The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (11 page)

Sanders kept the
Book of Commandments
in a safe-deposit box and later sold it for the young man to a collector for $200,000, from which Sanders earned a commission.
²
Mostly, however, these types of finds don’t just show up on dealers’ counters. Books go missing far more frequently. But of the theft of
The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse
, Sanders had heard nothing. The store owners were not members of the ABAA.

THE NEXT MONTHS were busy. In February, armed with a pile of credit card numbers, Gilkey took his father on a two-week trip to France and Germany, where they visited casinos, wineries, restaurants, and museums. They won a moderate but satisfying sum while gambling, which confirmed Gilkey’s feelings about his ability to take risks and come out unscathed, at least most of the time. They returned just in time for the Los Angeles Festival of the Book, where Gilkey “picked up” about ten more books, including a signed first-edition
Ragtime
, by E. L. Doctorow. It is number eighty-six on the Modern Library’s list of one hundred best English-language novels.

What people choose to collect is revealing. That Gilkey favors books from the Modern Library’s list is in keeping with his desire to be admired. He isn’t following his own taste as much as that of experts. The books are already sanctioned, surefire greatest hits, guaranteed to impress.

Through the spring, Gilkey kept up his pace, stealing about a book or two a month. He is as adept at justifying these thefts as he was at pulling them off. He explained it to me like this: When he walks into a rare book store and ogles the riches lined up on the shelf, he sees them almost as the personal collection of the store owner. What a wealthy person this is! Look how many books he owns! It is not fair that he charges so much for a single book, Gilkey thinks. Books selling for $10,000 or $40,000 or half a million—they are all out of his reach. How am I to afford it? he asks with righteous indignation. So he takes what he sees as duly his. That dealers pay a lot for their books and, with the exception of relatively few lucky or especially savvy ones, barely make ends meet does not occur to him. Even after I brought this to his attention, he chose not to acknowledge his guilt. As he sees it, if he owns fewer rare books than the next collector or dealer, the world is not fair, and, as he put it, he means to “even the score.”

I wondered what fed this skewed perspective of justice. While many collectors build images of themselves through their collections, most of them do not cross the line between coveting and stealing. It was not just a collection Gilkey was building but an image of himself for the world. In this respect, he did not differ from other collectors, but most of them do not cross the line between coveting and stealing. The leap between collector and thief is a huge moral and ethical one. But for Gilkey, who repeatedly crosses the line, having not paid for the books—having acquired them for free, as he would say—adds even more to their allure. He told me that back when he kept his books at his mother’s house, before he started secreting them to a storage facility, he separated those he had paid for from those he had stolen, the former on one set of shelves, the latter on another. Stolen or not, however, his satisfaction was always fleeting: the more books a collector gets, the more he wants. In this respect, Gilkey is like any other collector. As collectors have often remarked, collecting is like hunger, and having one more book doesn’t quench the longing for another.

As spring headed into summer, Gilkey wanted to get his hands on even more books, but since he was still on parole for stealing foreign currency (to pay for books and living expenses), he felt he should be more circumspect. While he tempered the scope of his acquisitions, he found methods to at least be in proximity to spectacular books. In June, he visited The Huntington Library Museum, in San Marino, California. For lovers of books and art, the place is a paradise; for Gilkey, it must have been mighty fuel for his fantasies.

Henry Huntington, born on February 27, 1850, in Oneonta, New York, grew up in a well-to-do family in a house filled with books.
³
He read and appreciated books throughout his life and, from the age of about twenty-one, acquired them voraciously. Decades later, after founding the Pacific Electric Railway and an intercity transit system in California, he inherited around $30 million and began collecting rare books and manuscripts. In 1919, he founded The Huntington Library, which now has more than seven million rare books, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and maps in the fields of British and American history and literature. The library stacks are open only to scholars, but Gilkey got to see a small selection of items on display for the public.

