The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

by Allison Hoover Bartlett

  We passed the rare book shop of John Windle, who had been helpful months earlier when I consulted him about the seventeenth-century German botanical text, the book that had captured my curiosity and led me to Gilkey and Sanders. I was sure Windle would recognize me and, I feared, also Gilkey as we passed his shop, so I turned and looked the other way so that I wouldn’t have to explain myself.

  These are small, quiet shops, places where one customer is the norm, two is busy, and three feels bustling. Gilkey and I arrived at the door to Brick Row almost immediately. We walked in and faced two men, John Crichton, the owner, standing near the rear, and an employee sitting at a desk near the entrance. Did they recognize Gilkey? Would they call the police?

  I wondered how Gilkey would react if they did. During a prior meeting, when I had asked him what he was up to, expecting to hear about books he was reading, or the research he was always doing, or his almost daily visits to the library, he reported a new problem.

  “I just gotta be careful about what I say ’cause a couple of the book dealers are doing repeat complaints, tryin’ to get me in trouble.”

  According to Gilkey, at his weekly parole meeting, his probation officer told him that an autograph dealer in New York named Roger Gross had alerted the police about a postcard he had spotted for sale on eBay. (In fact, Sanders had spotted it.) The postcard was signed by nineteenth-century composer Johannes Brahms, and Gilkey had stolen it from Gross a few years earlier (but the police, not having proof—since Gross hadn’t yet reported it missing—had returned it to Gilkey after the Treasure Island raid).

  The week before his probation meeting, Gilkey had sold the Brahms postcard to a Colorado autograph dealer, Tod Mueller, but felt exempt from culpability. “I guess the guy [Roger Gross] was already reimbursed for the loss and he wanted his property back,” Gilkey said to me, shaking his head in disbelief. In a bizarre, but what I was beginning to grasp as typical, distancing of himself from his crimes, he said, “Now, to me, I wasn’t even involved. Gross wanted it from the guy who purchased it from me. Somehow my name came up.”

  Somehow? Once Gilkey had rid himself of the postcard, he felt that he should also be rid of all blame.

  Inside Brick Row, natural light streamed through the windows, illuminating books sitting in cases along every wall and under windows, and on a graceful arc of shelves that ran through the middle of the shop. It was a quiet refuge from the city streets below, and if you ignored the computer and phone on Crichton’s heavy oak desk, it could be a nineteenth-century bookshop. Thousands of majestic leather-bound books, many with gold lettering, caught the light as I walked by. Given Gilkey’s Victorian library fantasies, I could see why he favored this shop, why he chose to bring me there. Unlike Sanders’s shop in Salt Lake City, Brick Row was tidy and appeared highly ordered. I got the sense that only serious collectors would venture inside, in contrast to Sanders’s shop, where collectors mingled with people in search of a good used paperback (he offered a selection at the back of the store). The doors of the locked bookcases on the right-hand wall near the entrance had metal screens in a crosshatch pattern that made deciphering titles a challenge. These cases contained some of Crichton’s more valuable books. A film-maker would do well to use Brick Row as a set for a gentleman’s fine library. “More classier feel than some of the other bookstores that just rack them up in average bookcases,” is how Gilkey had described it.

  Crichton spoke from behind his desk. “May I help you?” His question seemed to ask much more. He was looking hard at Gilkey.

  “I’m not here to buy anything,” said Gilkey congenially, “just to look around, if that’s okay. We’re just here to look.”

  No answer.

  Crichton stood facing us. He was in his fifties, with white hair, a ruddy complexion, and clear blue eyes. He had an assured air and seemed to be the kind of person who rarely had the wool pulled over his eyes.

  Gilkey referred to his list of the Modern Library’s “100 Best Novels,” and explained to me how he often looks for books on it. He pointed to the name Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  “Do you have any Hawthorne?” Gilkey asked Crichton.

  Crichton answered curtly, “No.”

  “I know he has one,” Gilkey whispered to me.

