The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

by Allison Hoover Bartlett

  The next week, several times, I called the California inmate locator service to see if Gilkey was back in prison, but he wasn’t. I called his mother’s house, where his sister Tina answered the phone and told me she didn’t know where he was. But I knew from Gilkey that the two of them were in frequent contact; I doubted she was telling me the truth.

  Eventually, Gilkey called me and agreed to meet again, suggesting the Olive Garden in the Stonestown Shopping Center. Over a pizza, Gilkey explained that because he had stopped going to his weekly parole meetings, he was now a fugitive, a “parolee at large,” but he couldn’t have been happier. He had bought a new laptop, which he showed me, and said he was taking classes at “a nearby college” that he was reluctant to name because he wanted his whereabouts kept secret. He told me he was enrolled in a class on the philosophy of Nietzsche, whom he had mentioned as an interest before, and was particularly taken with what he described as Nietzsche’s idea that if a law or system is unjust, to break it down, to go against it, is not wrong. Apparently, the unfair system Gilkey had in mind was one under which he cannot afford what he wants while others can. There are books that cost more than Gilkey can pay, or wants to pay, so he steals them. It’s a correction to the system.

  Gilkey said he had a part-time job at the waterfront, but wouldn’t give me any details. Living off a part-time job in an expensive city like San Francisco while staying in a hotel, however fleabag-ish, is no easy feat. I asked him what he was living on.

  “I spent eighteen dollars yesterday,” he said. “Then I got a Lotto ticket and won nineteen, so I actually finished ahead. . . . I figure I’ve got good luck now. It’s time for a jack-pot.” He was full of energy and optimism. “What a story that would be! I win a hundred million dollars in the lottery and buy a rare book shop.”

  I had the sense he was offering me an ending to the book I had told him I was working on. It would not be the first time he had done this, nor would it be the last. The next time we met, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking that by the time you’re done with the book, maybe I’ll have read all the one hundred best novels, and maybe I’ll hire an artist to do the work, and I’ll have a show. That would be a good way to finish it.”

  After giving that idea some thought, he added, “Unless I do something bad or something . . . but I don’t think so.”

  “Have you been in any trouble lately?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “I haven’t had time.”

  WHILE GILKEY WAS still on parole and living, as far as I knew, in a cheap motel in San Francisco, I drove to his family’s house in Modesto to meet his mother, Cora, and sister Tina, a meeting he had helped arrange.

  The Gilkeys live in a neighborhood of ranch-style houses with modest lawns bordered by rows of tall liquidambar trees shedding piles of leaves onto the sidewalks. It seems like the kind of town that thirty years ago rang with the sounds of bicycle bells and hollering mothers. I walked through the front door and into the dim living room, where every corner, wall, table, and shelf was hectic with collections. In one corner sat brass candlesticks, in another, English porcelain, “not like the cheap Chinese knockoffs,” Gilkey’s mother pointed out. There were Filipino fabrics, silver spoons, dolls from around the world, Norman Rockwell plates, salt and pepper shakers. Gilkey had said that his mother wasn’t a big collector, but I doubt he had been trying to hide the fact; it had simply never occurred to him to think of her that way. To amass large quantities of similar objects, to collect, was like sitting down to dinner in his family: one didn’t stop to take notice of something so natural.

  Cora was a petite Filipino woman in her eighties with clear brown eyes and the slender, unlined hands of someone much younger. Her hearing was going, and her voice faltered, but her intellect and memory were sharp. After inviting me to take a seat on a dark leather couch that took up much of the room, she told me about how she had met her husband, the father of their eight children, in Okinawa while he was a serviceman, how they had moved to Sacramento, then there, to the house in Modesto, where collections of objects multiplied alongside their growing family.

  “I got a lot of antique cups,” she said in slightly broken English, pointing to a collection as she led me around the house. “And bells, brass, books, clocks. John says it will be worth something. . . . Here’s a collection of cameos. John says to me, ‘Don’t sell it now.’ . . . I love collecting Chinese engraved silver. Hummels. That’s English, too. You go in the store, they don’t look like that anymore. John gave this to me, a candle. And that, he gave that to me,” she said, pointing to a brass candlestick. “You see all those angels there? John buy me all those angels. I got a lot of things. I told them [John and Tina], ‘Don’t let the others [siblings] get them.’ When I’m gone, it’s got to be divvied. But now they [the siblings] don’t even come see me. . . . One of my daughters already grab a whole station wagon and fill it with my old hats. Patricia did that.”

  “My mom had these old hats from the sixties,” Tina explained.

  “I said to Patricia,” remembered Cora, “‘Help yourself with this hat,’ but she took all of them.”

  We walked into the family room. “You see: books, books, books,” said Cora. “All those are Franklin Mint books up above there. Crimes and Punishment. The old crimes, the old cases. Down below, piles of books down there. A lot of them are his, wrapped in plastic,” she said of her son. “And there is his metal detector to find coins.”

