The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (8 page)

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.

About a year later, on New Year’s Eve 1998, he wrote another bad check to cover gambling losses at a casino. Again he was arrested.

“I just wanted some extra change, and I lost,” he said, as though this might be a satisfactory explanation.

Gilkey didn’t get out of prison until October 1999. When he did, he was feeling cheated and ready to be paid back. It was a cycle he would run through repeatedly: being sure he will never be caught, being arrested, doing time, then being released with a sense of entitlement and an eagerness for revenge that set him back on the same cycle. Having spent so many months behind bars, he felt as though he were running out of time.

“Once you’ve done time, you start to feel that way,” he said. So he made a promise to himself and his aging father, who was almost eighty.

“I’m going to build us a grand estate.”

 

 

 

 

W
hen, at the start of 1999, Ken Sanders received a letter from the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America asking him to vote on whether to dissolve the southwest chapter to which he belonged, it was out of pure orneriness that he voted against the change.
¹
With only seventeen members, it was one of the smallest, and unlike larger chapters, it didn’t hold fairs or meetings. Soon he discovered that he was the only member who had voted against dissolution, and although the votes in favor were enough to shut it down, the board decided otherwise. And since every chapter needs a representative and a president, they asked Sanders which position he would prefer to fill—a fair request, he thought, given his vote.

“I don’t care—as long as it doesn’t have to do with money,” said Sanders, who has had financial problems for much of his life. “Whatever you do, don’t make me treasurer.”

He began his term as representative.

“The next thing I know I’m supposed to be at the board of governors’ meeting in New York City. What the hell is that?!” said Sanders. He found out on the seventeenth floor of a Rockefeller Center building at his first board meeting, where they put him on a membership committee. Shortly thereafter, they also assigned him the position of security chair, about which he knew nothing.

A few weeks later, sitting at his desk, perched in a loft overlooking his store, Sanders got a call from the secretary in the ABAA’s New York office.

“Have you vetted the pink sheets yet?” she asked.

“What pink sheets?” said Sanders.

He hadn’t opened the box she sent him, assuming it was full of reference materials. When he pried it open, he uncovered a problem much bigger than abandoned pink sheets, the term for theft reports sent by dealers.

Since 1949, the ABAA has worked to promote and maintain ethical standards within the trade. There are now 455 bookseller members, and to join, each of them has to have been in business for at least four years, undergone intense scrutiny, and been recommended by ABAA members.
²
Until Sanders started working as security chair, when someone stole books from an ABAA dealer, that dealer would fill out a pink sheet and mail it to ABAA headquarters in New York. There, copies would be sent out with the next mass mailing, whenever it happened to come about, so that all members could be on the lookout for the stolen books. This would take considerably longer than the time it would take a thief to saunter out the door of one bookstore with a first edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
, for example, tucked into his coat and into the door of another, where he could sell it and walk away with several thousand dollars (depending on its condition, whether or not it’s inscribed, has an original dust wrapper, etc., it’s valued at up to $6,500). The box of pink sheets Sanders had inherited contained some that were over a year old but had not yet been distributed. He knew that at that point it was probably too late to send them out to dealers around the country.

What the hell good is this doing anybody?
thought Sanders. The job hadn’t come with instructions, and he knew little about technological options. “You know that scene from Kubrick’s
2001
where the apes are grunting around the black monolith?” Sanders likes to say. “That’s me and my computer every morning, seeing if it will work.”

But he wanted to find a way to broadcast news of thefts immediately. First, he started using a private ABAA online discussion list to reach members. Then he campaigned the board of governors, declaring with characteristic zealous-ness, “I’m the security chair, dammit, I want a security line! I want a way to contact everyone, and since over half the membership doesn’t subscribe to the discuss list, I need something else!” So although Sanders calls himself “a Luddite in cyberspace,” he convinced the Internet committee to create a stolen-book database and an e-mail system to alert the hundreds of members of the ABAA and, soon thereafter, members of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), which includes two thousand booksellers in thirty countries.

In November, about six months after the e-mail system had been set up, John Gilkey was reading the
San Francisco Chronicle
when an advertisement caught his attention: Saks Fifth Avenue was hiring salespeople. The next day, he dressed in a shirt, tie, and slacks from a too-tight pin-striped suit, and took the ninety-mile train ride from Modesto to San Francisco.

Saks Men’s Store sits just outside the center of Union Square, on a block with glittering sidewalks and neighbors like Armani, Burberry, and Cartier. It is a high-rent district that attracts big spenders, something that Gilkey found attractive. He figured that by working in a place like Saks, he would come in contact with wealthy clientele, “no riffraff.” He also assumed that since it was a quality place specializing in luxury goods, he would get paid more, maybe even earn commissions and discounts. He was right on all counts. (Saks declined my repeated requests to respond to Gilkey’s claims.)

