death. He will do whatever possible to get his books back and prevent thieves from ever, ever thinking of stealing another book.

6

Happy New Year

It was the start of a new millennium, and Gilkey had noth ing but good feelings about the year to come. He had a dream and a thick stack of credit card numbers to make it come true. With the holidays over, his job at Saks was done, and to start the year off right, he decided to take his father to Los Angeles, one of their favorite cities. “We loved the malls, the shops, the weather. There were celebrities there, more opportunities,” he said.

One such opportunity arose on a sunny afternoon. Gilkey and his father had lunch at a fancy hotel in Beverly Hills, after which he decided to walk around and check out some of the shops nearby. The neighborhood was wealthy, the kind where shoppers with drivers were not uncommon, and he was enticed by a small but particularly impressive store with a large locked area. They were selling rifles for $500,000, jewelry well into six digits—and books, displayed in neat, becoming stacks. Gilkey thought he might pick up something small, with a price tag of about $2,000. (When I asked him what his father was doing while he was scouting loot, Gilkey said he was sitting outside, waiting. I doubted this, but became more interested in why Gilkey was protecting him than I was about the extent of his father’s involvement.) Given the cost of most items in the store, he thought, surely they wouldn’t care about such a small loss. He looked at the books and took mental notes about what he wanted. The next day, while doing his laundry at a laundromat, he called the store from a pay phone. It was time to use the first of the credit card numbers he had pilfered from Saks.

“I was in your store the other day,” said Gilkey. “Do you still have that first edition of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse ?”

The woman put the phone down to check. “Yes,” she said, “we do.”

“Well, let me see,” said Gilkey, as though he needed to think about it. “I’ll take it.” He explained that it was a gift and asked the woman to wrap it, adding, “Do you mind if I pay for it now?”

Gilkey gave her the credit card number and finished his laundry. From the laundromat, he called to confirm that the charge had gone through.