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

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA is fertile ground for any book lover, and there is no shortage of collectors. Wandering the aisles of a recent antiquarian book fair in San Francisco, I ran into someone I recognized: an owner of my local pet supplies store, Celia Sack. I was frequently in her store, buying food for my dog and cats, but I had no idea she was a book collector. We said hello, but it wasn’t until the next time I visited her store that we began talking books. Sack lights up when the subject arises, and reveals a depth of literary knowledge that reflects her seven years working at a book auction house. I learned that she is an avid collector, as are both her parents, but that none of her friends or family loves books the way she does, so she has no one to share her excitement when she finds a new prize. A few weeks later, she picked up several rare gardening books and cookbooks, and we arranged for me to come over and take a look at them.

Sack lives in a flat within a handsome, modest-sized Victorian house in the Castro district. Her store is filled with 1950s displays and other vintage pet-related objects, and I expected a small group of quirky titles, but that’s not what I found. Her dining room had been transformed into an impressive library. The walls, wrapped with built-in shelves, were filled floor to ceiling, mostly with leather- and cloth-bound beauties, and on the heavy wooden table at the room’s center lay a couple dozen of her favorites. It was like a private museum, and it made me wonder how many flats in San Francisco harbor secret collections like this. Touring a personal library is a lot like going through someone’s family photo album, but in this case one whose photographer was Edward Weston or Roy DeCarava. Like expertly shot photos, each volume had a story behind it, and although she stopped only to pull favorites from the shelves, the tour lasted about an hour and a half.

Sack’s areas of interest appeared broad: modern literature and lesbian literature on the left-hand wall, which extended to the next wall and then gave way to Edward Gorey, World War I, natural history, cookbooks, the Pan Pacific Exposition, and how-to books for retailers. Admiring so many lovely and artfully arranged books, I was covetous. I would love to own a library like this—so what was stopping me? Many of the books Sack showed me were not expensive. I buy shoes that cost more. Way more. I suppose that more than anything, I am daunted by the enormity of the endeavor: how much research is necessary to understand what is valuable, along with how much scouting I’d need to do. And once you get into the very valuable books, which I realize not all collectors do, I would have trouble justifying the expense to myself, even though I deem such books worthy and respect others who make the investment. Still, even collectors with little money find ways to buy collectible books. The difference between me and them was that while I desire books, they are compelled to get them. Nothing stops them.

Not all Sack’s books were very valuable, monetarily, but all had special meaning to her. Intermingled among inscribed first editions were some that are simply appealing to her. She showed me several of her favorite how-to books, The Whole Art of Curing, Pickling and Smoking Meat and Fish both in the British and Foreign Modes, published in 1847, and Roadside Marketing: A Complete Advisor for the Everyday Use of Gardeners, Fruit Growers, Poultrymen, and Farmers, on the Marketing of their Products to the Consumer Direct , a Depression-era guide to roadside stands. They were snapshots of history that few people today have ever seen.

Before I left, Sack showed me examples of her favorite type of book, the association copy. Several of them were by lesbian authors, with author-to-lover inscriptions. She held a copy of No Letters to the Dead, by Gale Wilhelm, 1936. Inscribing the book to her girlfriend, Helen Hope Rudolph, Wilhelm had written: “Dear Helen—Someone once said this edition looked like a box of chocolates. So—with my love—a box of chocolates worth 6 shillings, Gale.”

Looking up, Sack said, “It’s like being a witness to an intimate moment in the author’s life.”

Being a woman and under forty set Sack apart from most book collectors, but I had come across others who didn’t fit the mold, either. When I first brought the Kräutterbuch to John Windle Books in San Francisco, I noticed a young Hispanic man walking into the store. Windle addressed him by name; he was a regular. It occurred to me how unusual it is to see a person of color at a rare book fair or store. This has been an old-white-man’s game for a long time, but it appeared, at that moment, that perhaps things were changing.

Joseph Serrano, thirty-five, grew up in San Francisco with a mother who had read Latin American literature to him when he was a boy. He is a heavyset, amiable man with long-lashed brown eyes behind rectangular wire glasses, who described himself to me thus: “I’m different. I don’t have a higher education. I’m not a scholar or anything. I’m just an oddball about books.” At the time we met, on his nightstand were Sartre’s No Exit and Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (paperbacks, he assured me, never first editions for reading).

As a child, Serrano’s aunt, who had worked as a book-binder in El Salvador, gave him a set of leather-bound books, and he recognized how special they were. At sixteen, he worked as a delivery boy for a florist in posh Pacific Heights. “Almost every house I went into had a big wall of books,” he said. To own such a wall became a dream. At twenty-three, while working as a tow-truck driver, he bought his first valuable book, Franny and Zooey , by J. D. Salinger, for $100. “ Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorites,” he said, “but I couldn’t afford it.” After that first find, he began scouring estate sales, Goodwill and Salvation Army stores. He didn’t like driving the tow truck, but the advantage of the job was that between pickups he could study dealers’ catalogs, memorize the information, and go on searching expeditions. “I’d walk into a thrift store and I’d know what was valuable,” he said. He wanted to make a living out of it, so at first he would spend $2 or $3 for a book and turn it around for $20, $100. He was also assembling his own collection, so he would buy books by obscure authors whose value he recognized, and later trade them for books in the categories he was collecting: Californian, Latin American, and twentieth-century literature. One of his favorite possessions is the first printed description of the Bear Flag Revolt, the 1846 American revolt against the authorities of the Mexican province of California, which later became the state of the same name. “It used to be,” said Serrano, “I was happy finding books worth a hundred dollars and paying only a couple bucks for them, but as I learned about books that have changed people, controversial books like Orwell’s 1984 , important books—that’s what I really want to collect. It’s the hunt that keeps it alive. I go to these estate sales where people walk right by the books; they’re only interested in furniture or art. Once I sat on the floor and started pulling titles off the shelf: first-edition Hemingways, Faulkners. It was amazing.” Like adventurers who still trawl the sea for centuries-old shipwrecks’ loot, book hunters’ hope and determination is fed by stories like Serrano’s. He still visits thrift shops, but he also likes going to fairs and rare book shops, where he can test his knowledge against the dealers’. He has taken what he has learned as an amateur book appraiser and is now building his own rare book business online. He explains the draw like this: “You see something you can’t afford, but you buy it anyway,” he said. “My wife calls it an addiction, but finding those books is such a good feeling.”