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

In callously stealing, mutilating, and destroying rare and unique elements of our common intellectual heritage, Spiegelman did not simply aim to divest Columbia of $1.3 million worth of physical property. He risked stunting, and probably stunted, the growth of human knowledge to the detriment of us all. By the very nature of the crime, it is impossible to know exactly what damage he has done. But this much is clear: this crime was quite different from the theft of cash equal to the appraised value of the materials stolen, because it deprived not only Columbia, but the world, of irreplaceable pieces of the past and the benefits of future scholarship. 6

However moving this commentary on the nonmonetary value of books was, and as positive as it was in setting precedent for sentencing book thieves, it’s unlikely to deter others, especially any like Gilkey. No matter how dire the punishment, it’s virtually useless in thwarting crimes of passion.

Nor is the perceived futility of catching thieves much of an obstacle for those who passionately want them behind bars. By the time Gavora contacted Sanders for advice about the theft of his books, Sanders had concluded his six-year term as security chair of the ABAA, but Gavora, knowing his reputation, chose to contact him, not his replacement. (As Sanders himself admits, “I do have a natural tendency whenever I get involved in something new to plunge into it, and I pretty much go off the deep end every single time. It’s a pattern that’s repeated itself throughout my life. [Pursuing thieves], it was a good thing; relationships with women, it tends to be a bad thing. I’m very unsuccessful at that.”) And Sanders, ever eager to help catch a thief, gladly stepped back into his old role.

I was beginning to relate to Sanders in his obsessiveness. This rare book world had become almost all I thought about. My desk and bedside table were now crowded with books about people like Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick, a botany professor who bought so many books in the 1930s that his Nebraska house exceeded the building code maximum load. 7When he died in 1952, at age eighty-three, it was on an army cot he used as a bed in his kitchen, surrounded by ninety tons of books. Might Gilkey steal that many if he could get away with it?

I was also devouring information on the much better known Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, who is legendary for his love of books. 8(His family said that by the age of five, he had read all the books in his father’s library. Even if the facts were stretched, the general idea wasn’t.) When his earliest collection was destroyed by fire in 1770, he began replacing it with an even more expansive one. As the minister to France, he took time out to scour Parisian bookshops and ordered books from London and other European cities. In Jefferson’s home library in Monticello, he grouped the books according to size: the smallest on the top shelves, the midsized in the middle, and the truly voluminous on the tall bottom shelves.

In 1814, when the British army burned the Congressional Library in Washington, Jefferson offered to sell his substantial collection of 6,700 volumes. The books were hauled in wagons from Monticello to Washington, where they became the foundation for the Library of Congress. Perhaps there were too many volumes to keep to the simple small-medium-large arrangement at home, because Jefferson proposed a classification scheme he adapted from Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning , in which books were organized within the broad categories of Memory, Reason, and Imagination, poetic divisions I’d like to see bookstores adopt today. It might take longer to find what you’re looking for, but in browsing, who knows what you’d find.

The more I read through the stacks in my house about Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick, and the many other collectors who have written copiously about their beloved books, the more I thought about the role these men (and a few women) have played as preservers of cultural heritage. In the words of Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, a collector who died in 1979, “Mad or sane, they salvage civilization.” 9I couldn’t get enough of them.

Of course their salvaging of civilization hasn’t always been popularly motivated. Some of these men have been remarkably selfish. One of the stories that kept me up late was that of Guglielmo Libri (1803-1869), one of the most highly regarded guardians of cultural heritage, who pilfered probably as much as he preserved. 10Libri, an Italian count with a prophetic name from a family of old Tuscan nobility, was responsible for a loss of stunning proportions. A mathematician, journalist, teacher, adviser to the French government, and authority on the history of science, he moved easily in French, Italian, and English academic circles, and in 1841 was put in charge of cataloging historical manuscripts in France’s public libraries. In this role, he was allowed in any room, at any hour, and often requested access through the night, ostensibly to conduct research uninterrupted. (When one librarian refused permission, Libri challenged him to a duel.) His reputation as a venerable scholar protected him long after suspicions rose about his thinning the collections. As the cataloger of the French libraries’ vast holdings, he knew which manuscripts had not yet been recorded, and these proved irresistible to him. He was seen climbing ladders to reach the highest shelves, where the rarest works, often unbound and uncataloged, were stored. The man was not only voracious but cunning. He borrowed valuable editions of books and replaced them with less valuable copies. After removing libraries’ markings by sanding the paper on which they were stamped, he would sell the originals at generous profits. Many of the manuscripts were priceless, ninety-three of them dating from before the twelfth century. In the end, his collection’s worth was estimated at six hundred thousand francs (more than 1.5 million euros in today’s world). He was finally caught in 1850, and sentenced to ten years’ solitary confinement, after which he returned to Italy, where he lived for the rest of his life. I have serious doubts that this dueler for books lived that life without stealing more books.

SHORTLY AFTER GILKEY told me about being kicked out of Acorn Books, he started talking about how impressed he was by the ways the San Francisco library protected its books. Apparently, one time he had simply wanted to make a photocopy from a book, but the librarian wouldn’t let him. The only way I could imagine this happening was if Gilkey had attempted to take a book from a secure area, or if he had tried to leave the library with it. A few months later, in conversations with dealers about Gilkey, I must have mentioned my concern that he might someday steal from the library, because when I called his parole officer to confirm what Gilkey had told me about the terms of his parole, etc., he said he was not at liberty to discuss Gilkey but noted that at a recent parole hearing, with Gilkey present, someone had mentioned my concern that he might steal from the library. Word had traveled. I realized I had to be careful about what I said if I wanted Gilkey to continue talking to me. At that point, after months of interviews and research, I was elbow-deep in this story, and I had no intention of losing contact with either Gilkey or Sanders. We were all tenacious hunters—Gilkey for books, Sanders for thieves, and me for both their stories. What I had not anticipated was that my role would become more complicated. No longer the objective observer, I had stepped into the plot.