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

I had been waiting over an hour, trying to distract myself from the growing knot in my stomach. What if Gilkey was more hostile than I expected? Would I be safe talking to him? I stared at the wall, to which several handwritten signs were taped: “No Levi’s” and “No sleeveless tops” and “No sandals.” Another one read “No underwire bras.” They must set off the metal detectors. I ran back across the hot parking lot into my car, sank low in my seat, wrestled off my bra, and pulled it out one sleeve. I was glad I had not worn a white blouse. I ran back in. A half-hour later my name was called.

When I finally got through the metal detector and two sets of heavily locked doors, I arrived in the visiting room and walked to the desk to announce who I was there to see. I waited for what seemed like hours while officials located Gilkey, wanting more than anything to have the interview over with. At last, they found him and brought him to the booth, where he sat behind a Plexiglas window. I approached, trying to look as though I did this all the time. He was dressed in a prison-issued V-necked orange shirt with a threadbare undershirt showing at the neck, and orange elastic-waist pants. He smiled and tipped his head as if to say, “Please, take a seat.” I told myself this was a good sign; he didn’t appear to be angry—yet. I was still in my coat and sweating from heat and nerves. I glanced at the list of questions in my notebook, which began with nonconfrontational topics: Where did you grow up? When did you first become interested in rare books? And so on. At the end of the list, I had written: Did you steal any books? But I figured I would probably have to wait until another day to ask that one. I introduced myself through the heavy black phone receiver on my side of the glass, and he, apparently as nervous as I, quickly said hello. Then, just as abruptly, he offered, “So, do you want me to tell you how I got my first book?”

I exhaled and began writing. At the time of our first meeting Gilkey was thirty-seven. He is of average stature, about five-foot-nine. His eyes are hazel-brown, his hair dark and thinning, his fingers long and nail-bitten. The cadence of his quiet, calm voice reminded me of the children’s television host Mr. Rogers. Trying not to think about the resemblance, I asked him how he first became interested in books.

“My family has this big library in the family room with thousands of books, and I remember looking at them all the time,” he said. “Also, I used to watch those British Victorian movies, you know, like Sherlock Holmes. I loved those movies where a gentleman has an old library, wears a smoking jacket.”

Exploring his motives seemed to please Gilkey, but there was nothing revelatory about it: he seemed comfortable in this knowledge of himself, that his fantasy of living an old-fashioned, cultured English life as depicted on the big screen is what compelled him to steal books.

“Watching those movies,” he said, “that was when I first thought about getting books.”

Gilkey smiled and shrugged as if he knew that his pronouncement sounded a bit ridiculous, but it was the truth. If you aren’t born into learned, wealthy society, why not steal your way in? His affable manner was disturbingly at odds with the content of our discussion, but it made questioning him easier than I had expected.

Since prison rules prohibited my bringing a pen or tape recorder (more metal), I wrote at hand-cramping speed with a pencil I feared would snap since I had sharpened it to a long point (no spares allowed). I tried to tune out the two women on either side of me who, in vehemently cheerful voices, shared whatever good news of home they could scrounge up, while Gilkey told me about his favorite bookstore.

“In the late 1990s, the primary bookstore I went to was a great store in L.A., Heritage Books. It’s housed in a converted mausoleum. You have to see it,” he said. Later, I would learn that he not only “went to” Heritage, but stole from it.

The Heritage Book Shop, which closed in 2007, was, I found out, one of the most successful rare book businesses in the country, founded by brothers Ben and Lou Weinstein, two former junk-store owners who found their way into the rare book trade in the 1960s. 1With stained-glass windows, English cabinets, and a vaulted ceiling, the store exuded old-world wealth. New-world, Hollywood-style wealth was evident in the chairs, which had been used as set furniture in the film Gone With the Wind . This combination of old-time finery and movie-business glamour was irresistible to Gilkey, who thought that if he ever opened a bookstore, one of his dreams, he would like it to look like Heritage.

“I guess I got a warped sense of what was possible in that place,” he said. “I started dreaming of building a gigantic library, where I will sit at a nice desk. I’ll read or write. I’ll have a globe of the world next to the desk,” he added, unaware of how revealing his change in tense was.

“At Heritage,” he said, “that’s where I got the idea of owning a collection.”

He had already said that he was first inspired to build a collection as a child, but I didn’t interrupt. Gilkey was eager to tell his story, so from then on, I asked few questions. He was soft-spoken, pleasant, almost courtly, and forthcoming about how he built his book collection, yet averse to using words like “steal” or “prison” or “theft.” Instead, he “got” books and has been “away” for “doing that.” He seemed intelligent, but frequently mispronounced words the way well-read people who have not grown up around well-read people often do.

Gilkey said he collects more than rare books: snuff bottles, musical instruments, baseball cards, crystal, coins, and autographs, noting that he has Stephen King’s, Anne Perry’s, Princess Diana’s, and Ronald Reagan’s. But it was clear that his attraction was primarily to books, and I would learn that in this respect, Gilkey is typical of collectors, who very often accumulate more than one type of object. They have a focus, though, and Gilkey’s unequivocally was books. But why? And what made his desire so fervid that he was willing to risk his freedom for it? Gilkey returned to the image of an English gentleman with a grand library and explained further.

“I like the feeling of having a book worth five or ten grand in my hands. And there’s that sense of admiration you’re gonna get from other people.”

That people would admire Gilkey because of his book collection seemed to be at the crux of his desire. It wasn’t merely a love of books that compelled him, but also what owning them would say about him. It’s a normal ambition—that our choice of music or cars or shoes reflects well on us—taken to the extreme. Having spent a few days among collectors and dealers at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, I sensed that many of them were also building identities through their collections, acquiring books as talismans of taste, knowledge, and affluence. Shortly before visiting Gilkey, while flipping through a magazine, I noticed an advertisement for a wealth management company in which a well-dressed woman was leaving a rare book store. Around the same time, I received a hip women’s clothing catalog in which at least half the photographs were shot in an old library. In both cases, fine, old books were the backdrop of the good life, the wealthy life, one rich with country estates and long vacations in foreign countries. It’s a seductive fantasy that if you acquire the books, you might just end up with the life itself, or at least make other people think you have it. In my research, I had read about other motivations. Some collectors (of cereal boxes, farm machinery, anything) describe their obsession as a way to create order and to fill a hole in their lives. 2But don’t most people crave at least some order? And don’t many have a hole of some sort in their lives—unhappy childhoods or health problems or marital woes? Again, this impulse seems like a normal one taken to the extreme. In many ways, Gilkey did not appear to be all that different from other book collectors. The only quality I knew of that set him apart was his criminal history.