The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (21 page)

SHORTLY AFTER GILKEY told me about being kicked out of Acorn Books, he started talking about how impressed he was by the ways the San Francisco library protected its books. Apparently, one time he had simply wanted to make a photocopy from a book, but the librarian wouldn’t let him. The only way I could imagine this happening was if Gilkey had attempted to take a book from a secure area, or if he had tried to leave the library with it. A few months later, in conversations with dealers about Gilkey, I must have mentioned my concern that he might someday steal from the library, because when I called his parole officer to confirm what Gilkey had told me about the terms of his parole, etc., he said he was not at liberty to discuss Gilkey but noted that at a recent parole hearing, with Gilkey present, someone had mentioned my concern that he might steal from the library. Word had traveled. I realized I had to be careful about what I said if I wanted Gilkey to continue talking to me. At that point, after months of interviews and research, I was elbow-deep in this story, and I had no intention of losing contact with either Gilkey or Sanders. We were all tenacious hunters—Gilkey for books, Sanders for thieves, and me for both their stories. What I had not anticipated was that my role would become more complicated. No longer the objective observer, I had stepped into the plot.

 

 

 

 

W
hen I was in Salt Lake City visiting Sanders, he told me a story about the time he visited author Wendell Berry, whom he admires greatly. Speaking in a cadence in keeping with both the rhythm of the place and the language of its people, he rendered a keen portrait not only of Berry and a Kentucky tobacco farm but also of himself.

“Wendell Berry has a place in the world and he knows it. I think in his youth he did wander away from the hills of Kentucky, but he came back home, and as he put it, ‘Ever since then I’ve been growin’ me a wilderness.’ He invited me out there. . . .

“He’s a working man, and it was harvest season, and he was helping the neighbors bring in the tobacco. . . . I’d never seen a tobacco plant in my life. Those things are monstrous! Huge aliens with leaves the size of this whole table and stalks almost as big around as this glass. [After work, harvesting tobacco,] we’d go back to his porch and watch the fireflies and sip bourbon. At six o’clock the next morning, do it all over again. Then Sunday, Wendell took me to his woods. . . . He has this sense of his place in the world and he practices what he preaches.

“I came back to Salt Lake feeling: This is my home, I was born here, I come from a long line of Mormon ancestors, but I don’t feel that kind of kinship, I don’t feel a part of this place, somehow. I feel like an expat in my own land. I don’t feel that connection. I don’t think I ever will.”

Sanders may have felt disconnected from Salt Lake City, but it seemed to me that by tending his store, he had been growin’ himself a wilderness of another kind, inhabited by an eclectic range of books and a continual stream of people who loved them. This was a world of his making, one he irrefutably belonged in. Sanders surely knows as much about his rows of books as Wendell does of his neighbor’s rows of tobacco plants; when handed an old, obscure volume, he can sometimes sense its value in the same mysterious way a tobacco farmer might sense coming weather by catching certain scents in the air. Sitting with Sanders, listening to his stories, watching him help customers hunt down titles (
The Phantom Blooper
and “any Roman classics in Latin” were two requests that afternoon), it was I who was the outsider. I envied his lifelong attachment to this world perhaps as much as he envied Wendell Berry’s.

My interest in Sanders’s story, and Gilkey’s, how they lived such different lives, and how they were intertwined, was now what possessed me. I was still trying to determine what made Gilkey so passionate about books, why he would put his freedom on the line for them, and why Sanders was so determined to catch him, why he would put the financial stability of his store on the line for it. So I made a goal to spend more time with each and to further explore the territory in which they overlapped: collecting.

Every collector, by definition, seems to be at least a bit obsessed, a little mad (one of my favorite books about collecting is called
A Gentle Madness
). To a collector, one is never enough, and when a collection is complete, another is imminent, if not already begun. The accumulating never ends. Even though Sanders says he doesn’t collect anymore, he does admit that stocking his store is a form of vicarious collecting and that the stock is only part of his cache; he has a warehouse he refers to as “the catacombs,” where thousands more books are stored. He sells books every day, but he buys even more. Gilkey is equally focused. Even when he isn’t actively stealing books, he is researching them. Given the right circumstances, I wondered, how far might he or any obsessed collector go?

I found one answer in history. Don Vincente was a nineteenth-century Spanish monk who stole from the library of his Cistercian cloister in northeast Spain, as well as from several other ancient monasteries.
¹
After disappearing for a time, he resurfaced as the owner of a remarkably well-stocked antiquarian book shop in Barcelona, where he had a reputation for buying more books than he sold, selling only those he considered the most pedestrian, and keeping the rarest for himself. One particular volume obsessed him:
Furs e ordinacions fetes par los gloriosos reys de Aragon als regnicols del regne de Valencia
(Edicts and Ordinances for Valencia), printed in 1482 by Lamberto Palmart, the first printer in Spain. In 1836, upon its owner’s death, the book was offered at auction. It was thought to be the only existing copy, and Don Vincente was determined to acquire it. Although he offered all the money he owned, Augustino Patxot, a dealer whose shop was near Don Vincente’s, outbid him. Don Vincente appeared to have lost his senses, mumbling threats in the street, and did not even take the
reales de consolación
, a small payment the highest bidder had to give to the next highest according to custom at Spanish auctions. Three nights later, Patxot’s house went up in flames, and the next day his charred body was found. Soon, the bodies of nine learned men were also found, all of whom had been stabbed to death. Outbursts at the auction had made Don Vincente an obvious suspect. When his house was searched, the
Furs e ordinacions
was found hidden on a top shelf, along with books that had belonged to the other victims. He confessed to strangling Patxot and stabbing the others only after the magistrate assured him that his library would be well cared for once he was incarcerated. In court, when the judge asked the accused why he hadn’t ever stolen money from his victims, he replied, “I am not a thief.” Of having taken their lives, he said, “Every man must die, sooner or later, but good books must be conserved.” His lawyer argued that his client was insane. In addition, the lawyer noted with great import that he had just discovered that another copy of the book was in Paris, and argued that because of this, it could not be proved that the copy found in Don Vincente’s house was Patxot’s. His client, utterly despairing, cried, “Alas, alas! My copy is not unique!” He was heard repeating this phrase up until the time he was executed in 1836 in Barcelona.

