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

“Hello. I’m looking for a gift for a wedding. Do you have any rare books by Iris Murdoch? Under the Net , or anything else by Iris Murdoch? Or maybe something by J. P. Donleavy, like The Ginger Man ?” ( The Ginger Man was number ninety-nine on the Modern Library’s list.)

While the person on the line searched for a Murdoch or Donleavy, Gilkey, not covering the receiver, said to me, “That’s usually what I do, ask for a book I happen to be reading. Right now, she’s checking. I think I told you, they’ve got thousands of books there.”

Gilkey continued waiting. I continued watching.

“Only problem with this phone,” he said to me, “is it doesn’t take incoming calls. So I’d tell them I’m busy and don’t take calls at work. Then later I’d call the store back to make sure the charge went through.”

Gilkey waited another moment while the woman tried to find a book that might satisfy him. He grew impatient.

“See, for something like this, where they made me wait and wait and wait, I would definitely make sure they were next on the list.”

The woman at Serendipity returned and must have asked for his phone number, because he read the number posted on the phone, and his name, because the next thing he said was, “Uh . . . Robert.”

“I read on the Internet,” he said to her, “that you specialize in Irish writers, especially James Joyce. Could you make a recommendation for a gift from an Irish writer? Oh, I think anything up to five thousand. Yeah, it’s a wedding gift. Or if you have an autograph by James Joyce or Charles Dickens or . . . Okay, if you can just take a quick look. Okay, thank you.”

I had heard this scenario before, from Sanders and from Gilkey’s victims. They’d described for me Gilkey’s voice while placing an order, his way of demonstrating a measure of book knowledge, his story that he was buying a gift. In tone and content, his enactment seemed almost a parody of itself. It was also going very smoothly. Even though Gilkey was not, I assumed, going to provide the dealer with a credit card number or hotel address, it was a deception I was witnessing, a half-crime—and I was half horrified, half fascinated.

Gilkey hung up the phone and gave me his take on the call, a blend of disdain for the dealer, pride for himself.

“See, that would have been perfect because the owner wasn’t there,” he said. “She probably wouldn’t know the correct procedure. She doesn’t even know where anything is. If I wanted it today, I probably would have done it. I’d have given her the credit card number. It would definitely go through. If it didn’t go through, I’d have a spare one ready. I’d have three or four spares in my pocket. I’d order the book and say, ‘What time do you close?’ I’d say, ‘Can you gift wrap it?’ Then they’d stutter around and say, ‘Uh, okay.’ If they close at five, I’d get there around four-fifteen, four-thirty, take a look around, make sure there are no suspicious characters around. Then I’d go in there and say, ‘I’m picking up a book for Robert,’ and hopefully they’d have it ready. Sometimes they wouldn’t have it ready, which would make me a little bit nervous. That’s how stupid they were. They should have asked for the credit card. A few times they would run the number through when I got there. It didn’t make any sense to me. But I signed it, and that’s it. I didn’t do anything suspicious or anything. I just said, ‘Thank you.’ I’d probably take a look at a couple more books and say, ‘This is great. Thank you very much. I’ll probably be back. You have a great collection.’ And then I’d calmly walk out.”

I nodded, balancing my notebook on the small shelf under the next pay phone, taking in just how replenished he appeared.

“Obviously,” he said, “I’m not into it anymore. But that would have been the perfect opportunity.”

Gilkey told me the story of another perfect opportunity as we left the Crowne Plaza and headed to one of his other favorite pay phones, a few blocks away in the Grand Hyatt. He and his father had taken a red-eye to New York and had themselves a few days of what he called “the good life,” using stolen credit cards. The trip, said Gilkey, was “very, very successful.” That’s when he got the Winnie-the-Pooh books he later tried to sell, and a copy of A Streetcar Named Desire worth $3,000. Gilkey was careful to tell me that it was from “a shop” in the Waldorf-Astoria. “You couldn’t believe how easy that one was,” he boasted.

