The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

by Allison Hoover Bartlett

  Gilkey had spent that summer in prison for violating parole (police finally caught up with him at his mother’s house), and in the fall of 2007, when he got out, we met a few more times. I wanted to ask him a question that had dogged me for months, a simple one to determine how knowledgeable and calculating, versus just plain lucky, he had been during his most active spree: Had he known that by stealing from different states, different counties, different police jurisdictions, he had made it more difficult for the court to convict him?

  “It did?” he asked, puzzled. He considered the fact for a moment. “Oh yes, I did know.”

  He was a lucky man.

  When I asked if he’d been aware of the FBI’s five-year limit on pursuing stolen books, which meant that the crimes he committed could no longer be prosecuted, he was equally surprised.

  Gilkey was lucky for yet another reason, although it took me some time to see it. As much as his passion wreaked havoc in his life, it gave shape and purpose to it. Often, when I told people his story, they would say, How sad. Here was a man who seemingly could not help himself from the very act that would put him in prison. I came to disagree. Such single-minded wanting is a lot like never-satisfied lust, a dream that won’t die, and working toward achieving it can give tremendous pleasure. While Gilkey had told me he was depressed in prison and said he would never want to go back, I began to see his “frequent flyer” status (as one prison official referred to it) as perhaps he saw it: the price he had to pay. Some pay for their success with soaring blood pressure or dissolved marriages. He paid with jail time. To me, Gilkey had come to seem a happy man with goals, ambition, and some measure of success. His only sacrifice was a series of forced pauses on the way to realizing his dream.

  One of the last times we met, as if feeling the urgency of time running out, Gilkey offered another idea for his future.

  “I could have a T-shirt made that says, ‘Will Work for Rare Books,’ ” he said. “There could be a picture of me wearing it over a suit. That might be good to include in your book.”

  That was not all.

  “I had a couple notes here. I was thinking maybe at the end of the book . . . and I think it’s a perfect ending, if the people who read it want to donate a book to me to keep me out of jail or something. I was thinking of something cheesy like that.”

  And then, “What do you think about bobble heads? Of famous writers? I’ve been doing research on copyright, and I thought maybe a limited edition of, like, a thousand bobble heads. I’d sell the books with them.”

  He was also hoping to visit ghost towns in New Mexico with a video camera and a metal detector. “I’d talk about the history a little and then try to search for treasure,” he said. He would record his experiences and broadcast them on the Internet.

  He was thinking about publishing books with expired copyrights now in the public domain. He speculated that Booth Tarkington’s Magnificent Ambersons might be such a book, and if so, he’d print five hundred and sell a bobble head of Tarkington with every copy.

  “I got another idea. I’m working on it. I’m gonna get a database of rare book collectors, and I’m just gonna ask them if I could have a book. It wouldn’t hurt to ask. I mean, I’m trying not to do anything illegal.”

  “You can’t stop, can you?” I asked, but it wasn’t really a question.

  “I just like to collect books, collect stuff. Actually, I was gonna tell you about a new plan that I have, but I guess I better not. I’ll tell you later. I don’t want to do anything criminal, ’cause I don’t want to go back to prison. But somehow, if I can get my books for free, it would be better.”

  The next time we met, when I was almost accustomed to Gilkey’s eagerness to contribute to his own story, he surprised me. Speculating that maybe there wasn’t enough action in the book I was writing, he looked at me with a quizzical expression and asked, “So, do you think I should get all one hundred books now?”

  “I’m not going to answer that question,” I said, stunned. He had begun orchestrating his life with an eye to how it might appear on the printed page, but I was still trying to cling to the notion that I was recording a story that was progressing without my influence. I was not going to become its director.

  Gilkey elaborated on his reasoning.

  “I was trying to think of a grand finale . . .” he said. “Getting a hundred books from that one-hundred-books list. To say that I had won.”

  I was astounded, but I was also at ease, a dawning that came to me unexpectedly. Nearing the end of my encounters with Gilkey, what was once tense and awkward had become routine, sometimes even pleasurable. He loved books; this we had in common. Over the course of a couple of years, I had sat across numerous café tables from him and listened to him tell his story. What became clear was that although he was a criminal, he was also curious, ambitious, and polite, three qualities I respect. But later, at home, I would listen to our taped conversations and realize how the con man’s physical presence had distracted me from the content of his narratives. The surface charm of a con man, like most enchantments, is a form of manipulation, and behind the façade stood a sturdy buttress of greed.

