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

A couple of days before the fair, Sanders received a mug shot of Gilkey. He had imagined what the thief looked like, but this was not it.

“I can tell you one thing,” he said. “He didn’t look like Moriarty to me”—referring to the fictional character whom Sherlock Holmes called the “Napoleon of crime.”

The photo showed a plain-looking man in his thirties with short dark hair parted on the side, a red T-shirt under a white buttoned shirt, and an expression that was more despondent than menacing. Sanders’s friend Ken Lopez, a tall Massachusetts dealer with shoulder-length hair and an open pack of Camel cigarettes in his T-shirt pocket, was, as far as they knew, Gilkey’s latest victim (he had ordered a first-edition Grapes of Wrath ). Shortly before the fair opened, Sanders and Lopez talked about handing out Gilkey’s photo to all the dealers, even making a wanted poster for the doors of the fair. But Sanders reconsidered. Gilkey’s victims, many of whom were at the fair, might one day be called to identify him in a lineup, and Sanders didn’t want to risk contaminating the process. All he could do was remain vigilant and wonder if Gilkey would be brazen enough to show up at the fair.

“I was thinking that he would be attracted to a good fair like a moth to a flame,” he said. “And he would be there to steal books.”

The San Francisco fair had been open less than an hour when Sanders locked eyes with a man he didn’t recognize. This was not so unusual. Sanders often forgets names, even faces. But this encounter was different.

“I looked at that guy, and he looked right back into my eyes,” said Sanders, “and I got the weirdest goddamn feeling.”

It was not the mug shot he was thinking of. That had already faded from his memory. Something else had snagged his attention, a strange, sure sense that flooded him in a slice of a second. Sanders’s daughter, Melissa, was helping a customer at the other end of the booth, and Sanders turned to ask her to take a look at this dark-haired, ordinary-looking man he suspected was Gilkey. But when Sanders turned around to point out the man to Melissa, he had vanished.

Sanders rushed down the aisle, past four or five other booths, bumping into a couple of collectors along the way, to his friend John Crichton’s booth. Still stunned, he paused to catch his breath. “I think I just saw Gilkey,” Sanders told him.

“You’ve got to relax, old man,” Crichton said, reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. “You’re getting paranoid.”

SO IT WAS with all of this in mind that I wandered through the New York fair, waiting for my scheduled meeting with Sanders at his booth, and wondering, as I observed the scene around me, if any of these people were like Gilkey. What about the elderly man at a counter a few feet away looking back and forth from one blood-red leather-bound book to another almost identical one? Or the dark-suited couple whispering to each other as they ogled a book on nineteenth-century French architecture? It was hard not to view everyone with suspicion, but I tried to keep my imagination in check as I approached my first booth.

Straight ahead was Aleph-Bet Books, where I was drawn in by an enticing array of children’s books, first editions of many that I recognized from my childhood, like Pinocchio , although this was a first edition in Italian, which at $80,000 cost around twenty thousand times more than my own childhood copy at home (a Golden Book). The booth was packed with hungry collectors, but I managed to get the attention of co-owner Marc Younger, who explained to me why so many fairgoers had crowded his booth. People have an emotional attachment to books they remember reading as children, he said, and very often it’s the first type of book a collector seeks. Some move on to other books, but many spend a lifetime collecting their favorite childhood stories. He showed me the first trade edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit ($15,000).

“It’s an interesting story,” he said. “No one would publish it, so she [Beatrix Potter] self-published two hundred and fifty of them. They go up to a hundred thousand dollars.”

Next, he pointed out a first-edition The Cat in the Hat , priced at $8,500. It looked pretty much like a new The Cat in the Hat to me, and he confirmed that it can be difficult to identify first editions of children’s books, in part because the edition is not always noted. Apparently, you have to look for other clues. Younger explained that when first published, The Cat in the Hat’s boards (a term for covers—I was learning the lingo) were covered in flat paper, but that later they were glazed (shiny). I was starting to feel like an insider. At the next flea market, I could be on the lookout for a first-edition The Cat in the Hat .

Younger then agreed to show me something more rare. He had two letters from L. Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz books, to John R. Neill, who illustrated many of them. “Usually it’s the really extraordinary things that do well,” he said, “like these.” Younger expected them to go for $45,000 to $60,000. So many of his books (not to mention the letters, original illustrations, and other ephemera) seemed like “really extraordinary things” that I walked away with a kind of book-fever setting in.

Across the aisle from Aleph-Bet were the largest books I’d ever seen: sumptuously illustrated volumes of natural history, as big as coffee tables and twice as thick, which the dealer, a bow-tied gentleman who spoke in hushed tones, called elephant folios. Based on size and weight, they were aptly named, and I wondered where, other than museums, such books would be useful, or even practical to lug from a shelf, for example, to a table. After admiring a darkly lush, eerie floral illustration in one of the elephant folios, “The Night-Blowing Cereus,” by Robert John Thornton (1799), I left and headed in the other direction, to a booth where I got to see a rare first edition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony ($13,500) and a valuable copy of Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids , Watson and Crick’s first and second DNA article offprints, signed ($140,000).

The New York fair guidebook indicated that Sanders was in booth D8. Making my way there, I stopped by several more booths. At Bruce McKittrick Rare Books of Philadelphia, owner McKittrick was charming anyone who stopped by with his rapid-fire musings on books. His booth attracted more people than any around it, but that may also have been due to the champagne he poured. He told me about Pietro Aretino, a sixteenth-century Italian writer whose oeuvre included erotic books. In 1524, he wrote a collection of sonnets to accompany the engravings of sixteen sexual positions by Marcantonio Raimondi (who based his images on a series of paintings by Giulio Romano, a student of Raphael’s). It remains one of the most famous examples of Renaissance erotica.

“The original editions of his books are so rare and were read to death and were extremely scandalous,” said McKittrick, “not just slightly pornographic. Not like eighteenth-century French soft porn. In Venice, in the 1520s, so many wanted it, the stuff just disappeared.”

He said people pirated Aretino’s work, and at the fair he was selling a mid-seventeenth-century fake of a pirated copy.

“A fake of a fake,” he said. “Very interesting.”

Before the fair, I had learned that there are probably as many definitions of “rare” as there are book dealers. Most tend toward the cheeky. Burt Auerback, a Manhattan appraiser, is quoted as having said, “It is a book that is worth more money now than when it was published.” 2The late American collector Robert H. Taylor said that a rare book is “a book I want badly and can’t find.” 3On the occasions that people answer seriously, they all agree that “rare” is a highly subjective moniker.