The third pickup in New York was, he said, “a funny story.” He and his father were staying at the Hyatt near Madison Avenue, where there were several rare book stores. In a listing from one, which Gilkey declined to name, he had picked out a few selections, one of which was a series of travel books. Since he was having trouble deciding on one, he asked his father to choose. The elder Gilkey thought the travel books sounded appealing, so Gilkey called from a pay phone at the Hyatt and placed the order.

“So I get over there, and they were gift wrapping it,” said Gilkey. “It turns out it’s a seventeen-volume set. It must have weighed like seventy-five pounds. I had to carry it all the way back to the hotel.” He said he didn’t take a taxi because he didn’t want to spend the money. “Very strenuous,” he went on. “I had to keep taking breaks. . . . I kept trudging along, trudging along.”

Did anyone know about this theft? Did Sanders? The ABAA? When I asked Gilkey which store he got it from, he said, “I better not say.” I heard this response more often now, because he was, in fact, confessing crimes more frequently. He seemed to be growing more trusting of me, and I hoped that he would eventually tell me where the books were stashed.

In addition to lining his suitcases with rare books and a handful of other collectibles, Gilkey said he and his father spent their time in New York “eating hundred-dollar meals, visiting the Empire State Building, and walking around Greenwich Village. We were eating like kings. I said to my dad, ‘I guarantee you everything, the hotels, the meals, will be free. I guarantee you.’ ”

The trip was an inspiration.

“That’s what I wanted to do,” said Gilkey, “plan trips to other cities, especially because New York was amazing. Nothing went wrong.”

Until their return. Gilkey and his father boarded the plane with suitcases full of loot, but after they arrived in San Francisco, Gilkey discovered that someone had taken his luggage.

“That was the worst thing that could have happened,” he said. “All those thousands of dollars’ worth of books.”

A passenger from San Mateo had the same model of Hartmann luggage, and within hours he had returned Gilkey’s bag. In spite of that experience, as Gilkey relayed the story of his trip to New York, it was clear that it was one of his fondest memories.

“That’s what I wanted to do. Go to a city, get free hotels, free plane tickets. New York worked out perfectly. I had eighty to ninety credit slips, and I could get one thousand, two thousand, three thousand a slip at least. . . . If you like getting stuff for free, it was the perfect trip. I didn’t feel guilty. Free vacation, free meals, free books. I was excited. I was gonna go mobile from city to city. New York, that was the test run. New York was the future of what I was going to do, because what more could I ask?”

13

And Look: More Books!

After our tour of Union Square’s finest phone booths, I didn’t hear a thing from Gilkey for several weeks. While wondering if he had been caught stealing and was back in prison again, I kept busy. Once, when my daughter was looking for a costume at Goodwill, I drifted over to the bookshelves. This is the type of place where it’s still possible to find a treasure, however unlikely. But maybe I would be lucky. Collector Joseph Serrano had told me about two of his recent finds there: a signed first-edition Willie Mays autobiography for $2.49 (he later saw two copies online, unsigned, priced at $400 each) and a first-edition Booked to Die , the book collector mystery by John Dunning (which Gilkey happened to read in prison), for $3.49 (Serrano estimates it’s worth around $400 to $500). I went straight for a couple of “high spots,” the Stephen Kings: no first editions. No Tarzan s, which I had heard were very valuable, either. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t much of anything besides bedraggled airport paperbacks and stained cookbooks. I ran my eyes down one shelf, then another, scanning for hardbacks. Not a first edition among them. There were more bookshelves behind me, but unlike the scowling man in a darkly stained parka next to me, who was diligently searching for something (first editions?), I was ready to give up. I thought of Gilkey, who had been to that Goodwill before, and couldn’t grasp how he or anyone else could keep up the search when it yielded so little. When I returned to the crowded racks of tulle and velveteen skirts my daughter was digging through, I was ready to go. She had had just as scant luck as I had, so we left empty-handed. As we walked out, I saw that the same man was still hunting among the books, building a small stack of them on the floor. What had I missed?