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

by Allison Hoover Bartlett

  “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.”

  It had been over two years since Gilkey had stolen books from Sanders’s colleagues, but Sanders was obviously still stung by the experience. Unlike me, merely intrigued by the idea of Gilkey’s thefts, Sanders’s way of life had been violated by them. He had a legitimate grievance against Gilkey. It was time for me to go, but before I left his booth, Sanders needed to give me one more warning:

  “I tell you,” he said, knowing I would soon meet with Gilkey, “all, and I mean all, book thieves are natural-born liars.”

  2

  Half-truths

  When I returned to San Francisco, I found in my mailbox another envelope stamped STATE PRISON GENERATED MAIL. Inside, Gilkey had written more encouragement and information regarding visiting hours (weekends only), that his time in prison was soon to end (in July), and that it might be a good idea for you to call DVI [the prison] and set a date. I did.

  Deuel Vocational Institution lies sixty-five miles east of San Francisco, in Tracy. On the late spring day I drove there, the sky was a dull blue, the wind fierce, and the hills well on their way to a dry shade of brown. Off the highway, the frontage road was bordered by Harley-Davidsons, powerboats, and off-road vehicles in various states of disrepair. I turned onto Casson Road, which led to the prison, a group of beige two-and three-story buildings surrounded by two layers of razor-wire fencing.

  It was nine-fifteen in the morning and already hot. I told a uniformed woman behind the window at the Reception Center that I was there for my appointment. “We’ll call you when it’s your turn,” she grunted, adding that if I had any change, it would have to be in a plastic bag, and that I couldn’t bring any paper money inside. So before joining the people waiting in the lobby, I ran out to my car and locked my cash in the glove compartment.

  I had never been inside a prison, but I’d heard stories from a friend who had conducted an interview in one. The women visiting, she explained, were dressed to the nines, usually in very low-cut, tight blouses, and the atmosphere thrummed with lust and danger.

  Inside the DVI Reception Center, the atmosphere was more church social than sleazy bar. Parents, spouses, grandparents, and children, mostly Hispanic, sat and waited to hear their names called. Occasionally, one of them would drift over to the corner, where there was a gift shop with inmates’ crafts for sale. A painting of a terrified-looking wolf with yellow eyes hung on a wall above three identical wooden wishing well lamps for $24 each and a selection of clocks with pictures of Jesus or desert scenes lacquered to their faces.

  I had been waiting over an hour, trying to distract myself from the growing knot in my stomach. What if Gilkey was more hostile than I expected? Would I be safe talking to him? I stared at the wall, to which several handwritten signs were taped: “No Levi’s” and “No sleeveless tops” and “No sandals.” Another one read “No underwire bras.” They must set off the metal detectors. I ran back across the hot parking lot into my car, sank low in my seat, wrestled off my bra, and pulled it out one sleeve. I was glad I had not worn a white blouse. I ran back in. A half-hour later my name was called.

  When I finally got through the metal detector and two sets of heavily locked doors, I arrived in the visiting room and walked to the desk to announce who I was there to see. I waited for what seemed like hours while officials located Gilkey, wanting more than anything to have the interview over with. At last, they found him and brought him to the booth, where he sat behind a Plexiglas window. I approached, trying to look as though I did this all the time. He was dressed in a prison-issued V-necked orange shirt with a threadbare undershirt showing at the neck, and orange elastic-waist pants. He smiled and tipped his head as if to say, “Please, take a seat.” I told myself this was a good sign; he didn’t appear to be angry—yet. I was still in my coat and sweating from heat and nerves. I glanced at the list of questions in my notebook, which began with nonconfrontational topics: Where did you grow up? When did you first become interested in rare books? And so on. At the end of the list, I had written: Did you steal any books? But I figured I would probably have to wait until another day to ask that one. I introduced myself through the heavy black phone receiver on my side of the glass, and he, apparently as nervous as I, quickly said hello. Then, just as abruptly, he offered, “So, do you want me to tell you how I got my first book?”

  I exhaled and began writing. At the time of our first meeting Gilkey was thirty-seven. He is of average stature, about five-foot-nine. His eyes are hazel-brown, his hair dark and thinning, his fingers long and nail-bitten. The cadence of his quiet, calm voice reminded me of the children’s television host Mr. Rogers. Trying not to think about the resemblance, I asked him how he first became interested in books.

  “My family has this big library in the family room with thousands of books, and I remember looking at them all the time,” he said. “Also, I used to watch those British Victorian movies, you know, like Sherlock Holmes. I loved those movies where a gentleman has an old library, wears a smoking jacket.”

  Exploring his motives seemed to please Gilkey, but there was nothing revelatory about it: he seemed comfortable in this knowledge of himself, that his fantasy of living an old-fashioned, cultured English life as depicted on the big screen is what compelled him to steal books.

  “Watching those movies,” he said, “that was when I first thought about getting books.”

  Gilkey smiled and shrugged as if he knew that his pronouncement sounded a bit ridiculous, but it was the truth. If you aren’t born into learned, wealthy society, why not steal your way in? His affable manner was disturbingly at odds with the content of our discussion, but it made questioning him easier than I had expected.

  Since prison rules prohibited my bringing a pen or tape recorder (more metal), I wrote at hand-cramping speed with a pencil I feared would snap since I had sharpened it to a long point (no spares allowed). I tried to tune out the two women on either side of me who, in vehemently cheerful voices, shared whatever good news of home they could scrounge up, while Gilkey told me about his favorite bookstore.

  “In the late 1990s, the primary bookstore I went to was a great store in L.A., Heritage Books. It’s housed in a converted mausoleum. You have to see it,” he said. Later, I would learn that he not only “went to” Heritage, but stole from it.

  The Heritage Book Shop, which closed in 2007, was, I found out, one of the most successful rare book businesses in the country, founded by brothers Ben and Lou Weinstein, two former junk-store owners who found their way into the rare book trade in the 1960s.1 With stained-glass windows, English cabinets, and a vaulted ceiling, the store exuded old-world wealth. New-world, Hollywood-style wealth was evident in the chairs, which had been used as set furniture in the film Gone With the Wind. This combination of old-time finery and movie-business glamour was irresistible to Gilkey, who thought that if he ever opened a bookstore, one of his dreams, he would like it to look like Heritage.

  “I guess I got a warped sense of what was possible in that place,” he said. “I started dreaming of building a gigantic library, where I will sit at a nice desk. I’ll read or write. I’ll have a globe of the world next to the desk,” he added, unaware of how revealing his change in tense was.

  “At Heritage,” he said, “that’s where I got the idea of owning a collection.”

  He had already said that he was first inspired to build a collection as a child, but I didn’t interrupt.
Gilkey was eager to tell his story, so from then on, I asked few questions. He was soft-spoken, pleasant, almost courtly, and forthcoming about how he built his book collection, yet averse to using words like “steal” or “prison” or “theft.” Instead, he “got” books and has been “away” for “doing that.” He seemed intelligent, but frequently mispronounced words the way well-read people who have not grown up around well-read people often do.

  Gilkey said he collects more than rare books: snuff bottles, musical instruments, baseball cards, crystal, coins, and autographs, noting that he has Stephen King’s, Anne Perry’s, Princess Diana’s, and Ronald Reagan’s. But it was clear that his attraction was primarily to books, and I would learn that in this respect, Gilkey is typical of collectors, who very often accumulate more than one type of object. They have a focus, though, and Gilkey’s unequivocally was books. But why? And what made his desire so fervid that he was willing to risk his freedom for it? Gilkey returned to the image of an English gentleman with a grand library and explained further.

  “I like the feeling of having a book worth five or ten grand in my hands. And there’s that sense of admiration you’re gonna get from other people.”

  That people would admire Gilkey because of his book collection seemed to be at the crux of his desire. It wasn’t merely a love of books that compelled him, but also what owning them would say about him. It’s a normal ambition—that our choice of music or cars or shoes reflects well on us—taken to the extreme. Having spent a few days among collectors and dealers at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, I sensed that many of them were also building identities through their collections, acquiring books as talismans of taste, knowledge, and affluence. Shortly before visiting Gilkey, while flipping through a magazine, I noticed an advertisement for a wealth management company in which a well-dressed woman was leaving a rare book store. Around the same time, I received a hip women’s clothing catalog in which at least half the photographs were shot in an old library. In both cases, fine, old books were the backdrop of the good life, the wealthy life, one rich with country estates and long vacations in foreign countries. It’s a seductive fantasy that if you acquire the books, you might just end up with the life itself, or at least make other people think you have it. In my research, I had read about other motivations. Some collectors (of cereal boxes, farm machinery, anything) describe their obsession as a way to create order and to fill a hole in their lives.2 But don’t most people crave at least some order? And don’t many have a hole of some sort in their lives—unhappy childhoods or health problems or marital woes? Again, this impulse seems like a normal one taken to the extreme. In many ways, Gilkey did not appear to be all that different from other book collectors. The only quality I knew of that set him apart was his criminal history.

  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.3 I’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.”

&
nbsp; 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.