The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (18 page)

From early July through September, Munson kept Sanders abreast of Gilkey’s case. Gilkey did not opt for a public defender, and for the first several weeks, he repeatedly hired new attorneys, then fired them, delaying the process.
⁵
Finally, the deputy attorney general said he would listen to anything Gilkey had to say, but that he still had to plead guilty and accept a sentence of three years. If he did not accept this arrangement, the court would file the additional ten to twelve felonies, including those involving his father. Remembering that two years earlier his attorney had suggested he might benefit from a psychiatric evaluation, Gilkey tried that tack again, but the judge wasn’t going for it, so he pleaded guilty. He also told the judge he wanted to appeal the decision, a tactic he thought would enable him to stay even longer in county jail, which was much more comfortable than state prison. The judge would hear nothing of it. She sent him to San Quentin.

Almost exactly a year after the sting, on February 24, 2004, Munson e-mailed Sanders to notify him that Gilkey had been shipped to state prison.
So while he appeals,
wrote Munson,
he can do it from somewhere not as pleasant as the county jail.

So it was in San Quentin State Prison that Gilkey lived twenty-three hours a day in a cell,
⁶
imagining ways to win an appeal. Even if he were to lose it, he knew he would probably serve only half of his three-year sentence. Still, eighteen months seemed, as he put it, “an awfully long time to be behind bars for liking books.” He spent those months sleeping most of the day so that he wouldn’t have to deal with his fellow inmates, and lying awake at night, thinking about how unjust the world was and how deserving he was of a better life and more rare books. It was the point in a repeating cycle he’d lived through many times, yet it was no less powerful for its frequency. If anything, its repetition fomented a deep desire, once again, for getting even.

 

 

 

 

A
couple of months after Gilkey’s 2005 release from prison, I met him in front of 49 Geary Street, a building that houses several art galleries and rare book stores in San Francisco. It was a September morning and he wore a bright white sweatshirt, pleated khakis, his beige leather sneakers, and the PGA baseball cap. He held a folder, on top of which lay a handwritten, numbered list, his to-do list for the day.

“So, how do you want to do this?” he asked.

The week before, he had agreed to let me tag along with him on one of his scouting trips, to learn how he selects books. I had suggested going to Goodwill, a frequent haunt of his now that he was persona non grata in most San Francisco rare book shops. Gilkey, though, wanted to take me to Brick Row, from which he stole
The Mayor of Casterbridge
. I tried to mask my disbelief and hoped he would think of another place.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Wouldn’t Goodwill work? Or, if not that, aren’t there any other stores you can think of?”

Probably sensing my unease, he hesitated. “Maybe they’ll recognize me,” he said, but then he reconsidered. “On second thought, it won’t be a problem.”

At home, I e-mailed Sanders for his opinion: Would the owner, John Crichton, whom I had not yet met, be upset or angry that I’d knowingly accompanied a rare book thief into his store? I didn’t relish dealing with the wrath of one of Gilkey’s victims, however peripherally.

“Crichton’s a good guy,” Sanders assured me and gave me the impression that, as Gilkey had said, it wouldn’t be a problem.

I was still wary, but too curious to walk away from an opportunity to see Gilkey in his element. What sort of person returns to the scene of his crime? So far, I had come to know Gilkey only through our private conversations. I still had no idea how he behaved out in the world, especially his idealized rare book world. He shared many characteristics of other collectors, but his thieving set him apart in ways that still confounded me: Was he amoral or mentally ill? How are such lines drawn, anyway? Accompanying Gilkey to Brick Row was an irresistible chance to be an eyewitness. Also, I had heard that the shop was well regarded among rare book collectors, and I wanted to see it firsthand. I had arranged to write a story about Gilkey and Sanders for
San Francisco Magazine
, so with the assignment in hand, I headed off to observe Gilkey as I had never seen him before.

Standing on the sidewalk in front of Brick Row, Gilkey said he would show me what he typically looks for and how he goes about it.

He did not appear to be apprehensive. I, on the other hand, was all nerves. I had no idea what Crichton might do when we walked in. This, at the very least, was going to be awkward.

We took the elevator to the second floor. The sign outside the elevator indicated that Brick Row Books was to the left, down the hall, but Gilkey headed to the right. I pointed to the sign, and he said that they must have moved. Later he noted with some satisfaction that Brick Row must not be doing very well these days because their old location, at the other end of the hall, was bigger.

We passed the rare book shop of John Windle, who had been helpful months earlier when I consulted him about the seventeenth-century German botanical text, the book that had captured my curiosity and led me to Gilkey and Sanders. I was sure Windle would recognize me and, I feared, also Gilkey as we passed his shop, so I turned and looked the other way so that I wouldn’t have to explain myself.

These are small, quiet shops, places where one customer is the norm, two is busy, and three feels bustling. Gilkey and I arrived at the door to Brick Row almost immediately. We walked in and faced two men, John Crichton, the owner, standing near the rear, and an employee sitting at a desk near the entrance. Did they recognize Gilkey? Would they call the police?

 

 

 

 

I wondered how Gilkey would react if they did. During a prior meeting, when I had asked him what he was up to, expecting to hear about books he was reading, or the research he was always doing, or his almost daily visits to the library, he reported a new problem.

“I just gotta be careful about what I say ’cause a couple of the book dealers are doing repeat complaints, tryin’ to get me in trouble.”

According to Gilkey, at his weekly parole meeting, his probation officer told him that an autograph dealer in New York named Roger Gross had alerted the police about a postcard he had spotted for sale on eBay. (In fact, Sanders had spotted it.) The postcard was signed by nineteenth-century composer Johannes Brahms, and Gilkey had stolen it from Gross a few years earlier (but the police, not having proof—since Gross hadn’t yet reported it missing—had returned it to Gilkey after the Treasure Island raid).

The week before his probation meeting, Gilkey had sold the Brahms postcard to a Colorado autograph dealer, Tod Mueller, but felt exempt from culpability. “I guess the guy [Roger Gross] was already reimbursed for the loss
and
he wanted his property back,” Gilkey said to me, shaking his head in disbelief. In a bizarre, but what I was beginning to grasp as typical, distancing of himself from his crimes, he said, “Now, to me, I wasn’t even involved. Gross wanted it from the guy who purchased it from me. Somehow my name came up.”

Somehow?
Once Gilkey had rid himself of the postcard, he felt that he should also be rid of all blame.

 

 

 

 

Inside Brick Row, natural light streamed through the windows, illuminating books sitting in cases along every wall and under windows, and on a graceful arc of shelves that ran through the middle of the shop. It was a quiet refuge from the city streets below, and if you ignored the computer and phone on Crichton’s heavy oak desk, it could be a nineteenth-century bookshop. Thousands of majestic leather-bound books, many with gold lettering, caught the light as I walked by. Given Gilkey’s Victorian library fantasies, I could see why he favored this shop, why he chose to bring me there. Unlike Sanders’s shop in Salt Lake City, Brick Row was tidy and appeared highly ordered. I got the sense that only serious collectors would venture inside, in contrast to Sanders’s shop, where collectors mingled with people in search of a good used paperback (he offered a selection at the back of the store). The doors of the locked bookcases on the right-hand wall near the entrance had metal screens in a crosshatch pattern that made deciphering titles a challenge. These cases contained some of Crichton’s more valuable books. A film-maker would do well to use Brick Row as a set for a gentleman’s fine library. “More classier feel than some of the other bookstores that just rack them up in average bookcases,” is how Gilkey had described it.

Crichton spoke from behind his desk. “May I help you?” His question seemed to ask much more. He was looking hard at Gilkey.

“I’m not here to buy anything,” said Gilkey congenially, “just to look around, if that’s okay. We’re just here to look.”

No answer.

Crichton stood facing us. He was in his fifties, with white hair, a ruddy complexion, and clear blue eyes. He had an assured air and seemed to be the kind of person who rarely had the wool pulled over his eyes.

Gilkey referred to his list of the Modern Library’s “100 Best Novels,” and explained to me how he often looks for books on it. He pointed to the name Nathaniel Hawthorne.

“Do you have any Hawthorne?” Gilkey asked Crichton.

Crichton answered curtly, “No.”

“I know he has one,” Gilkey whispered to me.

His comment was a hint at his antagonism toward dealers, which he had made plain in our prior meetings. He’d argued that there was, in fact, widespread fraud among rare book sellers, fraud that made him not only blameless but also a victim.

One example Gilkey had cited was rebinding. Dealers, he explained, would remove the cover and title page from a second or later edition of a book, and then rebind it with a title page from a first edition that was in poor condition.

“They make it look like a first edition, first printing,” he said. “That’s part of the fraud they do. That’s actually legal.”

Later, I learned that there was nothing legal about this practice, but that it was not uncommon. The more expensive the book, the more likely it is that someone may have tampered with the binding. Such fraud is hardly new. In the eighteenth century, for example, facsimiles of pages, or “leaves,” of ancient texts were sometimes created by hand, and to near-perfect effect. Of course, these efforts did not always go undetected, particularly when the pages were printed on eighteenth-century paper with an identifiable watermark. Even now, dealers come across pages of books that have been washed to give them a uniform appearance. Reputable dealers judiciously examine books for telltale signs of rebinding, but there are less upstanding dealers who don’t. “You see a lot of that sort of thing on eBay,” one dealer remarked, “but you’ll never see it from an ABAA member. They’d be kicked out of the organization.”

 

 

 

 

As we inched down Brick Row’s bookshelves, Gilkey pointed to another book on his list. “Kurt Vonnegut,” he said. “I’d like something from him, too. And D. H. Lawrence. He’s also good.”

Crichton looked stunned and turned his back to us, then turned around again to face Gilkey. A few seconds later, while Gilkey was explaining to me which books he might like to look for, Crichton asked, “What’s your name?”

“John.”

John
—as though Crichton would be satisfied with a first name! I looked down at my notes while my heartbeat threatened to drown out everything around me.

“John what?”

“Gilkey.”

Crichton waited a moment, glanced down at his desk, then looked up. He didn’t take his eyes off us as Gilkey pointed to various books and whispered, as one does in a library or museum, informing me about additional authors he was interested in: Vladimir Nabokov, Willa Cather. He commented that he stays away from Bibles.

“And who are you?” Crichton asked me.

I explained that I was a journalist writing a story about book collectors. Crichton stared a moment. He seemed to be trying to decipher the situation. He handed me his business card and asked me to call him.

“For further interviews, if you’d like,” he offered.

I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I was desperate to explain myself to Crichton, and also to hear what he had to say in Gilkey’s absence.

Surveying a row of ancient-looking tomes, resplendent with gilt titles, Gilkey said, “I think in the last ten years, a lot of rare books have just skyrocketed. If I was going to buy, I’d probably be looking for something like Salman Rushdie and Jack London and Booth Tarkington.

“See these cases,” he said, pointing to the wall of locked cases with metal screens. “You can’t really see through them.” After trying to peer through, Gilkey said, “I think they have mostly nineteenth-century literature here, so no Kurt Vonnegut.”

My tape recorder was running, and I took notes, but sporadically. I couldn’t concentrate through the tension, and prayed the tape recorder was getting it all. Crichton came closer. I realized that he might be thinking that I, too, might be a thief, because as a reporter, I was asking too few questions. I was letting Gilkey go on, undirected.

“How is the shop organized?” I asked Crichton.

Curtly, he waved his hand in one direction. “These three or four tiers are nineteenth-century English literature.” He waved it in another. “That’s twentieth-century, English and American,” he said. “And there’s some other, more valuable first editions over here, organized the same way. Everything behind here is . . . uh . . . reference . . . Uh—sorry,” he said, clearly distracted, “I’m right in the middle of doing several things today, so why don’t you give me your number so I can call you. I do a lot of interviews with people.”