The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

by Allison Hoover Bartlett

  At another booth, a dealer told me the story of a famous prank. There was a pair of books, one by Hemingway, another by Thomas Wolfe. Each had written a long inscription to the other. A knowledgeable dealer had to inform the unfortunate owner who had just paid a pretty penny for them that the inscriptions were not authentic, and that the value was not what he had hoped. Later, another dealer discovered that they were spectacular forgeries: Wolfe had written Hemingway’s inscription, and Hemingway, Wolfe’s.16

  As I made my way through the fair, I heard many stories of another kind—tales of theft—that whetted my appetite for meeting Sanders. Bruce McKittrick, the dealer who’d told me about the “fake of a fake” Aretino, directed me to a curly-haired man he said was “a very good guy.”

  The very good guy was Alain Moirandat, a tall, slender, articulate dealer from Switzerland. Even in a crowd of erudite, bookish people, he stood out. In the first few minutes of our conversation, he mentioned Nietzsche, Goethe, and Florentine architects. From a glass case, he retrieved a manuscript, unbound, in a shallow box. He had acquired it at auction in 2004, where it had been described simply as “a full work of Flaubert, 254 pages.” It had been priced “idiotically low,” said Moirandat. “I was desperate. Like many in this business, I’m undercapitalized, but it was so ridiculously cheap. I think people must have misread the description, maybe thought it was only twenty-five pages. I decided to put in a bid. . . . I got it at half the price.”

  He opened the box and, to my surprise, invited me to leaf through the slightly yellowed pages. They were written in brown ink, which had faded somewhat, as had the drips and splatters, and many lines had been aggressively crossed out. Moirandat said it was a piece Flaubert supposedly wrote while traveling, although he doubted it.

  “I’m convinced he didn’t write it on the trip. It’s too well formed.”

  He read a passage aloud in French, then translated it roughly for me.

  “I will abstain from every declamation and I will not allow myself more than six times per page to use the word ‘picturesque’ and only a dozen times the word ‘admirable.’ I want my sentences to smell of the leather of my traveling shoes . . .”

  “It is like peeking in the workshop,” sighed Moirandat, looking over my shoulder at the manuscript.

  I had to agree. Its unfinished state, with words scratched out and ink spilled, gave it an immediate, intimate quality. Moirandat left me with the manuscript for a few minutes while he helped a customer. I touched the pages and realized how much I would love to own something like it. This is how it happens, I thought. I could slip these sheets under my sweater and make a dash for the door. As I waited for Moirandat to return, I noticed other handsome items he had left on the counter. He was not acting carelessly. Almost every dealer I’d visited so far had done this. When Moirandat returned, I had to stop myself from suggesting he not be so trusting. I might as well suggest to a Japanese host that guests keep their shoes on. Trust was clearly part of the rare book trade’s culture, and who was I to suggest resisting it?

  When I asked Moirandat if he had ever suffered a theft, he told me how he once traveled to Germany in pursuit of a thief who had taken a volume from his store in Basel. When Moirandat caught up with him, the thief denied he had been in Basel at the time of the theft. But Moirandat knew his books’ physical markings as intimately as a parent knows a child’s freckles and scars. In court, he told the judge, who held the book in question, to turn to page 28. “You will find three small holes there, and if you go to the last page, you will find my predecessor’s entry mark.” The judge did, and the suspect, a public school teacher, was convicted.

  Moirandat also told me about a man who had used the “wet string” method.

  “He went one day to the library with a length of wool yarn hidden in his cheek. He placed the wet yarn inside a book, along the spine,” he said. “He put the book back on the shelf and came back a few weeks later. As the yarn dried, it grew shorter, which made a clean cut.”

  The thief didn’t have to smuggle a razor in. A length of wet yarn was all he needed to walk away with one valuable page: an original Manet print. Later, he went to Moirandat’s shop and tried to sell him a book. “It was the absolute rarest Goethe first edition that there is on the cathedral in Salzburg. It’s one of the really, really great texts by Goethe, seminal to the development of romanticism. It had a round library stamp, eighteen millimeters in diameter, which he had tried to erase. I could see the stamp, but couldn’t tell which library it was from. I called up every Swiss library until I found where it was from.” The police were notified, and the man, thief of Manet and Goethe, was caught.

