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

The more Gilkey spoke, the more incongruities emerged. The combination of his full, round face and thinning dark hair made him appear at once young and old. He was unevenly shaven but careful in his manner, which made him seem both lost and deliberate. And most striking, he collected books to feel “grand, regal, like royalty, rich, cultured,” yet has become a criminal, stealing in order to give himself the appearance of wealth and erudition.

We had only thirty minutes, and Gilkey happily plowed through his story, jumping back and forth in time, guided by memories of various books he stole rather than by chronology. It appeared that he wanted to cover a lot of ground. Maybe, like me, he thought it might be our only conversation. When the subject turned to his release from prison and what he might do, he laid out his plans.

“I’m full of creativity,” he said. “When you’re in here twenty-four/seven, you get a lot of ideas.” He noted them in quick succession:

“I want one book from each famous author.

“I want to write the presidential library and see if they’ll send me a book.

“I’m going to put an ad in the paper. It will say ‘Keep me out of jail: send me a book.’

“I’m gonna open a bookstore.

“I’ve actually written a long book. It was inspired by the work of John Kendrick Bangs. He wrote nineteenth-century prose and plays. I drafted an homage to him. And a couple of suspense stories.”

Gilkey was in prison this time because only three weeks after being released, following a three-year sentence for book theft, he went to a book fair and wrote a bad check. He does not like being in prison. “I stand out like a sore thumb,” he said, and intimated that he has fended off sexual assaults. Watching Gilkey through the Plexiglas window, as though I felt the awkward boy at the front of the class with the too-short pants and neatly combed hair had somehow found himself amid rapists and carjackers.

“The intellectual level is low here,” he said. “I went to college, UC Santa Cruz. 3I’ve had an extremely rough time here.” Still, he found time to read. “I’m reading Tom Clancy. My first cellmate was a constant talker, so it was hard to read. Now I read spy novels by R. Ludlum, The Bourne Supremacy , James Patterson. I’ve read twenty to twenty-five books in here. I prefer reference books, though, ’cause I like to learn more about antiques and collectibles, so I can build my knowledge.”

In 1998, while doing time in Stanislaus County Jail for fraud, Gilkey said he had read John Dunning’s Booked to Die , a novel in which a woman collector does copious research on rare books and profits from her knowledge. It was this book that had inspired Gilkey to become more serious, more thorough, with his own research about rare books.

Gilkey said that he didn’t like to spend his “own money” on books, and that it wasn’t fair that he didn’t have enough money to afford all the rare books he wanted. For Gilkey, “fairness” seemed to be a synonym for “satisfaction”: if he is satisfied, all is deemed fair; if not, it isn’t. I had no idea how to respond, especially because of his unfailing equanimity while stating his views.

“I have a degree in economics,” he said, in an effort to explain his compulsion to steal. “I figure the more books I get for free, if I need to sell them, I get a hundred percent profit.”

It took me a few seconds to realize that Gilkey was not joking. He was so calm and polite that statements like these were particularly jolting, bringing into sharp and unnerving focus his skewed sense of what is fair and right and reasonable. Back and forth, as though a pendulum were swinging in and out of his conscience, Gilkey alternated between claiming that he would never commit another crime, and presenting ideas of how to “get” more books. “I want to stop committing crime. It’s not worth it,” he said. Then, “There’s the excitement of having the books in your hands.” The conversation continued this way, swinging from his desire for books to his plan to quit stealing them. Only one of these wishes seemed genuine, or even possible.

Gilkey has been arrested several times for writing bad checks for books, which he told me he didn’t know was against the law.

“I mean, I thought it was a civil issue, not a criminal one,” he said.

I knew that this was as unlikely as the story he had just told me about how he got the children’s book Madeline .

“I went to a flea market and I bought a first-edition Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans for one dollar. It’s worth fifteen hundred now.”

Much of what he had said so far was true (Sanders had already given me some of the same information), but surely not all of it.

I turned our conversation to the 2003 book fair in San Francisco, where Sanders thought he had seen Gilkey, although I did not mention Sanders.

“Yeah, I went,” he said, “but I think people knew about me.”

He had just posted bail and brought with him to the fair a couple of books he had hoped to sell to unsuspecting dealers in order to raise money for an attorney. He had roamed up and down the aisles, chatting with dealers and admiring books and color plates from an Audubon folio. One of the books he carried around at the fair was, appropriately enough, The Invisible Man .

“But I got the feeling I was being watched,” he said, “so I left.”

So maybe Sanders was not, as his colleague suggested, paranoid. Maybe the man he had locked eyes with on the opening day of the fair was indeed Gilkey.

“But you know,” said Gilkey, “the police never got me. That’s not how I got caught. Some ABAA security chair got me. Ken something. I can’t remember his last name.”

He looked at me to see if I knew, but I did not want to appear to be on Sanders’s side, so I said nothing. I had spent the last half-hour trying to parse Gilkey’s truths from his lies, and now the half-truth of my silence lodged as its own kind of deception.

Gilkey started to tell me the names of other books he would like to collect, but stopped mid-sentence because a guard had signaled him. Our thirty minutes were up.

Driving home from hot, dry Tracy to cool, crisp San Francisco, I replayed my conversation with Gilkey in my head. He was not the flinty, belligerent criminal I had expected, nor had he been completely straight with me. What I felt sure of was that he was a man completely enthralled by books and how they might express his ideal self. He was a collector like other collectors—but also not like them. His polite manner had been a relief at first, but had become disconcerting. Reconciling the face of composure with his history of crime was no simple task, and it was about to become even more complicated.

3

Richie Rich

When Gilkey was released from prison several weeks later, we met at Café Fresco in Union Square, his choice. It’s up the street from Saks Fifth Avenue, where he used to work. The café’s décor is faux Italian, with extra-large cans of tomatoes and bags of pasta gathering dust on metal shelves across from a refrigerated case of doughnuts that Hispanic women ring up at the register. It is as though someone thought the café should have the façade of Italian country charm, but abandoned the idea when it was half done.

Gilkey wore a pressed white shirt, a dark blue baseball cap with “PGA Golf” printed across it, and brand-new beige leather sneakers, the kind you don’t usually see on anyone under sixty-five. The shirt and jacket once belonged to his father, who had died while Gilkey was doing time at DVI. He said he missed his father a lot, then pulled a crumpled tissue from the jacket pocket. “Huh,” he said, looking at the tissue, “this was his,” then put it back in his pocket. I picked up a cup of tea at the counter, and he ordered an orange juice and a doughnut, for which he thanked me profusely. We sat down at a table, and for two hours he answered my questions, most of which were of the straightforward who, what, where, when, and why variety, but it was this last question, why , more than any other, that had brought me there. Why did Gilkey love rare books? Why did he steal them? Why did he risk his freedom for them? And why was he willing to talk to me so frankly about it?