On view was “The Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale” from Geoffrey Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales
, made in England, c. 1400-1405, an illuminated manuscript on vellum adorned with an intricate border that looks like a fabulously bejeweled vine.
⁴
Such literary tricking-out seems akin to framing a masterpiece in gold or wrapping an emerald necklace in marbled paper and satin ribbons—an effort to clothe something wondrous in a fitting garment. Another illuminated text on display, a Gutenberg Bible (c. 1455), is similarly bedecked with fantastical borders, and they’re still as clear and lovely as freshly stitched silk embroidery. Given the number of times throughout history that books, especially racy or religious texts like these—including the
Kräutterbuch
on my desk, which had illustrations that were at the time of publication considered unfit to be viewed by women
⁵
—have been snatched up, set into piles in public squares, and set on fire, the fact that these ancient tomes are still around is doubly miraculous.
⁶
The depth of care and craft in their creation in retrospect seems like an expression of epic optimism. Even though anyone can look up photos of books like these online and view up-close images where every mark on the page is in sharp detail, every year thousands choose to visit the books in person. In addition to being objects of beauty, like all ancient books, they provide a physical link to the past. This is one of their most powerful, enduring effects.

The Huntington’s more modern texts are just as alluring. On the title page of the original manuscript of Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden
, one can see the author’s right-leaning, fluid, elegant script in dark ink. In the lower right corner, smudged ink reminds us that this was written by a real, living, mistake-making human, one whose finger was once stained black from that very point on the page. Gilkey was enchanted by the whole display, but lingered near one volume in particular. He couldn’t take his eyes off Samuel Pepys’s seventeenth-century diary, noticing how fragile and small it looked sitting in a glass case.

Huntington, like Gilkey, used his collection to influence how people viewed him. A story in the December 25, 1910, issue of the
Los Angeles Examiner
noted that he “delights in having an appreciative book lover call on him, and it is then the railway magnate opens up his cases and brings forth some jewel in his splendid collection and exhibits it to the visitor.”

I had heard at least one dealer refer to collecting as a sport, and I got the impression that Huntington was competing to win. A cartoon in the
Los Angeles Times
on March 27, 1920, showed two mustachioed gentlemen in a library and bore the caption: “Henry E. Huntington and Herschel V. Jones, who publishes the Minneapolis Journal and collects rare books, are talking shop out in San Marino.” The cartoon summed up the collectors’ competitive instincts perfectly. Huntington is saying, “I’ve just picked up Eve’s diary,” and Jones replies, “Oh! That reminds me, I got hold of ‘The Log of the Ark,’ by Noah, the other day!”

WHILE STILL in Los Angeles, on a warm, sunny day, Gilkey drove to the Century Plaza Hotel, one of his favorite spots to conduct business since it had a row of phones with a good deal of privacy. He was also fond of its location: near Melrose Avenue, where there were two bookstores he planned to visit.

From the hotel, Gilkey called one of them, Dailey’s Rare Books on Melrose, and asked about a few authors, one of whom was Mark Twain. He was in luck: they had a first edition of
Life on the Mississippi
. He gave them a credit card number and told them someone else would pick up the book, which they said would be fine. Gilkey got there and, to avoid suspicion, took his time. He didn’t want to appear rushed or hide behind dark sunglasses, stuttering and stumbling.
Act normal
, he thought. When he left, he ripped up the credit card receipt and threw it in a trashcan, a protective measure he repeated after almost every pickup. He would visit Dailey’s two more times in the next year.

Gilkey drove the short distance back to the hotel, speeding because he hates to have anyone cut in front of him in traffic. At the hotel, he called his favorite bookstore, the Heritage Book Shop, also on Melrose. Gilkey has a strong sense of decorum, which comes through on the phone, and a complete lack of guilt about ripping people off, which does not. When he reached the store on the phone, he asked if they had any books by H. G. Wells. They did. He gave them a credit card number and, as usual, said that someone else would stop by to pick it up, a man named Robert. Shortly thereafter, Gilkey went for the pickup.

“Great place you have here,” said “Robert.” He talked with Ben or Lou (Gilkey wasn’t sure) for ten minutes or so and took a look at a few books. The book was already packed up and ready to go, so “Robert” signed for it and walked out with
The Invisible Man
.

GILKEY TOLD ME that when he holds a rare book, he smells its age, feels its crispness, makes sure there’s nothing wrong with it, and opens it up very gently. He thumbs through a few pages. If the author is still alive, he thinks about whether he wants it signed. He says that a book like
The Invisible Man
is like a fine wine. It feels good to hold it and, especially, to add it to his collection—but not to read, almost never to read. Like most book collectors, his attachment is not so much to the story as to all that the book represents.

Winston S. Churchill, a bibliophile who paid for his books, nonetheless understood the same intimate attachment: