The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (2 page)

Whenever I would close the
Kräutterbuch
and push its covers tight, there was an exhalation, a settling, before I affixed the clasps. Of course I would return it, I reassured myself. But in the meantime, I kept a book that did not belong to me, and tried not to think about what that made me.

 

 

 

 

A
pril 28, 2005, was bright and mild, the kind of spring day in New York City that seems full of promise, and on the corner of Park Avenue and East Sixty-sixth Street a queue of optimistic people was growing. It was opening day of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, and they were waiting to begin the treasure hunt. The annual fair is held at the Park Avenue Armory, an anachronistic, castle-like building with towers and musket ports that one historian described as large enough to allow a four-abreast formation to march in and out of the building. There were no such formations when I arrived, but a steady stream of book-hungry people marching through the doors, eager to be among the first to see and touch the objects of their desire: modern first editions, illuminated texts, Americana, law books, cookbooks, children’s books, World War II histories, incunabula (Latin for “in the cradle,” books from printing’s infancy, roughly 1450 to 1500
¹
), Pulitzer Prize winners, natural histories, erotica, and countless other temptations.

Inside, security guards had taken their positions and were prepared to explain, twice to the indignant, that all but the smallest purses would have to be left behind at the coat check. Overhead lights shone bright and hot, like spotlights aimed at a stage, and as I walked into the fair, I felt like an actor without a script. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been an inveterate flea market shopper, on the prowl for beautiful and interesting objects. Some of my favorite recent finds are an old doctor’s bag I use as a purse, wooden forms for ships’ gears, which now hang on a wall in my house, and an old watch repairman’s kit with glass vials of minuscule parts. (When I was a teen, it was costume jewelry and bootleg eight-track tapes to play in my boyfriend’s van.) This book fair was altogether different. A hybrid of museum and marketplace, it was filled with millions of dollars’ worth of books and enough weathered leather spines to make a decorator swoon. Collectors strode with purpose toward specific booths, and dealers adjusted the displays of their wares on shelves while eyeing one another’s latest and most valuable finds, perched in sparkling glass cases. They even set some of their goods on countertops, where anyone who pleased would be able to pick them up and leaf through them. Everyone but me seemed to know exactly what he was looking for. But what I sought was not as clear-cut as first editions or illuminated manuscripts. I love to read books and I appreciate their aesthetic charms, but I don’t collect them; I had come to this fair to understand what makes others do so. I wanted a close-up view into the rare book world, a place where the customs were utterly foreign to me. With any luck—something I’m sure every person at this fair was wishing for—I also hoped to discover something about those whose craving leads them to steal the books they love.

To that end, I was here in part to meet with Ken Sanders, the Salt Lake City rare book dealer and self-styled sleuth I had spoken with on the phone. Sanders has a reputation as a man who relishes catching book thieves, and like a cop who has been on the force for years without a partner, he also savors any opportunity to share a good story. I had called him a few weeks earlier, in preparation for our meeting, and during that first conversation, he had told me about the Red Jaguar Guy, who stole valuable copies of the
Book of Mormon
from him; the Yugoslavian Scammers, whom he helped the FBI track down one weekend; and the Irish Gas Station Gang, who routinely placed fraudulent orders with dealers through the Internet and had them shipped to a gas station in Northern Ireland. But these were preliminary stories, warm-ups for the big one: In 1999, Sanders had begun working as the volunteer security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. In short, the job was to alert fellow dealers whenever he got wind of a theft so that they could be on the lookout for the missing books. At first, the work was sporadic. Every few months he would receive an e-mail or telephone call about a theft and immediately forward the information to his colleagues. But as time passed, the number of thefts climbed. There seemed to be no one type of book stolen, nor any pattern, except that most had been snatched through credit card fraud. No one knew if this was the work of one thief or a gang of many. Sanders heard from a dealer in the Bay Area who had lost a nineteenth-century diary. The next week, a dealer in Los Angeles reported losing a first-edition
War of the Worlds
by H. G. Wells. Sanders found himself spending less and less time attending to his store and more time trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Sanders took a deep breath, then launched into a bizarre incident that had occurred at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in 2003, held in San Francisco. The fair was at the Concourse Exhibition Center, a lackluster, warehouse-like building situated on the edge of the city’s design center, just blocks from the county jail—between showcases for the domestic trappings of wealth and a holding pen for criminals. It was a location that would turn out to be fitting. With about 250 dealers and 10,000 attendees, the city’s fair is the largest in the world. “That big ol’ barn goes on forever,” is how Sanders described it. On opening day, as usual, collectors and dealers were giddy with a sense of possibility. Sanders, however, warily paced his booth. He was surrounded by some of his finest offerings—
The Strategy of Peace
, inscribed by John F. Kennedy, and a first edition of the
Book of Mormon
—but his mind was not on his books. Several days before the fair, while sitting in his Salt Lake City office, surrounded by dusty piles of books and documents, he had received a phone call from a detective in San Jose, California. The detective said that the thief Sanders had spent three years trying to track down (and by then Sanders had a hunch it was one thief, not a gang) now had a name, John Gilkey, and that he was in San Francisco.

A couple of days before the fair, Sanders received a mug shot of Gilkey. He had imagined what the thief looked like, but this was not it.

“I can tell you one thing,” he said. “He didn’t look like Moriarty to me”—referring to the fictional character whom Sherlock Holmes called the “Napoleon of crime.”