  I walked away thinking it’s a wonder this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time.

  I passed McKittrick’s booth again, and he motioned for me to wait a moment while he quickly crossed the aisle to speak with dealer Sebastiaan Hesselink of the Netherlands. When McKittrick had told me earlier about the pirated fake Aretino, I had asked him about other crimes in the trade, like theft. He hadn’t had any stories for me, which is why he was now talking to Hesselink. McKittrick asked him if he would speak to me about, he whispered, the theft. He would, so McKittrick introduced us. I guessed that not all dealers might be willing to share a story of theft, so I felt fortunate that Hesselink had agreed to it. While his son manned their booth, Hesselink and I left the fair floor and sat on folding chairs in a dark, quiet hallway off the foyer.

  In a distinctive Dutch accent, Hesselink described how several years earlier, a man had called him and asked if he would be interested in some very rare items, including a Book of Hours and letters from several American presidents. Hesselink was interested, but as soon as he saw the books, he became suspicious. He lives in the countryside outside Amsterdam, “in the middle of nowhere,” yet here was a man from New York who had traveled that great distance to sell him books that could have been sold easily in the United States.

  “This was already fishy,” said Hesselink, who said he became more cautious than usual.

  He looked at all the materials and made an offer, which the man immediately accepted. This, too, was strange, he said. In order to stall, Hesselink told the man that because the banks had already closed, he could write a check, knowing that the man would prefer cash, and then suggested they meet the next day, when Hesselink would be able to offer it. Immediately after the man left, Hesselink contacted colleagues in the United States to see if they knew of any stolen books that resembled what he had just been offered. It took only hours to discover that all of the materials had been stolen from Columbia University. Hesselink contacted Interpol, the FBI, and local Dutch authorities, and they set up a sting for four o’clock the next day in the town’s public square.

  The story seemed straight out of a mystery novel, and my favorite detail was yet to come: That night, Hesselink and his son cut stacks of newspaper into rectangles the size of gilder notes and put bundles of them—the “payment”—into a plastic garbage bag. At four the next day, the man arrived in Utrecht’s central square with his bag of loot. Police, in bullet-proof vests, had surrounded the area. Hesselink suggested that the man accompany him to Hesselink’s car, where the payment was. After a number of Keystone Kops-style blunders by local police, they managed to arrest him. Prosecuting him would turn out to be even more problematic.17

  I asked Hesselink if he was frightened while handing over the bag of “money,” since the man could have been armed and the police might not have acted fast enough, but he said he was calm. I was impressed. This was not, after all, a seasoned detective, but a rare book dealer playing James Bond for a day. I left the hallway where we’d talked and headed back into the fair, with yet another story to add to the growing collection in my notebook. The excitement I felt hearing them, acquiring them, was akin, I guessed, to the excitement the most satisfied of collectors were feeling at the fair.

  If there had been any thefts that opening day, I figured that the fair manager would have got wind o
f them, so I stopped by his office to find out. He assured me not only that were there no thefts that day but also that they were uncommon at fairs. I wasn’t sure I should believe him. One of the things Ken Sanders had already told me is that part of the challenge in addressing the problem of rare book theft is the reluctance of many people to publicize it. It is irrelevant how cunningly the books may have been stolen; the assumption among the trade, and perhaps even more so among rare book librarians (whose books may have been donated), is that the victim wasn’t vigilant enough. Book dealers, who have been known to conduct millions of dollars’ worth of business through handshakes, sometimes feel that announcing losses would put them at risk of being blacklisted. “Once you’re tainted by theft,” McKittrick had explained to me, “you’re toast.” Because they are often entrusted with valuable, beloved books that collectors have hired them to sell, they don’t want to risk being seen as vulnerable.

