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

“It’s ready to go,” she said.

“Do you mind if someone else picks it up, because I’m rather busy,” said Gilkey. “I’m getting ready for this party.” He figured that way when he arrived at the store he wouldn’t be expected to be carrying the credit card.

Gilkey raced to the store right before closing time at six. He went in, took a quick glance at the books, and said, “Wow, this is a great place you’ve got here. He certainly did a great job picking it out.” She handed him the book, and he left.

As Gilkey would say, it was that easy.

By now, Sanders’s e-mail system had been up and running for several months, and he received notices of theft occasionally, but most of his time was spent attending to his store. While his daughter, Melissa, worked with customers, cataloged new items, stocked shelves, and answered the phone, Sanders attended estate sales, provided appraisals, and also helped customers. Often, he was upstairs at his cluttered desk, writing bibliographic entries. Sanders sells to other shops, collectors, libraries, and other institutions, so when he acquires items that might be of interest, he sends them a bibliographic description. It’s a way of drumming up the next month’s business. A surprising number of people wander in off the street with boxes or bags full of books they’d like to sell, and Sanders will take a look. Most times, they are not worth much, but occasionally he comes across a gem, like the time a man in his twenties walked into the store with a book his parents had given to him. It was his grandmother’s, and they had no idea whether or not it was valuable.

“Uh, I don’t want to get your hopes up,” Sanders told him, holding the small book, about four by six inches, in the palm of his hand, “but if this is real, it’s worth six figures.” He told the young man he would need to authenticate it.

It was real: a Mormon Book of Commandments from 1833, a precursor to the Doctrine and Covenants , one of the three scriptural works of the Mormon Church. At the time, the Mormons were at odds with their neighbors, and in retaliation for Joseph Smith’s destruction of an anti-Mormon newspaper, an angry mob stormed the printing press while the book was being printed and threw the printed sheets out the window. The story, which most agree is apocryphal, is that two little Mormon girls gathered up the sheets into their long skirts and hid in the cornfields until the mob had dispersed. From those loose pages, the books were then sewn by hand. Because of their volatile origins, most copies were incomplete, although a title page was added a few years later. Technically, because the books were never finished or professionally bound, the book wasn’t ever published. In the past 170 years, only twenty-nine copies have surfaced. 1

Sanders kept the Book of Commandments in a safe-deposit box and later sold it for the young man to a collector for $200,000, from which Sanders earned a commission. 2Mostly, however, these types of finds don’t just show up on dealers’ counters. Books go missing far more frequently. But of the theft of The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse , Sanders had heard nothing. The store owners were not members of the ABAA.

THE NEXT MONTHS were busy. In February, armed with a pile of credit card numbers, Gilkey took his father on a two-week trip to France and Germany, where they visited casinos, wineries, restaurants, and museums. They won a moderate but satisfying sum while gambling, which confirmed Gilkey’s feelings about his ability to take risks and come out unscathed, at least most of the time. They returned just in time for the Los Angeles Festival of the Book, where Gilkey “picked up” about ten more books, including a signed first-edition Ragtime , by E. L. Doctorow. It is number eighty-six on the Modern Library’s list of one hundred best English-language novels.

What people choose to collect is revealing. That Gilkey favors books from the Modern Library’s list is in keeping with his desire to be admired. He isn’t following his own taste as much as that of experts. The books are already sanctioned, surefire greatest hits, guaranteed to impress.

Through the spring, Gilkey kept up his pace, stealing about a book or two a month. He is as adept at justifying these thefts as he was at pulling them off. He explained it to me like this: When he walks into a rare book store and ogles the riches lined up on the shelf, he sees them almost as the personal collection of the store owner. What a wealthy person this is! Look how many books he owns! It is not fair that he charges so much for a single book, Gilkey thinks. Books selling for $10,000 or $40,000 or half a million—they are all out of his reach. How am I to afford it? he asks with righteous indignation. So he takes what he sees as duly his. That dealers pay a lot for their books and, with the exception of relatively few lucky or especially savvy ones, barely make ends meet does not occur to him. Even after I brought this to his attention, he chose not to acknowledge his guilt. As he sees it, if he owns fewer rare books than the next collector or dealer, the world is not fair, and, as he put it, he means to “even the score.”

I wondered what fed this skewed perspective of justice. While many collectors build images of themselves through their collections, most of them do not cross the line between coveting and stealing. It was not just a collection Gilkey was building but an image of himself for the world. In this respect, he did not differ from other collectors, but most of them do not cross the line between coveting and stealing. The leap between collector and thief is a huge moral and ethical one. But for Gilkey, who repeatedly crosses the line, having not paid for the books—having acquired them for free, as he would say—adds even more to their allure. He told me that back when he kept his books at his mother’s house, before he started secreting them to a storage facility, he separated those he had paid for from those he had stolen, the former on one set of shelves, the latter on another. Stolen or not, however, his satisfaction was always fleeting: the more books a collector gets, the more he wants. In this respect, Gilkey is like any other collector. As collectors have often remarked, collecting is like hunger, and having one more book doesn’t quench the longing for another.

As spring headed into summer, Gilkey wanted to get his hands on even more books, but since he was still on parole for stealing foreign currency (to pay for books and living expenses), he felt he should be more circumspect. While he tempered the scope of his acquisitions, he found methods to at least be in proximity to spectacular books. In June, he visited The Huntington Library Museum, in San Marino, California. For lovers of books and art, the place is a paradise; for Gilkey, it must have been mighty fuel for his fantasies.

Henry Huntington, born on February 27, 1850, in Oneonta, New York, grew up in a well-to-do family in a house filled with books. 3He read and appreciated books throughout his life and, from the age of about twenty-one, acquired them voraciously. Decades later, after founding the Pacific Electric Railway and an intercity transit system in California, he inherited around $30 million and began collecting rare books and manuscripts. In 1919, he founded The Huntington Library, which now has more than seven million rare books, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and maps in the fields of British and American history and literature. The library stacks are open only to scholars, but Gilkey got to see a small selection of items on display for the public.