  His comment was a hint at his antagonism toward dealers, which he had made plain in our prior meetings. He’d argued that there was, in fact, widespread fraud among rare book sellers, fraud that made him not only blameless but also a victim.

  One example Gilkey had cited was rebinding. Dealers, he explained, would remove the cover and title page from a second or later edition of a book, and then rebind it with a title page from a first edition that was in poor condition.

  “They make it look like a first edition, first printing,” he said. “That’s part of the fraud they do. That’s actually legal.”

  Later, I learned that there was nothing legal about this practice, but that it was not uncommon. The more expensive the book, the more likely it is that someone may have tampered with the binding. Such fraud is hardly new. In the eighteenth century, for example, facsimiles of pages, or “leaves,” of ancient texts were sometimes created by hand, and to near-perfect effect. Of course, these efforts did not always go undetected, particularly when the pages were printed on eighteenth-century paper with an identifiable watermark. Even now, dealers come across pages of books that have been washed to give them a uniform appearance. Reputable dealers judiciously examine books for telltale signs of rebinding, but there are less upstanding dealers who don’t. “You see a lot of that sort of thing on eBay,” one dealer remarked, “but you’ll never see it from an ABAA member. They’d be kicked out of the organization.”

  As we inched down Brick Row’s bookshelves, Gilkey pointed to another book on his list. “Kurt Vonnegut,” he said. “I’d like something from him, too. And D. H. Lawrence. He’s also good.”

  Crichton looked stunned and turned his back to us, then turned around again to face Gilkey. A few seconds later, while Gilkey was explaining to me which books he might like to look for, Crichton asked, “What’s your name?”

  “John.”

  John—as though Crichton would be satisfied with a first name! I looked down at my notes while my heartbeat threatened to drown out everything around me.

  “John what?”

  “Gilkey.”

  Crichton waited a moment, glanced down at his desk, then looked up. He didn’t take his eyes off us as Gilkey pointed to various books and whispered, as one does in a library or museum, informing me about additional authors he was interested in: Vladimir Nabokov, Willa Cather. He commented that he stays away from Bibles.

  “And who are you?” Crichton asked me.

  I explained that I was a journalist writing a story about book collectors. Crichton stared a moment. He seemed to be trying to decipher the situation. He handed me his business card and asked me to call him.

  “For further interviews, if you’d like,” he offered.

  I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I was desperate to explain myself to Crichton, and also to hear what he had to say in Gilkey’s absence.

  Surveying a row of ancient-looking tomes, resplendent with gilt titles, Gilkey said, “I think in the last ten years, a lot of rare books have just skyrocketed. If I was going to buy, I’d probably be looking for something like Salman Rushdie and Jack London and Booth Tarkington.

  “See these cases,” he said, pointing to the wall of locked cases with metal screens. “You can’t really see through them.” After trying to peer through, Gilkey said, “I think they have mostly nineteenth-century literature here, so no Kurt Vonnegut.”

  My tape recorder was running, and I took notes, but sporadically. I couldn’t concentrate through the tension, and prayed the tape recorder was getting it all. Crichton came closer. I realized that he might be thinking that I, too, might be a thief, because as a reporter, I was asking too few questions. I was letting Gilkey go on, undirected.

  “Ho
w is the shop organized?” I asked Crichton.

  Curtly, he waved his hand in one direction. “These three or four tiers are nineteenth-century English literature.” He waved it in another. “That’s twentieth-century, English and American,” he said. “And there’s some other, more valuable first editions over here, organized the same way. Everything behind here is . . . uh . . . reference . . . Uh—sorry,” he said, clearly distracted, “I’m right in the middle of doing several things today, so why don’t you give me your number so I can call you. I do a lot of interviews with people.”

  In a tone that was somewhat louder, Gilkey then told me how at age nine he bought his first rare book, a first edition of The Human Comedy by William Saroyan, published in 1943, for $60, an unlikely story from the start. “And what happened was they actually cheated me,” he said. “I found out six or seven years ago that it wasn’t a first edition, first printing, which is how they sold it. So that’s why I do a lot of research with bibliographies, check the details.”