  I had brought a slim notebook to the fair and already wished I’d brought a thicker one. Every dealer had a different story to tell. The only thing I heard more than once was, “Every rare book is a stolen book.” The Nazis were rampant pillagers of collections, dealers explained, as were the Romans, who stole whole libraries from the Greeks, and Queen Christina of Sweden, who collected a vast booty during the Thirty Years’ War.18 But they were referring also to thieves who act on their own behalf. Whether by the hands of conquerors or corrupt collectors, valuable books go missing, and unless a thief tries to sell a book to a reputable dealer or institution shortly after swiping it, they told me, there’s a good chance that no one will be able to track it down. Eventually, perhaps a year later, a decade later, a century later, the book is sold to someone who has no knowledge of its past, no idea of its tainted provenance. It is impossible to track the history of ownership of every book. This, I assumed, is something any clever book thief has figured out.

  I turned a corner and spotted Ken Sanders’s booth. I was eager to see the face of the impressive storyteller. He did not blend in with the rare book fair crowd any better than I. Sanders has an ample paunch, a thinning ponytail, and a long black-and-white beard that he strokes and twists between his thumb and fingers. His eyebrows form sharp inverted V’s over his eyes, making him look curious or indignant; I would soon learn that he very often is one or the other. While he has a suffer-no-fools way about him, if you’re interested in a book or a story, he has all the time in the world. He calls himself the “Book Cop.” His friends call him “Bibliodick.”

  We sat in two chairs at the edge of his booth and talked about how things were going at the fair.

  “In a fair like this,” he said, “I’m a bottom-feeder. Not like those up on Park Avenue.”

  That’s what Sanders called the aisles up near the front of the fair, which is prohibitively expensive for all but the high-end rare book dealers. Sanders, who told me he attends six to eight fairs a year, is an egalitarian and prefers the San Francisco fair, where a dealer’s booth location is decided by lottery. “A lot of New Yorkers hate it,” he said. “They’d rather have it be all elite. I like the mixture.” I mentioned the rumor that Al Pacino was shopping for books, but he was uninterested. He said that twice, at previous fairs, he had spoken to longtime collector Steve Martin (once, while almost backing into Diane Keaton), but hadn’t realized who Martin (or Keaton) was until his daughter, Melissa, exasperatedly informed him, twice.

  I asked how things were going.

  “We started unpacking at nine A.M. yesterday,” said Sanders. “Other dealers will help you unpack to see what you’ve got. So much depends on your knowledge, though.”

  He told me about a book he saw one dealer sell to another for $200 that morning, then watched the dealer resell it for $3,500 that afternoon. One dealer had recognized value where the other had not.

  We hadn’t been sitting for more than a couple of minutes when Sanders told me about the first New York fair he exhibited at.

  “Ten minutes into opening night, I lost a thousand-dollar book. And my friend Rob Rulon-Miller lost a book by Roger Williams worth thirty-five thousand. The two of us marched over to the Nineteenth Precinct, which is literally out the back door of the Armory. You can imagine a New York police precinct. And the two of us in suits over there. I let Rob go first.”

  Sanders explained that dealers are used to police scoffing at news of a stolen book, especially when it’s worth a lot of money. “People pay that for a book?” they ask skeptically.

  “Me, being the smart one,” continued Sanders, “I let Rob break the ice and explain to the sergeant on duty that we were there to report book thefts. When Rob gives him the details, the sergeant looks up at him, disbelievingly, and says, ‘Roger Williams? You talking about one of the guys who founded Rhode Island?’ He actually knew who the man was. I was very impressed. Then he says, ‘You let someone walk away with a first-edition Roger Williams?!’ And he looked at Rob like: You’re some kinda moron, right? After that, I decided my thousand-dollar book wasn’t worth making a fuss about.”