  When we sat down to talk, Cora was eager to tell me about John. When she recalled him as a boy, she laughed. “He created stories and then just talked from his head!” she said. “And he loves to read. He can finish a whole book in one day or one night. . . . He has so many different collections and movie posters. He orders it, buys it, and knows he’s gonna make a profit. So he makes money.” She was awash in maternal pride. “You seen him lately? Oh! He’s big. And well built. And one thing about him, of all my boys, he’s the one with the real good posture. Always straight. My other sons, they don’t have that.”

  Tina sat in an armchair at a distance from Cora and me, and seemed to be weighing whether or not she should join the conversation. Even with barely perceptible Asian features, like her brother, she strongly resembled their mother. Eventually, she told me how her brother liked to playact as a young boy. He would stand there, in the living room, make up stories for the family and tape them. Echoing her mother, she said, “They were often funny.”

  When I broached the subject of Gilkey’s thieving, however, the laughing stopped. I asked how they thought he had gotten into so much trouble with the law, and Cora tried to convince me that he had been wronged.

  “I mean, it’s innocent. Maybe he was just wandering around or looking around with the book, and he must have forgot about it, and then he got caught,” she said.

  I wondered whether she was deluded about her son’s criminal activities or was trying to delude me.

  “His father,” said Cora, her eyes darting in Tina’s direction, “I think it was his influence.” She nodded toward Tina, waiting for her daughter’s agreement, but Tina was having nothing to do with this line of speculation. Cora went on. She suggested John’s father’s desire to live profligately influenced him, in fact forced him into trouble with the law. She looked again to Tina for confirmation, but Tina shook her head in disagreement. Cora then explained how when her husband left her, he took then nineteen-year-old John with him.

  “I understand what his father deprived me of,” Cora said sadly. “My youngest.”

  It was the one theft she did not shellac with misunderstood intentions.

  If Cora or Tina had aided Gilkey with his stealing, they were not saying. I knew from my reading, though, that book thieves have often enlisted the help of family members. In one case, in Denmark in 2003, Copenhagen police found a trove of rare books, documents, and maps in the basement of a sixty-eight-year-old woman. She was the widow of a philologist who had worked in the Danish Royal Library’s Oriental Collection.
Between the late 1960s and 1978, it turned out, he had moved books off the library’s shelves and onto his own. Police grew suspicious of the woman, her son, and her daughter-in-law when they attempted to sell several books, including the only existing copy of a 1517 volume belonging to the Royal Library, through Christie’s in London. Among the books stolen were works by John Milton, Martin Luther, Immanuel Kant, and the astronomer Tycho Brahe. At the time of the theft announcement in 2003, only 1,800 of the 3,200 missing books had been recovered, and at least a hundred had already been auctioned, including a first edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, which sold for the equivalent of $244,500 .1

  Cora and Tina asked if I’d like to see some photos of Gilkey when he was young. They were organized somewhat randomly, so that a photo of Gilkey at age six might be next to one when he was a teen, opposite a page of older siblings’ baby pictures. The pastel sixties mingled with the round-cornered seventies and flat-finished eighties.

  “Do you want to see his father’s picture?” Cora asked. She led me to the hallway, papered with portraits of their large family. The resemblance between John and his father was faint. His father had a lighter complexion, a fuller face. Cora and Tina showed me through the rest of the house. They pointed out some of Gilkey’s prized possessions, including an oil painting of flowers.

  “John wanted to make sure you saw that,” said Cora, “so we put it up here.”

  So Gilkey had been setting the stage for my arrival. He wanted me to see him as someone who appreciated the finer things in life.

  We turned a corner in the narrow hallway. “This is John’s room,” said Cora. “Come inside. And look at these books here!”

  Tina joined us. She held up a slick new coffee-table book on wine that sat on his dresser atop several other large new books.

  I looked around and felt urgently that I shouldn’t be there, in Gilkey’s bedroom. His shoes were neatly lined up on the floor and artwork he had collected hung on the walls. Ceramic frogs, which they told me he had also collected for years, sat on his shelves. I made a move to leave, but his mother motioned toward the closet, which she opened.

  “See how he keeps his things? Neat,” she said. “And look, more books!”

  Yes, more books. Stacks and stacks of them below and above the jackets, shirts, and pants that hung from the rod. Their spines faced the back of the closet, as if in hiding. This seemed the most private, most intimate corner of Gilkey’s room, but instead of looking inside to see if I recognized any of the books he had stolen, I turned away. It was like being invited to view a ghastly scar, something awful but riveting. I was afraid of what I would find if I drew the books from the pile, what degree of crime, and what responsibility I might bear in knowing the books were there. Later, I would curse my lack of courage.

  IN DECEMBER, I met Gilkey at Café Fresco. The interview didn’t last long. I had a few questions, some facts to confirm, but soon thereafter, a janitor plodded by with her roaring vacuum cleaner. The noise made audiotaping impossible, so I suggested we end the interview and meet again soon. We both started to pack up, and I turned off my tape recorder. Gilkey held up a paperback to show me.

  “I checked this out of the library,” he said over the drone of the vacuum, “so that they wouldn’t notice a pattern.”

  I didn’t recognize the title. I also didn’t understand. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I usually check out classics,” he said.

  “And?” I asked, still confused.

  “See,” he said, “I took three dust jackets off classics, you know, to send to their authors for autographs.”

