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

Sometimes that good feeling is experienced also by those who help collectors with their searching. Several times, Sanders had mentioned a London man, David Hosein, who travels the world for business and, while doing so, stops by shops for books written by vagabonds and other outsiders. In an e-mail to me, Hosein described his collection:

My collection is focused on people (iconoclasts, cults and groups) and activities (legal and illegal) outside norms of society. For instance: prison, outlaw bikers, hobos, pimps, druggies, con men, environmental activism, training shoe (sneaker) collectors, pre hip hop culture and Japanese protest books. At the heart of the collection is a large number of works by prisoners.

I have been buying avidly both 20th century first-hand account nonfiction titles and photographic monographs in these areas for more than 10 years. I am only interested in books in fine condition. In this regard I am as nerdy as your regular Stephen King freaks.

Sanders is enamored of this collection’s originality—and so am I. In truth, such collections keep the business fresh for collectors and dealers like Sanders, who now keeps an eye out for books by hoboes, vagabonds, and the like, to put aside for him.

“Someone like Hosein,” said Sanders, “he’s ahead of the curve, pioneering a new collection, and people pay attention to it.”

According to Sanders, finding a buyer for a collection as original as Hosein’s requires as much ingenuity as building it, and it’s more likely that a visionary dealer or institution would purchase it than an individual collector. “After all,” Sanders said, “from a collecting point of view, the finding and the acquiring are what fuel the collector and the collection. Often, collectors burn out or let go of collections when they have been so narrowly defined as to preclude the acquisition of any new material. The collection reaches a level of stasis and the collector becomes burned out.” A collector like Hosein probably doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about who will buy his books. Amassing a collection like this seems to be a personal quest. But when he decides to sell it, like any collection, the effort put into bringing the books together will pay off; its value will be greater than the sum of its parts.

Even when a book is not part of a collection, if it carries the cachet of being a “classic,” its value climbs. A friend gave me an article she came across in Worth magazine that said that literary classics have outpaced the stock and bond markets in the past twenty years. A graph boasted an almost cartoon-like upward-reaching line demonstrating what a good investment such a collection can be. Naively, I assumed that this was good news for dealers: if people learned that collecting rare books was a smart investment, business would increase. I wrote to Sanders about it, and he responded in character:

I actually don’t think that this is necessarily a good thing. Books should always be acquired for the sheer love and joy of it. Thinking of them as investment objects first turns them into mere widgets and commodities. It reduces their cultural heritage and diminishes not only the books, but their authors and readers as well. Let’s leave the pork belly future to Wall Street.

Without Wall Street many forms of books, incunables, high spots of modern literature, are already unobtainable by the average collector or even fairly well-to-do collectors. Think Great Gatsby at over a $100k. . . . Look what happened in the art market, where paintings that used to cost thousands are now hundreds of thousands, and paintings that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are now millions of dollars. . . .

If Wall Street gets hold of books and turns them into high priced investment widgets, then look out. No one will be able to afford them any more and some of the joy of collecting will be gone. The vast bulk of collecting is done in the few hundred to few thousand dollar range. . . .

If you collect what you love and enjoy, and always buy the best you can afford, and buy copies in the best condition available, your books will always prove to be a good investment.

IT WASN’T LONG before Gilkey began snagging more receipts at Saks. He regarded it as a business, and his goal was to pocket two or three credit card numbers a day. His plans worked without a hitch. It was fun, he thought. When he did pickups, there was a moment of exhilaration, but then it was time to move on to the next one.

Sometimes Gilkey’s help was needed off the floor. He would call customers to inform them of special events in a room equipped with a phone, a computer, and a brown envelope filled with receipts. It was a temptation too strong to resist.

Gilkey wasn’t very busy, so he used the computer to research books and peruse booksellers’ websites. Once he had decided on something he would like, always an author or title he had heard of, he would wait for his lunch break, then head to a nearby hotel, one like the Crowne Plaza or the St. Francis, any that had phones with privacy. He never called in a book order from Saks, for fear the call would be traced to him.

After a while, though, his success seemed too good to be true. He became suspicious of exceedingly wealthy customers. Gilkey said that when the CEO of Netscape bought shoes, he resisted the urge to pocket the receipt. Once, when the chairman called about a shoe, and Gilkey’s manager asked him to go to the shoe department to help out, he thought it was a trap. That day, one platinum card-wielding customer after another approached him, buying $800 shoes, $900 shoes. He felt sure that Saks was onto him, putting temptation in his way. At the end of the day, he ripped up all the receipts he had pocketed.

His fears about Saks were unfounded. But in January 2001, when Gilkey’s parole officer learned that he was working in San Francisco, he put a stop to it. The terms of his parole had included staying in Modesto, so the officer told Gilkey to find a job there instead. Gilkey was incensed. Working at Saks had been one of the best things that had happened to him. It was easy work, he got to dress nicely, and he liked his coworkers. Most important, of course, the job offered him proximity to all those high-limit credit cards. Plus, he had just started working another part-time job in San Francisco, conducting audience surveys for a movie distributor, which was almost as good a gig as the job at Saks. He was working in the movie industry, he told himself, and for someone with a fascination with celebrity, it was exciting. But when that employer did a background check on Gilkey and found he had a criminal record, he was fired. He had been working there only two weeks.

As if being forced out of his jobs was not bad enough, on January 14, the Oakland Raiders, Gilkey’s favorite football team, lost an AFC championship game to the Baltimore Ravens, and they lost big: 16 to 3. He and his father had watched the game together, and they were sure the Raiders would be victorious. When they weren’t, Gilkey felt as slighted as he had by the parole officer. So he did what he usually did when he felt wronged: he stole a book, this time using a bad check. It was momentary succor for perceived injustices. He figured it was harmless, only $200, but the police were notified, and he was arrested.

According to Gilkey, in court, the public defender suggested they claim mental defect, which Gilkey considered a terrific idea. But when the judge told him he would spend a year in a mental institution, Gilkey told him, “Forget that. There’s nothing wrong with me,” and agreed to a sentence of six and a half months. The way sentences for this type of offense go, he knew that the actual time spent behind bars would likely be half that time. Gilkey then requested a delay, and the judge agreed to set his starting date in June, four months away. Fired up by the loss of his jobs and a prison sentence he considered unfair, Gilkey knew exactly how he would spend his time.