  Not only was Gilkey’s voice louder, but it had also taken on a bravado I had heard before, when he’d described thefts he’d gotten away with. He started in on another story, about buying a $3,500 book that was supposed to have been sent with a dust jacket, but wasn’t, which made its value drop by half.

  Gilkey had made a habit of sharing grievances with me during our meetings. He once told me that in his research, he had come across several companies that sell library books.

  “I’ve been researching this at the library, because it coincides with some of my work. I was looking under certain titles and I kept coming up with ‘missing,’ ‘missing.’ The librarian said people are stealing books from the library.”

  Gilkey said this with indignation and explained his theory: “Book dealers are paying people to steal them. I think they’re having someone go in and check the book out and not return it.”

  There may in fact be a few sleazy book dealers paying equally sleazy scouts to do dirty work in libraries, but I found no record of such activity, and libraries sometimes sell collections, which is how dealers often acquire them. If dealers are offered a book stamped with the mark of the library but not the “De-accessioned” stamp that should accompany it, they will contact the library to make sure the volume is not stolen. Gilkey’s suggestion was in keeping with his general tendency to implicate anyone he might have victimized.

  Gilkey continued to rail against the book trade throughout our meetings, and yet, as a reporter, I was in no position to contradict him. But sometimes it was hard to hold my tongue, as when Gilkey said, “It’s a very frustrating thing for me, because I just wanted to check out a bunch of those first-edition books at the library, just out of curiosity, and they were missing.”

  Just out of curiosity? Did he consider me a fool?

  “Have you ever taken a book from the library?” I asked.

  Gilkey looked incredulous. “No,” he said. “That would be stealing.”

  I had no idea what to say.

  At Brick Row, the soft green carpet was lush, the kind of flooring that generously accepts your footsteps and makes them inaudible. It encourages quiet talk, but in an even louder voice, Gilkey went on to describe buying books at book fairs, only to discover later that he’d been cheated. It was obvious that these stories were for Crichton’s ears as much as mine, and it pained me to listen.

  We continued a few feet farther down the shelf.

  “Theodore Dreiser,” said Gilkey. “He’s another one. He wrote The Financier, and they might have a copy.” He scanned the nearest shelf.

  My hands began to tremble. I dropped my pen.

  Gilkey seemed to be enjoying himself. This was a dream of his, I realized, to show off rare books and broadcast his knowledge of them. “Here is my ideal world, here is what I know,” he seemed to be saying to me. “And here is what I will one day own.”

  Gilkey walked a couple of steps to his right, where there were a few maps mounted on cardboard and covered in plastic. “A lot of stores also have maps, too. Here’s one of San Francisco,” he said, reaching for one, then adding in a raised voice, “What they do is, I guess they rip them out of books.”

  I avoided looking at Crichton so I wouldn’t have to see his response.

  Gilkey peered through the metal grate of one of the bookcases again. “Then there are certain books that an average collector will never be able to get, like Edgar Allan Poe. Books like that no one’s going to be able to buy unless you’re a top-tier collector, or your family happened to have one.”

  Crichton stared at us from his desk, where he stood. How much longer would Gilkey go on?

  Gilkey and I had met many times over the past several months, and each time, after describing various tribulations, he would jump from one big idea to another. I had the sense he had been waiting a long time to talk to someone. One idea was related to the Modern Library’s list of “100 Best Novels.” He called the project “100 Books, 100 Paintings.” He wanted to publish a book in which a scene from each of the one hundred novels would be illustrated. To keep his costs down, he was planning to hire just one artist. First he said he would read each book and give the artist instructions, but then he admitted that he might not read them all; he would just ask someone about them instead.

  I was starting to comprehend just how curious and imaginative Gilkey was, but also how quickly his hunger for information was sated. This characteristic mirrored his collecting habits: he was not dedicated to one author or one period or one subject. As soon as he’d snagged a twentieth-century American mystery, he was on to a nineteenth-century English novel. He thieved across genres the way a distracted reader might peruse shelves in a library, running his finger along the spines, stopping at whatever caught his eye, then moving on.