  I was no longer confused.

  “And a map,” he added. “I cut one out of a book.”

  So much for not stealing from the library.

  It was bound to happen. Imagine a jewel thief walking into Tiffany’s and having all but the most valuable diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds sitting on velvet-lined trays out in the open. So it must be for a book thief walking into a library, especially since first editions can still be found in the open stacks.

  When Gilkey told me about taking a map and dust jackets from the library, it was the first time he had confessed recent thefts to me—the others he’d pulled off years before. I assumed the dust jackets were not valuable, but what if I was mistaken? And what about the map? I had read about a New England map expert who had been charged with slicing millions of dollars’ worth of ancient maps from libraries’ collections. I doubted that Gilkey’s nicked map was from a very valuable book, but again, what if I was wrong? Was this the kind of treasure I had been hoping to uncover? I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I hadn’t expected to take on the role of confessor, and I worried about the implications. Was I obligated to inform the police? What about the library? And which library? If I decided not to share this information yet, how would librarians and book dealers respond once they found out?

  I consulted a couple of friends who are lawyers. After providing the caveat that they weren’t criminal attorneys, they told me they were fairly sure that I had no legal obligation to inform authorities unless the crimes had or would physically endanger someone. Later, my literary agent’s attorney echoed their opinions.

  But what about ethical responsibility? The difference between the two was as blurry as my role, which had shifted from observer to participant in Gilkey’s story. Did I owe this information to dealers, who had been so helpful with my research? But if I notified them of these thefts, wouldn’t Gilkey keep all future and possibly more significant thefts from me? Furthermore, would he then never tell me where the misbegotten books were stashed? I found myself teetering between selfishness and benevolence: either reveal the secrets Gilkey had shared with me, probably losing access to him and possibly sending him to jail, or keep them to myself and be unjust to his victims. I tried to reassure myself that such consequences were not directly my responsibility.

  Two months later, still undecided about what to do with this information, I called the FBI. I read that they had been involved in cases of rare book theft and I wanted to learn how many they pursued annually, which types of cases they took on, what sorts of trends they encountered, and so on. I was granted a telephone interview with Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, who heads the Art Crime Team responsible for rare book theft investigations. I explained what I was interested in and why. She was not able to provide me with statistics regarding the total number of rare book thefts in recent years, but said that the agency became interested in cases involving interstate transportation of stolen books worth over $5,000 that were uniquely identifiable.

  “Then,” she said, “it could become a matter for the FBI,” adding, “but there’s a five-year statute of limitations.”

  I remembered the $9,500 set of travel books Gilkey stole in New York and, crossing state lines, brought into California.

  “You’d tell me,” said the FBI agent, “if the book thief had stolen anything, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, trying to sound convincing, “Of course.”

  As soon as I got off the phone, I dug through my notes. When had Gilkey stolen the set? I couldn’t remember. And when had he told me? Had I waited too long to notify the police? Or now the FBI? Frantically, I flipped through thick binders of transcripts.

  I dug and dug, and eventually I found it.

  Gilkey had stolen the books in May of 2001, and had first informed me in September 2006, a little over five years after the fact. I was clear. But I was also stuck on the fact that Gilkey had told me of the theft just four months after the period of time in which he could have been prosecuted for it ended, even though we had been meeting for almost two years. Was he shrewd or, once again, just plain lucky?

  14

  The Devil’s Walk

  During a trip to New York, I visited the Morgan Library and Museum. I had read about J. P. Morgan’s private collection and wanted to see it up close. I was also eager to see a new exhibit, Federico da Montefeltro and His Library. Formed in the fifteenth
century, his was the richest Italian Renaissance library to be owned by a single private collector.1 It usually resides in the Vatican, but several prized pieces from the collection were on loan to the Morgan. Montefeltro, the illegitimate son of a count, had soldiered and studied his way to the lofty position of duke. Judging from what I saw and read, he probably cherished his books, but without doubt he loved displaying them for others. He had housed the library near the entrance of his palace in Urbino, allowing his books to be admired by many, even if only a few had the privilege of actually reading them. He was also in the habit of showing off his two-volume Bible, which according to one scholar served to “proclaim his identity as a Christian humanist prince.”2 Mere ownership as evidence of identity—Gilkey would, no doubt, agree. The exhibit was on display in a small gallery where the walls were hung with fine portraits, and where glass cases held six-hundred-year-old manuscripts and illuminations, but I found the most intriguing pieces to be the large digital reproductions of several wood panels the duke had ordered for his studiolo. Made of intricate inlay, these wooden trompe l’oeils were realistic depictions of cabinets with shelves full of books and musical and scientific objects: an astrolabe, a mechanical clock, an organ, a clavichord. Each was symbolic individually, and collectively they formed a tableau of the duke’s erudition and culture. While Montefeltro was an impressive man of means and power and Gilkey is not, standing in that small gallery, I couldn’t help wondering if either of them would have collected books if they hadn’t had an audience to appreciate them—or in Gilkey’s case, dreams of a future audience. In this and many other respects, I came to understand that Gilkey is typical of many book collectors. It is his crimes and his unwavering, narcissistic justification of them that sets him apart.