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 wore a pressed white shirt, a dark blue baseball cap with “PGA Golf” printed across it, and brand-new beige leather sneakers, the kind you don’t usually see on anyone under sixty-five. The shirt and jacket once belonged to his father, who had died while Gilkey was doing time at DVI. He said he missed his father a lot, then pulled a crumpled tissue from the jacket pocket. “Huh,” he said, looking at the tissue, “this was his,” then put it back in his pocket. I picked up a cup of tea at the counter, and he ordered an orange juice and a doughnut, for which he thanked me profusely. We sat down at a table, and for two hours he answered my questions, most of which were of the straightforward who, what, where, when, and why variety, but it was this last question, why, more than any other, that had brought me there. Why did Gilkey love rare books? Why did he steal them? Why did he risk his freedom for them? And why was he willing to talk to me so frankly about it?

  Before our meeting, I had read about where Gilkey grew up, hoping it might provide clues about the man and his motivations. He was born in 1968, in Modesto, California, a medium-sized town in rural San Joaquin Valley, which has since grown to nearly two hundred thousand people.1 The first settlers arrived during the Gold Rush, their pockets empty and their heads filled with dreams of striking it rich, but like most immigrants drawn to California in the mid- 1800s, most of them did not find their fortunes panning for gold. Over a hundred years later, Modesto developed into the idealized suburb popularized by native son George Lucas in American Graffiti. Today, the town solicits the television and film industries to use its “all-American” appearance as a backdrop.2 Behind the fresh-scrubbed façade, however, is a town with one of the highest rates of car theft in the United States,3 air quality that’s often hazardous, and, according to 2007 statistics from the FBI, more rapes, violent crime, larceny, and property crime per capita than New York City. It is fitting that a man like Gilkey, intent on constructing his own false front, should have grown up in a place like Modesto, where the public image is so misleading.

  Taking sips from his bottle of orange juice, Gilkey told me that he grew up the youngest in a family of eight. His father worked at Campbell’s Soup Company as a transportation manager, and his mother was a housewife.

  “My parents were just a normal couple, I guess. My mom’s a homemaker. She loves to take care of children, take care of the house, that’s all she likes to do. My father worked all the time. Eight to five, to bring in the money. My father did a lot of the gardening. My mom used to like to go to garage sales. Just regular stuff, I guess. Just regular family stuff.”

  When I asked Gilkey about when he started collecting books, he said, “I kept a collection of Richie Rich comic books in my bedroom.”

  Richie Rich was an odd-looking character who wore short pants and a large bow tie, but was a pleasant and likable boy from a family with bottomless wealth. The allure for kids was the fantasy of great riches and instant gratification. Richie Rich could get whatever he wanted with minimal effort. That Gilkey, a man whose dream is to be wealthy and refined, would have collected not Superman or X-Men or Fantastic Four but Richie Rich seemed the kind of detail a B-movie writer might propose to a director. Gilkey seemed unaware of the irony as he explained the attraction.

  “I liked the kid, wearing a bow tie . . . and the colorful cover. Nice stories, easy to read. He was so rich. [He was] just playing baseball with Pee Wee or Freckles, doing the things that kids do. But they were rich, they had vaults and all that, where all the money was, diamonds and jewelry, treasures. I guess everybody wants to be rich.”

  Maybe, but not everyone wants desperately for others to see him as rich. It was this aspect of Gilkey’s collecting that set him apart from other collectors I had met and read about. For them, however gratifying it might be to have the admiration and envy of others, it is not the driving incentive of their collecting. There are, undoubtedly, those who collect to impress (Sanders likens them to African big-game hunters: “Take aim—boom—you’ve got a trophy!”), but I had the sense that it was usually secondary to other reasons. One collector I met was delighted to show me her extensive and varied book collection.4 She had been gathering them for over a decade, but no one had ever asked to see them before. “None of my friends get it,” she said. Her growing library was a private pleasure, pure and simple. Gilkey had other motivations, as his enthusiasm for Richie Rich indicated.

  I wouldn’t be able to name a single issue of a comic book I read as a child. Occasionally, I glanced at my older brother’s issues of MAD or a friend’s Archies, but I was not interested in comics. I did collect, though. Huddled on my childhood shelves were glass animals, carnelian stones I had dug up at the beach, ceramic animals that came packed inside my mother’s boxes of tea, and, for reasons that now escape me, the striped paper straws that Pixy Stix candy came in. The difference, however, between my desire to accumulate and the true collector’s was that I added to each assemblage with mild pleasure, not fevered focus. The haphazard, infrequent expansion of my collections gave me a sense of constancy (another carnelian! bigger than the others, but like them) and confirmed identity (no one I knew collected these objects; it was my thing)—two common satisfactions of childhood. But eventually, after I’d amassed a couple dozen of each object, I would forget about them. I was easily sated, something probably no collector would say about himself. My only true passion as a child was an intense study of ballet, where what I collected were strained muscles, blisters, and, more than anything, a deep sense of purpose and joy. Throughout those years, I was drawn to classmates who were troublemakers, those who talked back to teachers and pulled off pranks that landed them in the principal’s office. (I’ve heard that two of these kids ended up in prison.) I never dared disobey, but got a secret thrill from their doing so. Being around Gilkey was similarly exciting, although instead of the visceral thrill I remember having as a kid, it was an intellectual one. I couldn’t fathom what it was about books that made him continually risk jail time for them.

