The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (14 page)

In reading about this hunger, I had repeatedly come across evidence of the widespread fondness for first editions. Other than original manuscripts, they are the closest most readers can get to an author. This sense of a book as an extension of a person is not remotely new. In 1644, John Milton wrote: “For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
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Nearly three hundred years later, in 1900, Walt Whitman echoed that sentiment: “Camerado! this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.”
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A collector of paintings can get his hands on the one and only; a book collector’s best option, aside from the original manuscript, is the first edition. Collectors can’t get enough of them. But according to a riddle I came across, this predilection can be problematic: Which man is happier, “he that hath a library with well nigh unto all the world’s classics, or he that hath thirteen daughters? The happier man is the one with thirteen daughters, because he knoweth that he hath enough.”
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I plunged forward anyway and decided to start with a couple of books by Gay Talese, since he would soon be coming through San Francisco and might sign them. I had been warned about the dangers of ordering books from non-ABAA dealers, but I was in a hurry, and the few ABAA dealers I called didn’t have what I was looking for. I ordered first editions of
The Overreachers
and
The Bridge
, about $40 each, from two non-ABAA dealers I found online. When they arrived, I eagerly opened the bubble-wrapped packages.
The Overreachers
was in “very good” shape, my first first edition!
The Bridge
, while also in “very good” shape, was not a first edition at all—where
The Overreachers’
copyright page clearly identified it as a “First Edition,”
The Bridge
made no mention of its printing. I had no idea what edition it was. I contacted the dealer, who admitted that she was mistaken and agreed to reimburse me the difference in price. Lesson learned.

Gay Talese did sign my copy of
The Overreachers
, and when I brought it home, I put it on the shelf with my non- first editions. I felt that maybe it needed a place of greater honor, but I never got around to moving it. Having touched the pages of a Flaubert manuscript at the New York book fair, I could appreciate why someone might want an original manuscript. Yet, I had to admit, I could not fully grasp the ardor for printed first editions. So much of collecting is driven by emotions, probably most of it, and although I understood the attraction of first editions intellectually, I didn’t
feel
it. The strongest attachments I have to books are those with which I have a personal history. When I was a child sick with the flu, my mother gave me her childhood copy of
Anne of Green Gables
. I was as charmed by its old-fashioned beauty as I was by the story. It had faded taupe linen with an illustration of Anne in profile on the cover. Inside was an inscription: “To Florence from Aunt Freddie, Xmas 1911,” meaning that not only had my mother read it, but also her mother, Florence. I also treasure my father’s vividly illustrated
Peter Rabbit
(in which Peter looks like a lunatic with devilish eyes) and his family of cat books (
Mother Cat
,
Fluffy Kitty
,
Muffy Kitty
, and, best of all,
Puffy Kitty
). Of all my grandparents’ books, none is more bewitching than
Lettres de mon moulin
, a 1948 book with lovely watercolor illustrations of French country life. (Does the fact that I adore a book I cannot read a single word of indicate at least some leaning toward bibliomania?) It has a soft cover with an illustration of a windmill and is wrapped in cracked glassine. The way it obscures the illustration makes me think of an old train’s window. None of these books is of any value in the marketplace (I checked), but I will always appreciate them for the stories they hold, both on the page (those in English, that is) and in their histories. I doubt I’d feel any different if they were first editions—unless they were worth enough, say, to pay for my children’s education, in which case I’d have to part with them. But it would be a sad parting.

So my Talese first edition sat on my shelf wedged between my second or third or twelfth editions of other books. As passionate as I am about reading, and as appreciative as I am of the aesthetic, historic charms of old books, the collecting bug hadn’t caught me yet.

WHEN LANE HELDFOND was notified that the credit card number used for the purchase of the first editions of
Joseph in Egypt
and
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
was fraudulent, she was shocked, but assumed insurance would cover their loss—enough money, she realized, for her and Erik and their six-year-old daughter to take a vacation in Hawaii. She was mistaken; insurance didn’t cover it. (Unless merchants obtain signatures from bona fide cardholders, they must absorb the cost of the stolen goods.) Furious, she e-mailed Ken Sanders the details. She had read his recent notices, and unlike so many of her colleagues who are loath to expose their vulnerability, she felt it was important to get word out of their missing books. She wrote that a fairly knowledgeable man had called about buying books as gifts. Like the thief Sanders had warned the trade about, he had used a credit card to pay for them and said a relative would pick them up. But this thief was not elderly. He was in his thirties, she guessed, with dark hair.

Sanders had been sending “Northern California Credit Card Thief” notices to the trade, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was “thieves” he should be warning them about. Was this a gang? He felt as though he were chasing phantoms. His detective work might have been easier had all his fellow dealers been willing to talk about their losses.

THE PLEASURE of Gilkey’s extended vacation with his father was heightened by his success at getting so much for free. Gilkey had two ways to wrangle a night in a hotel: using a stolen credit card number or telling hotel management that the toilet in his room had overflowed, thereby getting a refund. He found that most hotels guaranteed one-hundred-percent satisfaction, so if he complained to the general manager, most of the time they wouldn’t charge him. The same went for meals. Only a couple of times did his methods not work: at the St. Francis Hotel, in San Francisco, where they held his luggage until he could come up with cash to cover the room, and at the Mandarin Oriental, also in San Francisco, where he’d stayed because he had wanted to experience a five-star hotel. When they didn’t offer a refund after he said the toilet overflowed, he cleared the room of the shampoos, soaps, and complimentary slippers, which gave him a small sense of vindication.

As the weeks passed, and June drew near, Gilkey picked up his pace, about two books a week. Although it wasn’t very valuable, one of his favorites was Stephen King’s
The Dead Zone
, because of how he got it. One of the greatest pleasures of beholding one’s collection is remembering how each volume came to rest on the shelf. Gilkey had ordered
The Dead Zone
from a pay phone in the Beverly Hills library, right across the street from the police station.

This was an exciting time for Gilkey. He took precautions, always watching book dealers closely to see if something was wrong in case they’d called the police. He made up rules for himself: appear relaxed, chat for five to ten minutes, always check for suspicious cars or people, make sure the bookseller doesn’t seem nervous, compliment the stock. While he usually picked up the books himself, sometimes he would use a taxicab driver. He would tell the driver, “I’m lazy, I’ll give you a good tip.” Or to give the impression that he was not up to the task himself, he would limp, or say he had a headache, or that he wasn’t feeling well. He figured cabbies were “greedy enough, they would do anything for money, even five dollars.” Once, he considered wearing the costume of a priest during a pickup, but felt he had to draw the line somewhere.

Between January and June of 2001, Gilkey was picking up books worth $2,000, $5,000, $10,000. Together, they totaled at least $100,000. He realized that at this rate if he were to stop working entirely and dedicate himself to book collecting, he might end up with a collection worth millions.

He sensed, however, that he might be setting a pattern that would attract attention, especially in Northern California. So he decided he would expand his reach, steal from one major rare book store after another, and get himself fifty rare books. If the authorities were looking for a pattern, they wouldn’t find one. He would order one book from Oregon, another from Idaho, and yet another from Arizona. He’d hit New York, Philadelphia, all over the world. He knew that the market was international, so, as he said, “I could buy a rare book in Argentina, another in England, in South Africa, the Bahamas.”

He also decided to change his MO and stop picking up the books himself (or having someone else do it). Instead, he would have them delivered to hotels, where he would pick them up later. It wasn’t necessary to tell the bookseller it was a hotel; he could just give them an address.

In June, Gilkey finally went to jail to serve time for the bad check he’d written back in January. He would have three and a half months behind bars to think about his next moves. Before he left, he told his father to disregard his past vow.

“Forget about an estate,” he said, “I’m going to build us an empire.”

AFTER SERVING his sentence, Gilkey walked out the doors of Los Angeles County Jail and within several weeks was hired again at Saks Fifth Avenue. Over the next year, while on parole, he sold expensive designer garments, surreptitiously jotted down the credit card numbers of customers who bought them, then used the numbers to steal, according to his estimate, about a book a month, maybe more.

By the end of 2002, with the holiday shopping season in full swing, Gilkey’s employers were so pleased with his performance they offered him a promotion to the customer service center, where he would have access to cash, plus all the credit slips and gift cards. Fearing the move might trigger a background check that would reveal his criminal history, he tried to decline the offer. His caution was inconsistent, though. When his boss persisted and pushed some forms on him, Gilkey carelessly wrote down his Modesto address, where in 1998 he had done sixty days in jail for writing a bad check. Arriving at work one morning shortly after that, he was summoned by the VP of human resources, who confronted him with his falsified records, and that was the end of his employment.

Gilkey had enjoyed his job at Saks more than any other. His coworkers were nice to him, and customers seemed to appreciate his cordiality, all of which a coworker from the men’s department, Tony Garcia, confirmed. “Mostly quiet, very professional” is how Garcia described Gilkey. “Always willing to help.”
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