  Once, after Gilkey had told me about a book he stole and later sold, he said, “Greed is greed.” I had assumed that he was referring to his own motivation, until his next comment. “Dealers can’t resist buying them.” He had mentioned a dealer in San Francisco, but wouldn’t give me the man’s name. According to Gilkey, the dealer regularly bought books and other collectibles from him at a fraction of their market value on those rare instances when Gilkey needed cash. The dealer told him more than once that he ought to stop. He knew the goods were hot, yet he bought them, no doubt confirming Gilkey’s conviction that many in the trade are corrupt. I asked for the dealer’s name again, but Gilkey declined. Greed is greed.3

  ONE OF THE most astonishing books I ever encountered was at a book fair. I can’t remember the title or any other detail, except one. The dealer picked up the gilt-edged book and, holding it in front of me, slowly bent the block of pages as though he was about to fan through it in search of something. As he bent the pages, the gilt edge disappeared, revealing, along the long side, an intricate painting of a nautical scene, men navigating a stormy sea. “It’s a fore-edge painting,” he said. I gawked, then asked him to do it again. I learned that for centuries, artisans have been adorning books with fore-edge paintings for clients. They are delicately executed images, usually thematically related to the text: elaborate battle scenes, presidential portraits, Art Deco beauties, even erotic renderings, which, given the paintings’ clandestine quality, is no surprise. As if one hidden treasure were not enough, books are sometimes painted with two fore-edge images, so that when you bend the block of pages one way, one picture emerges, but when you bend it the other way, another appears. They are not usually applied to highly valuable books (doing so would be regarded as a form of vandalism) but to books that are of special interest or sentimental value to their owners. Emerging unexpectedly, these paintings seem like magical apparitions, as though bending a book’s pages can make the inert black type within metamorphose into sumptuous color images. When the pages, no longer swayed, are back in place, no one would guess what lies just a hair’s distance beyond the gilt.

  After two years of meeting with Gilkey I’d seen the gilt pages of his book, so to speak, and I had been witness to their being fanned one way, then another. If I had to reduce him to a sentence, I’d say that Gilkey is a man who believes that the ownership of a vast rare book collection would be the ultimate expression of his identity, that any means of getting it would be fair and right, and that once people could see his collection, they would appreciate the man who had built it.

  But he was more than that. I listened to the tapes of our conversations repeatedly, and each time, Gilkey’s selfishness, which in person is thickly veiled by his affable demeanor, was as clear as boldface type on a page. Like a book with a fore-edge painting, Gilkey had hidden much of himself
behind gilt. Polite, curious, ambitious—or greedy, selfish, criminal? Of course, he is all these things, but what intrigued me was how different he seemed to me in person versus on tape. Physical form had refracted meaning, or at least favored one interpretation over another. This is not only why I perceived Gilkey differently, but also precisely why a library, a visual representation of culture and learning, is so desirable to him: he is aware of how persuasive the physical can be.

  Meeting with Gilkey those last couple of times, I had another epiphany. I realized that the man I thought was stealing books so that others would consider him a cultured gentleman, the man who was building a phony image, a counterfeit identity, was in fact working diligently to become that gentleman. He was studying philosophy, researching authors, reading literature, even writing his own essays and plays. Through these efforts, he was attempting to create his ideal self. Another way of begetting this self, I came to understand, was by telling his story through me.

  One morning, while working next to my shelf of books about book collecting, I considered all the time I had spent with rare book lovers at their fairs, their shops, their homes. I had savored being around so much beauty and, even more, appreciated the stories behind the books. In my reading, one aspect of the history of books I had come across repeatedly was their destruction. From the Qin Shi Huang in China, who in 213 B.C. ordered the burning of all books not pertaining to agriculture, medicine, or prophecy,4 to the Nazis’ literary cleansing by fire (Säuberung) of twenty-five thousand volumes, totalitarian leaders have acted against books’ dangerous power to enlighten. Even today, some U.S. leaders attempt the same through banning books. So the fact that any ancient text, like the German Kräutterbuch my friend lent me, has survived is all the more heartening. The fearsome urge to destroy or suppress books is an acknowledgment of their power, and not only that of august scientific, political, and philosophical texts but that of small, quiet books of poetry and fiction as well, which nonetheless hold great capacity to change us. As I spent time among rare books and their collectors, as strongly as I felt this power and their manifold other attractions, I did not succumb to full-blown bibliomania, as I thought I might. I did, however, come to understand more fully the satisfaction of the pursuit. Hunting down treasures for a collection brings its own rewards, but, ultimately even more satisfying, building it is a way of creating a narrative. When books are joined with others that have traits in common they form a larger story that can reveal something wholly new about the history of democracy, or Renaissance Renaissance cooking, or Hells Angels who pen novels. When I first talked to rare book lovers, I was enamored of their stories of discovery and theft, but what I didn’t realize was that the most important stories they had to tell were those formed through their collections. They were not only “salvaging civilization,” but also, by linking books, engaging in acts of interpretation.