  Going over Gilkey’s childhood seemed to be a good way to begin satisfying my curiosity. He told me that one afternoon when he was around nine or ten, he climbed into the family station wagon with his parents and sister Tina, and headed toward downtown Modesto, to Montgomery Ward, where he was about to commit his first crime. Wandering through the department store, he admired the thirty-nine-cent Hot Wheels cars and action figures like Superman and The Incredible Hulk, but kept browsing. No one in his family was looking when he picked up a catcher’s mitt, and they didn’t notice it on the way out. Once outside the store, he held up his prize.

  “Look what I just did,” he said.

  They looked, said nothing, and continued walking through the lines of cars in the parking lot. When they got home, Gilkey, a right-handed boy, realized that the catcher’s mitt he had just swiped was a lefty.

  When I asked Gilkey why his parents hadn’t punished him, he shrugged.

  “I wasn’t surprised they didn’t say anything,” he said. “I’d just get in more trouble if I returned it.”

  I couldn’t let this one go, but when I asked further questions about it, Gilkey seemed puzzled by my insistent probing. Maybe the memory, like most family legends, had taken on its own kind of logic over the years. For him, there was no mystery to it. Still, telling me about snatching the mitt seemed to have jogged similar memories, because Gilkey was off and running. He told me that his family had a penchant for stealing from one another. He claimed his sister and brother had stolen some of his books while he was in prison. He said he and one of his brothers stole from a sister when they were helping her move from one apartment to another. He claimed that another sister and brother had both stolen from their mother’s belongings. Apparently, this familial filching was going on even a generation before.

  “My father’s mom collected books,” said Gilkey. “She gave him the books, but his sister stole some.”

  I returned to the main subject I was there to learn about: Gilkey’s book collectin
g. When I asked if his parents had collected, he said that at an early age he learned from them that seemingly worthless objects could grow in value, so if you could get them cheaply, all the better.

  “I used to go to garage sales when I was younger and wait in the car with my dad. I didn’t really care about them, but then my parents would come back with stories. ‘Look what I got for a quarter, and I bet it’s worth seventy or eighty dollars. . . . They’re just giving it away!’ ”

  They brought home their finds and set them on shelves or in boxes, along with the rest of their beloved collected objects, and waited for their value to climb.5

  At DVI, Gilkey had told me that his family owned thousands of books, and now he remembered some of his favorites, “a couple of leather-bound Time-Life books, especially the Western series.” He said, again with no apparent awareness of irony, that another favorite, Crimes and Punishment, an illustrated crime encyclopedia not to be confused with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, still stands on the shelves, whereas a set of one hundred law books his parents bought do not. “We took them off the shelf to make space for other books,” he said.

  “If you have a bookcase,” added Gilkey, “the more you put on them, the more it builds up, the more it’s worth, the better it looks. . . . With books, it looks beautiful, you can read it if you want, and it’s part of the ambience of a house, isn’t it? And it will go up in value. Shouldn’t every house have a bookcase? It’s just the pleasure of . . . Say you have somebody who’s never seen you before, and you take them in and say, ‘Here’s my library.’ ” 6

  Here’s my library? I had always thought of my books as fairly private things, not for display, but the ability to show them off seemed crucial to Gilkey. Then again, a wall in my living room is covered with bookshelves, and everyone who visits can see what I have read. If I am honest with myself, I must admit that to some degree my books are badges: there’s the faded spine of James Joyce’s Ulysses (willing to persevere! it shouts), Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (she doesn’t just read Americans and Europeans!), Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (look, a feminist classic!), etc. So, was the difference between my interest and appreciation of books and Gilkey’s only a matter of degree? There must be more to it than that. And what about the criminal side of his collecting? When I asked him about it, Gilkey told me how his use of credit card fraud began.

  Sometime in 1996, according to Gilkey, he was with a friend at the Red Lion Doubletree Inn in Modesto. “I found a credit card receipt on the floor,” he said. “I told him I was going to see if I could charge a few things using the number, but he said it would never work. A couple hours later, using the hotel pay phone, I got a bunch of stuff: a watch, a pizza, and a poster of the movie Psycho.”

  Gilkey got away with these thefts because he had not stolen the credit card itself, in which case the card’s owner could have alerted authorities and canceled all charges. Instead, by using the number off a receipt, its owner wouldn’t hear about the charge until the next bill. In the end, it was the retailer who would get stiffed. Even when the retailer has insurance, book dealers later told me, the deductible is often considerable, sometimes equaling what was stolen.

  The “friend” whom Gilkey mentioned as his accomplice was likely his own father, whom he had already told me he always hung around with. He went on to describe his fraudulent purchases as though they were larks, why-the-hell-not pranks, but the ease with which he pulled them off stuck with him. “It was that easy,” he said, a phrase that he would repeat almost every time he told a story of book theft. At the time, he was working at the Modesto Post Office, for $11 an hour.

