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

I called a computer systems security analyst named Mark Seiden for a less impassioned opinion (all of Sanders’s opinions are impassioned), but he echoed Sanders almost word for word, saying, “eBay is the largest legalized fence of stolen property in the world.” He said that eBay has avoided liability because they are not technically auctioneers, since there is no person hosting, no physical place where the auctions are held. “They say they are a marketplace,” said Seiden. “Period.” But however legal the business is, the fact is that unscrupulous sellers flourish there.

In another conversation with Sanders, I relayed Seiden’s confirmation, which got him fired up again. He told me he sees forgeries on eBay all the time. “I once saw that a guy was selling a John Lennon signature for a dollar,” he said. “So I called the buyer and asked if he had got an appraisal. He tells me, ‘Those rare book dealers wanted to charge me a hundred dollars for an appraisal.’ So I asked him, ‘Why not get one? If it’s real, you’ve got a five-thousand-dollar signature.’ He told me to eat shit and die.”

Sanders told me that several years ago he and his ABAA colleague Ken Lopez met with representatives of eBay, suggesting strategies to combat fraud, to no avail. “Lopez and I, we wasted nine months in negotiations with eBay,” said Sanders. “They never followed a single suggestion. They kept stringing us along, but they never changed one single thing.”

Ironically, one of the reasons people are getting cheated, according to Sanders, is the practice of providing certificates of authenticity.

“When material comes in,” he said, explaining the dealer’s traditional process, “you try to establish its provenance, but in many cases it’s impossible to do, so the trail ends at some point. You just have to look at the material, the situation it comes from, ask people who consider themselves experts, and have them look at it. You try to put as much of the story together as you can. In the end, because of eBay, now everyone wants a certificate of authenticity, but as I point out to people: Who signed this certificate? As far as I’m concerned, no legit book dealer or autograph trader that I’ve ever known in my life would ever offer a certificate of authenticity. That’s a warning bell right there, the mere offering of one. That’s become a popular paradigm on eBay. It’s what’s allowed predators to be so successful and grow so large.”

One of the dealers I met at the New York fair, Dan Gregory, of Between the Covers Books in Merchantville, New Jersey, worries about yet another problem he sees on eBay: fake dust jackets. Gregory is an expert in dust jackets and explained the phenomenon. Given that the cost of a first edition of The Great Gatsby without a dust jacket is $150 and one with can fetch $4,000, there’s great incentive to print one yourself (possible with current technologies and a lot of savvy) or to swap jackets with a less valuable copy of the book.

“If I were a bad guy instead of a good guy, that’s what I’d be doing,” said Gregory, who predicts that in ten or twenty years, when those who have found deals too good to be true on eBay decide to sell their collections, they’ll find that indeed, those deals were too good to be true.

ONE REASON Gilkey had been so difficult to catch was that he was not selling his stolen books on eBay or any other website. And that’s one of the reasons his capture was so satisfying to Sanders. Shortly after he e-mailed his colleagues about Gilkey’s arrest, Sanders went to San Francisco for that memorable California International Antiquarian Book Fair. As is typical for this fair, opening day drew thousands of collectors who, once through the front doors, were busy tracking down books. Even among this crowd of hungry collectors, and with a booth full of gems like the Book of Mormon and Kennedy’s The Strategy of Peace , Sanders still couldn’t keep his mind off Gilkey. For three years, he had kept after his colleagues both to report thefts and to be on the lookout for attempts to resell the stolen material, and nothing had come of it. They’d come so close, but they still hadn’t nailed the “sumbitch,” and not only was Gilkey out on bail, he was now paroled in San Francisco.

Since Sanders and Lopez decided not to post the mug shot or hang wanted posters of Gilkey around the fair (in order not to corrupt the identification process in a potential lineup), they were among only a handful of dealers who might recognize him.

So when Gilkey walked through the front door of the fair and immediately felt he was being watched, it may have been in his head. Still, he was determined to find someone who would buy one of the books he had brought because he needed to raise money for an attorney. He drifted from one dealer’s booth to the next, admiring books, asking questions. At one of his favorite stops, the Heritage Book Shop booth, he admired Ayn Rand’s The Fountain-head . He thought that one of the owners, Ben or Lou Weinstein, recognized him because, as he says, “I did business with him,” Gilkey’s euphemism for stealing. “I didn’t take anything from him, though,” he protested. “I had a taxi driver pick it up.”

Gilkey tried to sell Heritage his stolen copy of The Invisible Man , by H. G. Wells, but they declined. He wanted at least $1,000, but they offered only $500. He also approached John Crichton of Brick Row Books, who was unaware that this was the man whose father had picked up The Mayor of Casterbridge . At Sumner and Stillman Rare Books, Gilkey ogled a first edition of George Orwell’s 1984 , which was priced at about $2,000. At another booth, he was intrigued to learn from a dealer that author Lewis Carroll had invented the dust jacket. 1

Gilkey had read that John Dunning, author of the best-selling Cliff Janeway rare book mystery series that had so inspired him, was speaking, but didn’t see him at the fair. He would have liked to have asked Dunning for his autograph.

Gilkey told me that he did stop by Sanders’s booth. He glanced at a number of titles by Wallace Stegner, whom he had never heard of, and saw books about Mormons, which he had absolutely no interest in, so he didn’t linger. At the time, he had no idea that Sanders was the man who had set his capture in motion.

Despite the heightened awareness of several of the booksellers and Gilkey’s motivations to unload some of his stolen wares, no criminal activity was identified during the three-day fair. 2No one reported any books missing, and no one noticed one man’s peddling of suspicious items. It was the next month, on March 25, that Sanders received word that the activity had started up again. Gilkey had surfaced in San Francisco, attempting to buy books with bad checks. Sanders sent another e-mail to ABAA members:

Earlier this afternoon he went to Tom Goldwasser’s shop and attempted to buy several John Kendrick Bangs first editions. Be on lookout! Gilkey is 5’9”, 130 pounds, mid 30s, straight brown hair, rounded shoulders. He is described as soft spoken, clean shaven, casually dressed with windbreaker and cap. While in Goldwasser’s shop today, he was carrying newspapers, including a copy of Art News. He said he had a collection of John Kendrick Bangs. Also, another older man in shop may have been there to distract. He was in his 50s, taller, 6’, grayish hair.

Two days later, Sanders learned from Munson that Gilkey had shown up in court without his attorney. The hearing had to be postponed. Gilkey was set to go to court again, but Munson said it would be six to twelve months before any depositions. Due to standard delays in the court calendar, Gilkey was free for up to another year.