Saks would turn out to be an almost ideal working environment for Gilkey, offering him opportunities to speak with people who belonged to a world he desperately wanted to be a part of.
Almost
ideal, however, because while these people had money, they weren’t necessarily well educated or in possession of large libraries, as he knew he would be, given the same means.

Sitting in the Saks employment office, Gilkey completed the application, noting his brief experience working at a Robinson-May department store in Los Angeles. He must have seemed perfect for the job: polite, experienced, and not too badly dressed. Where they asked for his name, he neatly filled it in, but when he reached the part of the application where he was supposed to write whether he had ever been convicted of a crime, he left it blank.

He was asked to start the next day.

WHENEVER I HAVE ASKED Gilkey to describe the allure books have for him, he struggles, but ultimately settles on the aesthetic. “It’s a visual thing, the way they look, all lined up on the shelf.” He once suggested an almost sexual attraction to books. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a man, but I like to look.”

As Patricia Hampl wrote in a book about beauty’s bewitching qualities: “Collecting is not a simple matter of possessing. It’s a way of looking: a looking that is itself a kind of craving. To look this way is to be possessed, lost.”
³

Collectors talking about the books they have just acquired, or the ones they haven’t been able to get their hands on, or those snatched away by another collector, sound a lot like lotharios reminiscing about lovers. At a San Francisco book fair, Peter Stern, a gray-haired Boston dealer clad in a tweed jacket, with a plaid scarf around his neck, said he doesn’t collect anymore, but occasionally a book will catch his eye. When this happens, “I ache to buy it. I want it desperately.”
⁴
But acquiring the object of his affection changes everything. “The moment I own it, even if it’s for a few seconds, that’s enough. I could sell it the next minute, and I don’t even remember it sometimes. I’m looking forward to the next book.”

It is not uncommon to read pronouncements from besotted collectors that make the “mania” in “bibliomania” seem an understatement. “Too few people seem to realize that books have feelings,” wrote collector Eugene Field, who wrote
The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac
in 1896. “But if I know one thing better than another I know this, that my books know me and love me. When of a morning I awaken I cast my eyes about my room to see how fare my beloved treasures, and as I cry cheerily to them, ‘Good-day to you, sweet friends!’ how lovingly they beam upon me, and how glad they are that my repose has been unbroken.”
⁵

AT SAKS, Gilkey was in a world of tasteful luxury. He had been assigned to work in the Men’s Store on the first floor, in “men’s furnishings,” where meticulously folded garments of fine cottons, silks, and wools sat in floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted wood cabinetry. He would start his day checking the floor, clearing away any detritus left by the previous day’s shoppers. He would stroll past hand-stitched Borrelli shirts (starting around $350) and Etro ties ($130 and up), and chat with fellow workers. Because it was the holidays, when Saks customers can’t seem to get enough luxury goods, the floor was usually packed. They needed extra help, “floaters,” to work in various departments, which is why Gilkey was hired. He enjoyed the job and took special pleasure in spying local socialites and celebrities, such as Ann Getty and Sharon Stone, who was then married to
San Francisco Chronicle
editor Phil Bronstein. Gilkey prided himself on being a good employee, always on time. He was friendly and thought that everyone at Saks, “especially the people in the loss prevention department,” were nice to him. He had snowed even the watchdogs, and I could imagine how. His decorous way of speaking, deferential affect, and calm demeanor would be valuable assets on the sales floor, where big spenders would be accustomed to being treated with such regard.

In addition to consulting Gilkey about their purchases, customers sometimes asked to open instant credit accounts. He would dutifully take down their information—names, numbers, addresses, and so on—and when they would tell him that they needed higher credit limits, he would call the business office and communicate their requests. When the office checked a customer’s credit rating and decided to grant a more generous limit, increasing it from, say, $4,000 to $8,000, Gilkey noticed.

This was a part-time job, only two or three days a week, but even if Gilkey had been working full-time, his salary would never have afforded him what he wanted. One day, while he was opening a new account for a customer, he realized what he held in his hands.
A gold mine,
he thought. Whenever he opened the instant accounts, he could put the audit copy in his pocket, go out to lunch, and write the information on a separate piece of paper, which he could refer to later when placing orders over the phone. That day at lunch, he did just that. He walked down the street to the Westin Hotel, took the elevator to the second-floor lobby, which offered some degree of privacy, and wrote down the credit card numbers listed on the instant account. The next day, he did it again. So it went, through the holidays. He was careful not to take every account record, however, hoping to avoid raising suspicions.

It was not long before Gilkey realized that he had yet another source for credit card information. In those days, customers’ entire credit card numbers were printed on receipts. Each receipt included a copy for the customer and a copy for the auditing department at Saks. Salespeople were asked to cross out the number on the customers’ copies, but the audit copies remained fully intact. According to Gilkey, when salespeople were rushed, they sometimes threw away copies, so even if, from time to time, he were to forget to turn one in, it would not be noticed.