  I had tried turning the talk to work, which Gilkey had conspicuously omitted from our conversations. This absence was as baffling to me as his justifications of his crimes. His vision of the future never included a way to earn money. Again, hoping I might bring this omission to his attention, I asked about his plans for finding a job.

  “Work?” asked Gilkey. “Actually, they do have an opening at a bookstore.”

  Of course.

  Gesturing toward the locked cases near the entrance to Brick Row, Gilkey whispered, “I guess these are some of the really rare books in here.” Then, much more audibly, probably so that Crichton would hear: “I think probably the best bookstore I ever went to was Heritage in L.A. They have like twenty of these cases. Sometimes I’d just go in the bookstore, when I was doing that,” he said, referring to stealing books, “and I would call in an order, just pick it up. First, I’d take a quick look at the bibliography just to make sure I wasn’t getting cheated. ’Cause I have been cheated several times by legitimate book dealers when I was a legitimate book buyer.”

  I was tempted to ask when he was ever a legitimate buyer, but didn’t.

  “And a lot of times dealers advertise that they won’t take returns,” continued Gilkey with more outrageous claims. “Those are the ones that belong to a specific organization. They have certain ethics that they have to follow. Couple times I bought books at a book fair. Then I called up the dealer and said, ‘You said this was a first edition, and it wasn’t,’ but he said I couldn’t return it. It was just the frustration of it. I guess I got a little upset trying to be a collector, buy things legitimately, and then I was getting cheated.”

  Gilkey sighed. At last, he had run out of steam. “So, I guess we’re done here,” he said.

  I thanked Crichton and mumbled something about getting in touch soon, then headed out the door with my tape recorder, shoddy notes, and an immense sense of relief.

  On the elevator ride down from Brick Row, I asked Gilkey, who spent more time in Union Square than I, where he recommended we have lunch. He suggested the café at Neiman Marcus, only about a block away. With high ceilings, glass walls, and pale wood and steel furniture, the café was a departure from our usual meeting pla
ce, the drab Café Fresco. Gilkey took a seat opposite me at the small table, slipped off his baseball cap, and ran a black plastic comb over the top of his head, following through with the palm of his hand. It wasn’t an Elvis-like move executed with swagger, but something more tentative, self-conscious, an almost apologetic attempt to make himself presentable. It’s a gesture you almost never see done anymore, especially by a fairly young man, and it served as a reminder to me that Gilkey is unlike anyone I know. Looking around, I was relieved that the café was patronized mostly by tourists and people who worked nearby. It was unlikely I would run into any friends and have to explain my companion. What would I say? “This is the thief I’ve been telling you about”?

  Gilkey and I had established a routine, and our roles, interviewer, interviewee, were beginning to feel familiar. Still, there was a stilted formality to our conversations. Usually, I tried for an easy, friendly rapport with people I interviewed, but in Gilkey’s case I welcomed the defined borders that formality drew.

  “I guess that was kinda tense,” he said with a chuckle. He seemed invigorated by our trip to Brick Row. “I didn’t know if he was going to call the police or something. Did you hear him whisper something in the back? He was probably telling the guy not to show me anything. But I wasn’t doing anything wrong. That’s why I told him I wasn’t there to buy, just to look.”

  That Crichton would still be incensed about Gilkey’s stealing from him hadn’t occurred to him. He seemed happy that our trip to Brick Row had gone so well.

  “He was kinda rude, but I guess kinda a gentleman, too. I was really surprised he remembered me. I’ve only met him like twice,” said Gilkey, referring to a visit to Crichton’s booth at the 2003 book fair in San Francisco and later, at Brick Row, when he tried to sell the Winnie-the-Pooh books. He hadn’t considered that the crime he’d committed against Crichton might have cemented those two meetings in Crichton’s memory.