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

As I wrote this book, the noble Kräutterbuch sat in its sack at the end of my desk. I knew my friend wanted to return it, but because the librarian had told me that as far as she knew it was not theirs, I figured, what’s the hurry? Besides which, I discovered that if a book has been missing for many years, librarians will sometimes toss the attendant documents—an act of frustration, perhaps, but also of self-protection: they don’t want anyone to know they’ve let a book go missing, especially if it’s rare and valuable. The librarian from the Kräutterbuch ’s supposed home informed me that as they have updated their computer systems, records of the library’s holdings have been lost. Maybe this was the case with the Kräutterbuch . As weeks, then months, passed and the book was still in my possession, I thought, I’ll deal with it later. In the meantime, I would open the book and leaf through it. An illustration of an apple tree ( Apffelbaum ) shows, among the fallen fruit at its base, a skull and bone. A poisonous apple! Under another tree, men in caps and knee-length breeches vomit. Next to yet another, cherubic boys wearing nothing but sashes around their copious bellies squat and defecate. On another page, under a different kind of tree, men and women dance drunkenly. Even the illiterate would have had no doubt about each of these plants’ effects. Toward the back of the book is one of my favorite illustrations: an elaborate circular depiction of twelve faces representing twelve winds, each from a different direction, and each, cheeks out, blowing its particular remedy or threat. Overlapping this illustration, and throughout the book, are irregular brown blotches, which I learned are called foxing, a book’s age spots, usually caused by dampness or lack of ventilation. 8Some of the darkness on these pages, however, appears to be from spills of some sort. Mead? Candle wax? Tears? Every page is a mystery, a story to be puzzled out.

Whenever I would close the Kräutterbuch and push its covers tight, there was an exhalation, a settling, before I affixed the clasps. Of course I would return it, I reassured myself. But in the meantime, I kept a book that did not belong to me, and tried not to think about what that made me.

1

Like a Moth to a Flame

April 28, 2005, was bright and mild, the kind of spring day in New York City that seems full of promise, and on the corner of Park Avenue and East Sixty-sixth Street a queue of optimistic people was growing. It was opening day of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, and they were waiting to begin the treasure hunt. The annual fair is held at the Park Avenue Armory, an anachronistic, castle-like building with towers and musket ports that one historian described as large enough to allow a four-abreast formation to march in and out of the building. There were no such formations when I arrived, but a steady stream of book-hungry people marching through the doors, eager to be among the first to see and touch the objects of their desire: modern first editions, illuminated texts, Americana, law books, cookbooks, children’s books, World War II histories, incunabula (Latin for “in the cradle,” books from printing’s infancy, roughly 1450 to 1500 1), Pulitzer Prize winners, natural histories, erotica, and countless other temptations.

Inside, security guards had taken their positions and were prepared to explain, twice to the indignant, that all but the smallest purses would have to be left behind at the coat check. Overhead lights shone bright and hot, like spotlights aimed at a stage, and as I walked into the fair, I felt like an actor without a script. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been an inveterate flea market shopper, on the prowl for beautiful and interesting objects. Some of my favorite recent finds are an old doctor’s bag I use as a purse, wooden forms for ships’ gears, which now hang on a wall in my house, and an old watch repairman’s kit with glass vials of minuscule parts. (When I was a teen, it was costume jewelry and bootleg eight-track tapes to play in my boyfriend’s van.) This book fair was altogether different. A hybrid of museum and marketplace, it was filled with millions of dollars’ worth of books and enough weathered leather spines to make a decorator swoon. Collectors strode with purpose toward specific booths, and dealers adjusted the displays of their wares on shelves while eyeing one another’s latest and most valuable finds, perched in sparkling glass cases. They even set some of their goods on countertops, where anyone who pleased would be able to pick them up and leaf through them. Everyone but me seemed to know exactly what he was looking for. But what I sought was not as clear-cut as first editions or illuminated manuscripts. I love to read books and I appreciate their aesthetic charms, but I don’t collect them; I had come to this fair to understand what makes others do so. I wanted a close-up view into the rare book world, a place where the customs were utterly foreign to me. With any luck—something I’m sure every person at this fair was wishing for—I also hoped to discover something about those whose craving leads them to steal the books they love.

To that end, I was here in part to meet with Ken Sanders, the Salt Lake City rare book dealer and self-styled sleuth I had spoken with on the phone. Sanders has a reputation as a man who relishes catching book thieves, and like a cop who has been on the force for years without a partner, he also savors any opportunity to share a good story. I had called him a few weeks earlier, in preparation for our meeting, and during that first conversation, he had told me about the Red Jaguar Guy, who stole valuable copies of the Book of Mormon from him; the Yugoslavian Scammers, whom he helped the FBI track down one weekend; and the Irish Gas Station Gang, who routinely placed fraudulent orders with dealers through the Internet and had them shipped to a gas station in Northern Ireland. But these were preliminary stories, warm-ups for the big one: In 1999, Sanders had begun working as the volunteer security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. In short, the job was to alert fellow dealers whenever he got wind of a theft so that they could be on the lookout for the missing books. At first, the work was sporadic. Every few months he would receive an e-mail or telephone call about a theft and immediately forward the information to his colleagues. But as time passed, the number of thefts climbed. There seemed to be no one type of book stolen, nor any pattern, except that most had been snatched through credit card fraud. No one knew if this was the work of one thief or a gang of many. Sanders heard from a dealer in the Bay Area who had lost a nineteenth-century diary. The next week, a dealer in Los Angeles reported losing a first-edition War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Sanders found himself spending less and less time attending to his store and more time trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Sanders took a deep breath, then launched into a bizarre incident that had occurred at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in 2003, held in San Francisco. The fair was at the Concourse Exhibition Center, a lackluster, warehouse-like building situated on the edge of the city’s design center, just blocks from the county jail—between showcases for the domestic trappings of wealth and a holding pen for criminals. It was a location that would turn out to be fitting. With about 250 dealers and 10,000 attendees, the city’s fair is the largest in the world. “That big ol’ barn goes on forever,” is how Sanders described it. On opening day, as usual, collectors and dealers were giddy with a sense of possibility. Sanders, however, warily paced his booth. He was surrounded by some of his finest offerings— The Strategy of Peace , inscribed by John F. Kennedy, and a first edition of the Book of Mormon —but his mind was not on his books. Several days before the fair, while sitting in his Salt Lake City office, surrounded by dusty piles of books and documents, he had received a phone call from a detective in San Jose, California. The detective said that the thief Sanders had spent three years trying to track down (and by then Sanders had a hunch it was one thief, not a gang) now had a name, John Gilkey, and that he was in San Francisco.