  “That was enough money for some things,” said Gilkey, “but not enough for books.”

  SOMETHING TOLD ME that for Gilkey, no matter how much money he had, it would never be enough for all the books he craved. Sigmund Freud described collecting antiquities as “second only in intensity to his nicotine addiction.”7 He explained that the drive and pleasure in any kind of collecting comes from the sense of conquest. “I am by nature nothing but a conquistador,” he wrote, “an adventurer, if you wish to translate the term, with all the inquisitiveness, daring and tenacity capable of such a man.”8

  The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the former, the bookshelf is a kind of memoir: there are my childhood books, my college books, my favorite novels, my inexplicable choices. Many matchmaking and social networking websites offer a place for members to list what they’re reading for just this reason: books can reveal a lot about a person. This is particularly true of the collector, for whom the bookshelf is a reflection not just of what he has read but profoundly of who he is: “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they can come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them,” wrote cultural critic Walter Benjamin.9

  GILKEY CAME ALIVE in this way in the spring of 1997 when he went to his first antiquarian book fair. He told me he had recently lost his job as a mail sorter at the post office, and his father had left his mother. Father and son, now as inseparable as favorite brothers, went to Los Angeles, where they were thinking about renting a place together. One morning, while reading the Los Angeles Times, Gilkey noticed an advertisement for a book fair in Burbank and decided to check it out.

  Wandering through the fair, he was impressed by the number of dealers. His plan was to find some good books and to “get” about a thousand dollars’ worth of them. He was in awe of the collections. I could own those, he thought. Having recently attended the book fair in New York, I understood his awe. Being among such ravishing books, and so many of them, is intoxicating enough for the average book lover—but for Gilkey, it was an important, memorable high. The experience increased not only his appetite but his confidence in his ability to get what he wanted, how he wanted. He spotted a room where dealers specialized in horror books, one of his favorite genres, and selected three first editions: The Dunwich Horror, by H. P. Lovecraft, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, and Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales. He “paid” for the books with bad checks and a maxedout credit card.

  Gilkey figured it was a matter of getting in and out fast, before anyone could figure out what he was up to. He was successful. Along with books, he picked up a copy of Firsts, a magazine about book collecting. Later, flipping through it, he came upon an advertisement for Bauman Rare Book Shop, which appeared to have “some very nice books” for sale. He called and asked them to send him a catalog, which arrived in a couple of days.

  Gilkey described how he leafed through the catalog and began to seriously consider what it would be like to own a collection of books like those on its pages. He called Bauman again and asked for book recommendations. They mentioned a first-edition Lolita, a title he recognized. They explained that the book came with a green octavo shell (a protective box that’s a common accessory for rare books). Gilkey had never heard of such a thing, but he liked the way it sounded. Plus, he thought, it wasn’t that expensive for a book of its type, about $2,500. He placed the order, and Lolita arrived in two or three days.

  Before, Gilkey had managed to acquire several collectible books, but this was the first one he regarded as truly valuable, not only because of its price (the other books Gilkey had picked up were under $1,000 each) but also because of its historical significance, its notoriety. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s provocative story of a middle-aged man’s lust for a young girl, was first published in Paris in 1955 and has ranked high on banned-book lists ever since. In 1959, the author inscribed a copy to fellow novelist Graham Greene, “For Graham Greene from Vladimir Nabokov, November 8, 1959.” An accomplished lepidopterist, Nabokov also drew a delicate sketch of a butterfly, labeling it with what might be the most lyrical of inscriptions, “green swallowtail dancing waisthigh.” As an association copy (one that an author gives, often with an inscription, to someone of particular interest), over time its value
soared. At a Christie’s auction in 2002, Greene’s copy sold for $264,000.10

  Although Gilkey’s copy was worth a fraction of that, as his first valuable book, it held a special place in his heart. He put it on top of his piano and admired it. He liked the feel of the clamshell box it arrived in, how it was covered with a soft, textured fabric. He wished all covers were like that. The book was published in two volumes, in spring green wrappers (paper covers), with “Nabokov” printed on the top edges, “Lolita” in the middle, and “The Olympia Press” at the bottom edge. It was a simple design, elegant. Unlike the other books he had collected, he read Lolita, but found it “disgusting.” I sensed that he told me this in order to win my respect—he may be a criminal, but he has morals. His disgust with the story of Lolita, however, did not affect his feelings about the book, because he was looking forward to its value increasing over time. This was not because he had any intention of selling it, but rather because it would give his collection greater status. Also, it was number four on the Modern Library’s list of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century.11 He had just started reading and collecting books from this list, which he came across while researching rare books, and had decided that he wanted them all.

  Gilkey added that he had used his own American Express card to buy Lolita, but I hadn’t asked.

  A few months after Lolita arrived, Gilkey and his father were staying at a hotel in Beverly Hills when he decided to use bad checks from the same checkbooks he had used at the Burbank book fair, this time to purchase foreign currency. He was arrested and put in jail for forty days, then sent back to Modesto under house arrest, during which time he wore an electronic ankle bracelet.