His story inspired one of Gustave Flaubert’s first short stories and his first published work, “Bibliomanie,” written in 1836, shortly before his fifteenth birthday.

 

 

 

 

As my visit to Salt Lake City came to a close, Sanders asked how I was going to portray him in the magazine story I was working on. “As crazy as Gilkey?” he asked. It was not the first time he had posed this question. Sometimes, in the midst of an interview, he would slow down, as though it had just occurred to him that I might not perceive what he was telling me in ways that would benefit him. He seemed torn between his desire for recognition and his distrust of me. I admired his unconventional life, bold opinions, iconoclastic nature, artistic friends, enthralling stories, and dedication to his children and to his books, but the same wariness and suspicious nature that helped him in his work as a “bibliodick” were now a barrier between him and me. I tried to reassure him that I was painting a positive portrait of him.

Gilkey, on the other hand, had not asked how I was going to portray him. Had he inquired, I would not yet have had an answer.
As crazy as Gilkey?
Sanders had asked. Was Gilkey crazy? If so, what was the diagnosis? With all the information I had collected, I was still lacking clear answers. Sanders and Gilkey had shared with me their histories, their desires, their motivations, but all this information did not add up to bold portraits sharply in focus.

Back home, I read in the newspaper that John Berendt, author of
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
, was going to read that evening from his new book at a bookstore in San Francisco. I remembered that Gilkey had mentioned planning to attend. I considered going as well, but decided against it. I didn’t want to endure another awkward encounter in public. Besides, Gilkey and I were scheduled to meet the following Wednesday at the Goodwill store on the corner of Mission and Van Ness streets in San Francisco.

I called Gilkey’s cell phone to confirm our meeting, but he didn’t answer, nor did he return my message. I called a second time, but again, no response. This was unusual, because he was always careful to be on time for every meeting and to notify me well in advance if he could not make it.

The next week, I received a collect call.

“Mrs. Bartlett?” said the only person other than telemarketers who calls me that. “This is John Gilkey.”

He was calling me from a pay phone at Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, the prison where I had first interviewed him. He said he had been arrested in Modesto on the day I’d noted Berendt’s reading, and explained that he had been put back in prison because of the Brahms postcard he sold.

“They offered me three and a half months, and I turned that down,” he continued, explaining that he had instead been sentenced to nine and a half months. This was not the only time Gilkey had refused one sentence only to find himself, after protesting the unfairness of it, with a longer sentence. “I’m gonna go to the board to try to clear this up,” he said, sounding resigned more than angry. “I’m innocent this time,” he added. “That’s the funny part.”

Of course.

Gilkey said that after police raided his Treasure Island apartment, they returned to him several items they could not prove were stolen, including the Brahms postcard he had taken from Roger Gross. In his mind, this justified his contention that the items were not stolen.

“They gave it back to me,” he said. “So what am I supposed to think?”

I was contemplating the convoluted logic of Gilkey’s defense, when a recording interrupted our conversation:
This call may be recorded or monitored.

When I told him I might visit him in prison, he was more than welcoming.

“Do I need to sign anything?” he asked.

I had decided to be more frank about my views of his stealing. I told him that I had spoken with dealers whose books he’d stolen, and that some said they hadn’t had insurance, so they suffered the losses themselves.

“Well, if I were a better person . . . but I’m in jail right now, of course,” he said, acknowledging that he might not be that better person. “I’d say that’s the nature of the business. That’s how I feel now. As a business owner I certainly wouldn’t want to lose five hundred dollars. But if you open up a business, things like that are going to happen. ’Cause, like, a liquor store, it’s probably gonna get robbed once a month. So if you want to open up a business, you gotta be prepared for stuff like that.”

Stuff like that happens. That he made it happen was irrelevant to Gilkey. As he stated his views, his voice sounded the way it did when he told me about thefts he’d pulled off successfully. He spoke in short, staccato sentences, brimming with braggadocio, like a gangster in a 1940s movie. I couldn’t help thinking that he was not connecting the dots, that he was not able to see how his criminal actions had put him where he stood, with a pay phone at his ear, guards at his back. I suppose I wanted him to make that connection. I asked him if he could imagine a life without books.

“Yeah, I can,” he said. “I mean, I can’t collect books unless people donate them to me.”

Clearly, he considered actually buying them out of the question.

“Eventually,” he admitted, “I think I should try to get another rare book. At this point I don’t know how I would do it.”

As robust as his powers of imagination may have been, he seemed incapable of considering a future devoid of rare books. Neither, it would seem, could he stop thinking of devious ways of getting them.

“To be honest,” he said, “I did think of a criminal idea to get them. But I don’t think it’s feasible.” He elaborated, “I was thinking something like insurance fraud,” adding, as if in justification of his confession, “I am just being honest.”