The photo showed a plain-looking man in his thirties with short dark hair parted on the side, a red T-shirt under a white buttoned shirt, and an expression that was more despondent than menacing. Sanders’s friend Ken Lopez, a tall Massachusetts dealer with shoulder-length hair and an open pack of Camel cigarettes in his T-shirt pocket, was, as far as they knew, Gilkey’s latest victim (he had ordered a first-edition
Grapes of Wrath
). Shortly before the fair opened, Sanders and Lopez talked about handing out Gilkey’s photo to all the dealers, even making a wanted poster for the doors of the fair. But Sanders reconsidered. Gilkey’s victims, many of whom were at the fair, might one day be called to identify him in a lineup, and Sanders didn’t want to risk contaminating the process. All he could do was remain vigilant and wonder if Gilkey would be brazen enough to show up at the fair.

“I was thinking that he would be attracted to a good fair like a moth to a flame,” he said. “And he would be there to steal books.”

The San Francisco fair had been open less than an hour when Sanders locked eyes with a man he didn’t recognize. This was not so unusual. Sanders often forgets names, even faces. But this encounter was different.

“I looked at that guy, and he looked right back into my eyes,” said Sanders, “and I got the weirdest goddamn feeling.”

It was not the mug shot he was thinking of. That had already faded from his memory. Something else had snagged his attention, a strange, sure sense that flooded him in a slice of a second. Sanders’s daughter, Melissa, was helping a customer at the other end of the booth, and Sanders turned to ask her to take a look at this dark-haired, ordinary-looking man he suspected was Gilkey. But when Sanders turned around to point out the man to Melissa, he had vanished.

Sanders rushed down the aisle, past four or five other booths, bumping into a couple of collectors along the way, to his friend John Crichton’s booth. Still stunned, he paused to catch his breath. “I think I just saw Gilkey,” Sanders told him.

“You’ve got to relax, old man,” Crichton said, reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. “You’re getting paranoid.”

SO IT WAS with all of this in mind that I wandered through the New York fair, waiting for my scheduled meeting with Sanders at his booth, and wondering, as I observed the scene around me, if any of these people were like Gilkey. What about the elderly man at a counter a few feet away looking back and forth from one blood-red leather-bound book to another almost identical one? Or the dark-suited couple whispering to each other as they ogled a book on nineteenth-century French architecture? It was hard not to view everyone with suspicion, but I tried to keep my imagination in check as I approached my first booth.

Straight ahead was Aleph-Bet Books, where I was drawn in by an enticing array of children’s books, first editions of many that I recognized from my childhood, like
Pinocchio
, although this was a first edition in Italian, which at $80,000 cost around twenty thousand times more than my own childhood copy at home (a Golden Book). The booth was packed with hungry collectors, but I managed to get the attention of co-owner Marc Younger, who explained to me why so many fairgoers had crowded his booth. People have an emotional attachment to books they remember reading as children, he said, and very often it’s the first type of book a collector seeks. Some move on to other books, but many spend a lifetime collecting their favorite childhood stories. He showed me the first trade edition of
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
($15,000).

“It’s an interesting story,” he said. “No one would publish it, so she [Beatrix Potter] self-published two hundred and fifty of them. They go up to a hundred thousand dollars.”

Next, he pointed out a first-edition
The Cat in the Hat
, priced at $8,500. It looked pretty much like a new
The Cat in the Hat
to me, and he confirmed that it can be difficult to identify first editions of children’s books, in part because the edition is not always noted. Apparently, you have to look for other clues. Younger explained that when first published,
The Cat in the Hat’s
boards (a term for covers—I was learning the lingo) were covered in flat paper, but that later they were glazed (shiny). I was starting to feel like an insider. At the next flea market, I could be on the lookout for a first-edition
The Cat in the Hat
.

Younger then agreed to show me something more rare. He had two letters from L. Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz books, to John R. Neill, who illustrated many of them. “Usually it’s the really extraordinary things that do well,” he said, “like these.” Younger expected them to go for $45,000 to $60,000. So many of his books (not to mention the letters, original illustrations, and other ephemera) seemed like “really extraordinary things” that I walked away with a kind of book-fever setting in.

Across the aisle from Aleph-Bet were the largest books I’d ever seen: sumptuously illustrated volumes of natural history, as big as coffee tables and twice as thick, which the dealer, a bow-tied gentleman who spoke in hushed tones, called elephant folios. Based on size and weight, they were aptly named, and I wondered where, other than museums, such books would be useful, or even practical to lug from a shelf, for example, to a table. After admiring a darkly lush, eerie floral illustration in one of the elephant folios, “The Night-Blowing Cereus,” by Robert John Thornton (1799), I left and headed in the other direction, to a booth where I got to see a rare first edition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony ($13,500) and a valuable copy of
Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids
, Watson and Crick’s first and second DNA article offprints, signed ($140,000).

The New York fair guidebook indicated that Sanders was in booth D8. Making my way there, I stopped by several more booths. At Bruce McKittrick Rare Books of Philadelphia, owner McKittrick was charming anyone who stopped by with his rapid-fire musings on books. His booth attracted more people than any around it, but that may also have been due to the champagne he poured. He told me about Pietro Aretino, a sixteenth-century Italian writer whose oeuvre included erotic books. In 1524, he wrote a collection of sonnets to accompany the engravings of sixteen sexual positions by Marcantonio Raimondi (who based his images on a series of paintings by Giulio Romano, a student of Raphael’s). It remains one of the most famous examples of Renaissance erotica.