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

“I was trying to think of a grand finale . . .” he said. “Getting a hundred books from that one-hundred-books list. To say that I had won.”

I was astounded, but I was also at ease, a dawning that came to me unexpectedly. Nearing the end of my encounters with Gilkey, what was once tense and awkward had become routine, sometimes even pleasurable. He loved books; this we had in common. Over the course of a couple of years, I had sat across numerous café tables from him and listened to him tell his story. What became clear was that although he was a criminal, he was also curious, ambitious, and polite, three qualities I respect. But later, at home, I would listen to our taped conversations and realize how the con man’s physical presence had distracted me from the content of his narratives. The surface charm of a con man, like most enchantments, is a form of manipulation, and behind the façade stood a sturdy buttress of greed.

Once, after Gilkey had told me about a book he stole and later sold, he said, “Greed is greed.” I had assumed that he was referring to his own motivation, until his next comment. “Dealers can’t resist buying them.” He had mentioned a dealer in San Francisco, but wouldn’t give me the man’s name. According to Gilkey, the dealer regularly bought books and other collectibles from him at a fraction of their market value on those rare instances when Gilkey needed cash. The dealer told him more than once that he ought to stop. He knew the goods were hot, yet he bought them, no doubt confirming Gilkey’s conviction that many in the trade are corrupt. I asked for the dealer’s name again, but Gilkey declined. Greed is greed. 3

ONE OF THE most astonishing books I ever encountered was at a book fair. I can’t remember the title or any other detail, except one. The dealer picked up the gilt-edged book and, holding it in front of me, slowly bent the block of pages as though he was about to fan through it in search of something. As he bent the pages, the gilt edge disappeared, revealing, along the long side, an intricate painting of a nautical scene, men navigating a stormy sea. “It’s a fore-edge painting,” he said. I gawked, then asked him to do it again. I learned that for centuries, artisans have been adorning books with fore-edge paintings for clients. They are delicately executed images, usually thematically related to the text: elaborate battle scenes, presidential portraits, Art Deco beauties, even erotic renderings, which, given the paintings’ clandestine quality, is no surprise. As if one hidden treasure were not enough, books are sometimes painted with two fore-edge images, so that when you bend the block of pages one way, one picture emerges, but when you bend it the other way, another appears. They are not usually applied to highly valuable books (doing so would be regarded as a form of vandalism) but to books that are of special interest or sentimental value to their owners. Emerging unexpectedly, these paintings seem like magical apparitions, as though bending a book’s pages can make the inert black type within metamorphose into sumptuous color images. When the pages, no longer swayed, are back in place, no one would guess what lies just a hair’s distance beyond the gilt.

After two years of meeting with Gilkey I’d seen the gilt pages of his book, so to speak, and I had been witness to their being fanned one way, then another. If I had to reduce him to a sentence, I’d say that Gilkey is a man who believes that the ownership of a vast rare book collection would be the ultimate expression of his identity, that any means of getting it would be fair and right, and that once people could see his collection, they would appreciate the man who had built it.

But he was more than that. I listened to the tapes of our conversations repeatedly, and each time, Gilkey’s selfishness, which in person is thickly veiled by his affable demeanor, was as clear as boldface type on a page. Like a book with a fore-edge painting, Gilkey had hidden much of himself behind gilt. Polite, curious, ambitious—or greedy, selfish, criminal? Of course, he is all these things, but what intrigued me was how different he seemed to me in person versus on tape. Physical form had refracted meaning, or at least favored one interpretation over another. This is not only why I perceived Gilkey differently, but also precisely why a library, a visual representation of culture and learning, is so desirable to him: he is aware of how persuasive the physical can be.

Meeting with Gilkey those last couple of times, I had another epiphany. I realized that the man I thought was stealing books so that others would consider him a cultured gentleman, the man who was building a phony image, a counterfeit identity, was in fact working diligently to become that gentleman. He was studying philosophy, researching authors, reading literature, even writing his own essays and plays. Through these efforts, he was attempting to create his ideal self. Another way of begetting this self, I came to understand, was by telling his story through me.

One morning, while working next to my shelf of books about book collecting, I considered all the time I had spent with rare book lovers at their fairs, their shops, their homes. I had savored being around so much beauty and, even more, appreciated the stories behind the books. In my reading, one aspect of the history of books I had come across repeatedly was their destruction. From the Qin Shi Huang in China, who in 213 B.C. ordered the burning of all books not pertaining to agriculture, medicine, or prophecy, 4to the Nazis’ literary cleansing by fire ( Säuberung ) of twenty-five thousand volumes, totalitarian leaders have acted against books’ dangerous power to enlighten. Even today, some U.S. leaders attempt the same through banning books. So the fact that any ancient text, like the German Kräutterbuch my friend lent me, has survived is all the more heartening. The fearsome urge to destroy or suppress books is an acknowledgment of their power, and not only that of august scientific, political, and philosophical texts but that of small, quiet books of poetry and fiction as well, which nonetheless hold great capacity to change us. As I spent time among rare books and their collectors, as strongly as I felt this power and their manifold other attractions, I did not succumb to full-blown bibliomania, as I thought I might. I did, however, come to understand more fully the satisfaction of the pursuit. Hunting down treasures for a collection brings its own rewards, but, ultimately even more satisfying, building it is a way of creating a narrative. When books are joined with others that have traits in common they form a larger story that can reveal something wholly new about the history of democracy, or Renaissance Renaissance cooking, or Hells Angels who pen novels. When I first talked to rare book lovers, I was enamored of their stories of discovery and theft, but what I didn’t realize was that the most important stories they had to tell were those formed through their collections. They were not only “salvaging civilization,” but also, by linking books, engaging in acts of interpretation.

Although I haven’t become a bibliomaniac, I now see myself as an ardent collector, no longer of carnelians and Pixy Stix straws, but of stories. Searching for them, researching them, and writing them gives my life shape and purpose the way that hunting, gathering, and cataloging books does for the collector. We’re all building narratives. As I thought about Gilkey’s and Sanders’s stories, and those of the other collectors and thieves I encountered, they merged in my mind into a collection of their own, the larger story of which is a testament to the passion for books—their content and histories, their leathery, papery, smooth, musty, warped, foxed, torn, engraved, and inscribed bodies. This passion I share with them all.