  Moving on to more recent crimes, Sanders said that based on all the theft notices he had received from fellow dealers, he estimates that from the end of 1999 to the beginning of 2003, John Gilkey stole about $100,000 worth of books from dealers around the country. In the past decade, no other thief has been anywhere near that prolific. What was even more unusual, though, was that none of the items Gilkey stole later showed up for sale on the Internet or at any other public venue. It was this, combined with the inconsistency of Gilkey’s targeted titles (spanning a wide variety of genres and time periods) and the fact that some of the books he stole were not very valuable, that had Sanders convinced that he actually stole for love. Gilkey loved the books and wanted to own them. But Sanders couldn’t prove it.

  Weeks earlier, when we had first spoken on the phone, Sanders had told me he was fairly certain that Gilkey had already served time at San Quentin State Prison and that he was now free. He shuddered at the thought, warning me that it would be difficult if not impossible to find Gilkey.

  The day after that phone conversation, I looked into it.19 As Sanders had presumed, Gilkey had indeed done time at San Quentin and had been released. What Sanders did not know was that he was again behind bars, this time in a prison in Tracy, California. I wrote Gilkey a letter asking if he would talk to me. Knowing that he had denied his thefts in court, I didn’t expect him to open up to me about them. In the letter, I told him that I was interested in writing a story about people who have gone to extraordinary lengths to get rare books. It was a euphemism I hoped would keep him from feeling defensive.

  While waiting for a reply, I ordered several books about book collecting and read a stack of articles. One of them, from The Age, an Australian newspaper, stuck with me because it indicated that book thievery was rampant.20 Why hadn’t I heard about this? Why hadn’t any of the friends I asked? The 2003 story was about how those in charge of the Secret Archives of the Vatican, an underground vault holding eighty-five kilometers of historical papers, illuminated manuscripts, antediluvian books, and rare correspondence, have to be on guard against thieves. This was intriguing enough, but there was one sentence in particular that caught my eye: an Interpol agent, Vivianna Padilla, revealed that according to the global police agency’s statistics, book theft is more widespread than fine art theft.

  Something else caught my attention. It was an online reference to the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America’s profiles of five types of book thieves: the kleptomaniac who cannot keep himself from stealing; the thief who steals for profit; the thief who steals in anger; the casual thief; and the thief who steals for his own personal use. The ABAA had defined them, I suppose, to help dealers and librarians recognize and protect against the range of motivations that might drive a thief. Know thine enemy. Of all these, the one that interested me most was the thief who steals for his own personal use—one who steals out of a desire for books. How different would such a person be from the typica
l book collector? They all seem to be passionate and driven by want. A few dealers had already confided to me that in decades of working with rare books, they had been tempted more than once to steal a book, but had found the strength to resist it. At the book fair, I saw how easy it could be to walk away with something truly unique and wondrous (Flaubert’s own papers!). What makes someone cross the line from admirer to thief, and how fine is that line? I wanted to find out.

  After several weeks of checking my mailbox, I found what I had been hoping for—an envelope stamped diagonally in large red letters: STATE PRISON GENERATED MAIL. Inside was a letter written in fine, small print on lined paper.

  Yes, wrote Gilkey, I would be delighted to tell my story.

  With the letter, he sent a page ripped from a Department of Corrections regulations handbook. He had drawn two stars next to the section titled “Media Access to Facilities” and written in the margin, It’s easy to get approved!

  SITTING OUTSIDE SANDERS’S BOOTH at the New York fair, I watched him talk to customers, some of whom he knew well, others not at all. In either case, he was an accommodating host, taking pleasure in sharing his books with people who appreciated them. Again, I had the impression that the book fair was a kind of theater, and Sanders, a seasoned player. When his booth emptied for a minute, he sat down next to me again.

  “Gilkey wrote to me from prison,” I decided to tell him, “and said he’s willing to speak with me.”

  For a moment, Sanders didn’t respond. I had expected him to be excited about the news, eager to hear the details (this, after all, was his big quarry), but instead he looked stern, incredulous. Before saying anything, he gave me a sideways glance.

  “You should ask him where all the books he stole are hidden,” he said, peevishly. “I bet he’s got a storage unit somewhere out in Modesto, where he’s from.” He stared at the floor a moment, then added, “He’s not going to tell you, of course.”