  Although I haven’t become a bibliomaniac, I now see myself as an ardent collector, no longer of carnelians and Pixy Stix straws, but of stories. Searching for them, researching them, and writing them gives my life shape and purpose the way that hunting, gathering, and cataloging books does for the collector. We’re all building narratives. As I thought about Gilkey’s and Sanders’s stories, and those of the other collectors and thieves I encountered, they merged in my mind into a collection of their own, the larger story of which is a testament to the passion for books—their content and histories, their leathery, papery, smooth, musty, warped, foxed, torn, engraved, and inscribed bodies. This passion I share with them all.

  THE LAST TIME I met with Gilkey, I wondered aloud whether he had considered the possible consequences of his life, his story, being made public. He muttered something about a statute of limitations and stared at my notebook as if it held his future. For a moment, he looked frozen. Then he tossed out something about how the book might possibly hurt his future employment opportunities.

  “But no, I’m not worried about it,” he said, regaining his composure. “I mean, I gotta check certain legalities. Make sure I don’t get charged for things.”

  Then, as quickly as you can slam a book shut, Gilkey, in characteristic fashion, turned his attention from dangerous risk to glorious possibility.

  “I was thinking of the ending of your book,” he told me. “I could write a series of detective novels. The first one would be about a serial killer who’s fascinated by the poem ‘The Devil’s Walk,’ written in 1820 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is a very striking poem. It mentions bookstores and sort of an obsession. . . . Anyway, in my novel the FBI has to call in the foremost expert in the world of books and poems and classical literature, because there are no book dealers that can solve the murderer’s crimes. This expert is someone who, as Ken Sanders says, went over to the dark side and found all these ways to steal, to accumulate the greatest collection of rare books in the world. And then he had to go to prison, but now he’s out, so they called him in as a consultant. Unfortunately, he’s a former convict. You know, slightly crazy, but he stole rare books. I would base it a little on me. . . . I’d be set up like this dark figure. And maybe I’d try to have more access to certain books that the government keeps hidden. You know, the book. You know what I mean. . . . There’s always that one book you can never get your hands on. Maybe he’s working with the FBI just to have access to that one book. . . . Maybe it’s at the Library of Congress, maybe a special hidden book, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the diary of JFK’s killing. Something like that. And maybe there’s a surprise ending. Now he has access to the book, so maybe . . .” Gilkey paused a moment before delivering his ending. “Maybe still, I’m a thief.

  “What do you think about that idea? Your honest opinion.”

  Afterword

  I wrote most of this book from my home office, which overlooks a small garden of herbs my son planted several years ago, when he was nine. The only plants of his still growing are rue, a bitter herb that brings to mind the phrase “rue the day,” and purple sage, which he once dried, then gathered into pagan bundles, and with a friend burned one night to clear the air of bad spirits. Both herbs occupy pages in the Kräutterbuch, the centuries-old German botanical text that led me to this story. My son got the idea to plant medicinal herbs from a book on herbology he requested one Christmas because it was one of the subjects on Harry Potter’s reading list at Hogwarts. Like my son, almost everyone I met in the course of writing this book had been deeply inspired by stories, by books.

  For three years, the Kräutterbuch, an inspiring book to be sure—but not mine to keep—sat on my desk. I often wondered, did not returning it make me a thief? Or was I a thief only as long as I kept it? Where is the line drawn? And having taken down Gilkey’s story, had I become a thief of another sort? I have come to the conclusion that I was a thief of neither the book nor Gilkey’s story: I was a borrower of a book with an indeterminate provenance, and Gilkey gave his story to me willingly. Many times did I “rue the day” I happened upon this story, and maybe I should have waved sage smoke around my office to clear the air of the bad mojo that comes with writing about crime. Yet I was always grateful that I had had the good fortune to come across such an enthralling story, one that raised questions about obsession and deception, how passions provoke us, and the ways we justify our pursuit of them. Like the rare first edition, a collector’s longtime desire, this story had me under its spell from beginning to end.

  NOT LONG BEFORE this book went to press, Sanders, nominally retired “bibliodick,” had nevertheless alerted colleagues of Gilkey’s most recent theft: stealing a book from a Canadian dealer. Gilkey was not arrested. The story never ends.

  This book belongs to none but me

  For there’s my name inside to see.

  To steal this book, if you should try,

  It’s by the throat that you’ll hang high.

  And ravens then will gather ’bout

  To find your eyes and pull them out.

  And when you’re screaming

  “Oh, Oh,
Oh!”

  Remember, you deserved this woe.

  —Warning written by medieval German scribe

  Acknowledgments