The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (6 page)

The more Gilkey spoke, the more incongruities emerged. The combination of his full, round face and thinning dark hair made him appear at once young and old. He was unevenly shaven but careful in his manner, which made him seem both lost and deliberate. And most striking, he collected books to feel “grand, regal, like royalty, rich, cultured,” yet has become a criminal, stealing in order to give himself the appearance of wealth and erudition.

We had only thirty minutes, and Gilkey happily plowed through his story, jumping back and forth in time, guided by memories of various books he stole rather than by chronology. It appeared that he wanted to cover a lot of ground. Maybe, like me, he thought it might be our only conversation. When the subject turned to his release from prison and what he might do, he laid out his plans.

“I’m full of creativity,” he said. “When you’re in here twenty-four/seven, you get a lot of ideas.” He noted them in quick succession:

“I want one book from each famous author.

“I want to write the presidential library and see if they’ll send me a book.

“I’m going to put an ad in the paper. It will say ‘Keep me out of jail: send me a book.’

“I’m gonna open a bookstore.

“I’ve actually written a long book. It was inspired by the work of John Kendrick Bangs. He wrote nineteenth-century prose and plays. I drafted an homage to him. And a couple of suspense stories.”

Gilkey was in prison this time because only three weeks after being released, following a three-year sentence for book theft, he went to a book fair and wrote a bad check. He does not like being in prison. “I stand out like a sore thumb,” he said, and intimated that he has fended off sexual assaults. Watching Gilkey through the Plexiglas window, as though I felt the awkward boy at the front of the class with the too-short pants and neatly combed hair had somehow found himself amid rapists and carjackers.

“The intellectual level is low here,” he said. “I went to college, UC Santa Cruz.
³
I’ve had an extremely rough time here.” Still, he found time to read. “I’m reading Tom Clancy. My first cellmate was a constant talker, so it was hard to read. Now I read spy novels by R. Ludlum,
The Bourne Supremacy
, James Patterson. I’ve read twenty to twenty-five books in here. I prefer reference books, though, ’cause I like to learn more about antiques and collectibles, so I can build my knowledge.”

In 1998, while doing time in Stanislaus County Jail for fraud, Gilkey said he had read John Dunning’s
Booked to Die
, a novel in which a woman collector does copious research on rare books and profits from her knowledge. It was this book that had inspired Gilkey to become more serious, more thorough, with his own research about rare books.

Gilkey said that he didn’t like to spend his “own money” on books, and that it wasn’t fair that he didn’t have enough money to afford all the rare books he wanted. For Gilkey, “fairness” seemed to be a synonym for “satisfaction”: if he is satisfied, all is deemed fair; if not, it isn’t. I had no idea how to respond, especially because of his unfailing equanimity while stating his views.

“I have a degree in economics,” he said, in an effort to explain his compulsion to steal. “I figure the more books I get for free, if I need to sell them, I get a hundred percent profit.”

It took me a few seconds to realize that Gilkey was not joking. He was so calm and polite that statements like these were particularly jolting, bringing into sharp and unnerving focus his skewed sense of what is fair and right and reasonable. Back and forth, as though a pendulum were swinging in and out of his conscience, Gilkey alternated between claiming that he would never commit another crime, and presenting ideas of how to “get” more books. “I want to stop committing crime. It’s not worth it,” he said. Then, “There’s the excitement of having the books in your hands.” The conversation continued this way, swinging from his desire for books to his plan to quit stealing them. Only one of these wishes seemed genuine, or even possible.

Gilkey has been arrested several times for writing bad checks for books, which he told me he didn’t know was against the law.

“I mean, I thought it was a civil issue, not a criminal one,” he said.

I knew that this was as unlikely as the story he had just told me about how he got the children’s book
Madeline
.

“I went to a flea market and I bought a first-edition
Madeline
by Ludwig Bemelmans for one dollar. It’s worth fifteen hundred now.”

Much of what he had said so far was true (Sanders had already given me some of the same information), but surely not all of it.

I turned our conversation to the 2003 book fair in San Francisco, where Sanders thought he had seen Gilkey, although I did not mention Sanders.

“Yeah, I went,” he said, “but I think people knew about me.”

He had just posted bail and brought with him to the fair a couple of books he had hoped to sell to unsuspecting dealers in order to raise money for an attorney. He had roamed up and down the aisles, chatting with dealers and admiring books and color plates from an Audubon folio. One of the books he carried around at the fair was, appropriately enough,
The Invisible Man
.

“But I got the feeling I was being watched,” he said, “so I left.”

So maybe Sanders was not, as his colleague suggested, paranoid. Maybe the man he had locked eyes with on the opening day of the fair was indeed Gilkey.

“But you know,” said Gilkey, “the police never got me. That’s not how I got caught. Some ABAA security chair got me. Ken something. I can’t remember his last name.”

He looked at me to see if I knew, but I did not want to appear to be on Sanders’s side, so I said nothing. I had spent the last half-hour trying to parse Gilkey’s truths from his lies, and now the half-truth of my silence lodged as its own kind of deception.

Gilkey started to tell me the names of other books he would like to collect, but stopped mid-sentence because a guard had signaled him. Our thirty minutes were up.

Driving home from hot, dry Tracy to cool, crisp San Francisco, I replayed my conversation with Gilkey in my head. He was not the flinty, belligerent criminal I had expected, nor had he been completely straight with me. What I felt sure of was that he was a man completely enthralled by books and how they might express his ideal self. He was a collector like other collectors—but also not like them. His polite manner had been a relief at first, but had become disconcerting. Reconciling the face of composure with his history of crime was no simple task, and it was about to become even more complicated.

 

 

 

 

W
hen Gilkey was released from prison several weeks later, we met at Café Fresco in Union Square, his choice. It’s up the street from Saks Fifth Avenue, where he used to work. The café’s décor is faux Italian, with extra-large cans of tomatoes and bags of pasta gathering dust on metal shelves across from a refrigerated case of doughnuts that Hispanic women ring up at the register. It is as though someone thought the café should have the façade of Italian country charm, but abandoned the idea when it was half done.

Gilkey wore a pressed white shirt, a dark blue baseball cap with “PGA Golf” printed across it, and brand-new beige leather sneakers, the kind you don’t usually see on anyone under sixty-five. The shirt and jacket once belonged to his father, who had died while Gilkey was doing time at DVI. He said he missed his father a lot, then pulled a crumpled tissue from the jacket pocket. “Huh,” he said, looking at the tissue, “this was his,” then put it back in his pocket. I picked up a cup of tea at the counter, and he ordered an orange juice and a doughnut, for which he thanked me profusely. We sat down at a table, and for two hours he answered my questions, most of which were of the straightforward who, what, where, when, and why variety, but it was this last question,
why
, more than any other, that had brought me there. Why did Gilkey love rare books? Why did he steal them? Why did he risk his freedom for them? And why was he willing to talk to me so frankly about it?

Before our meeting, I had read about where Gilkey grew up, hoping it might provide clues about the man and his motivations. He was born in 1968, in Modesto, California, a medium-sized town in rural San Joaquin Valley, which has since grown to nearly two hundred thousand people.
¹
The first settlers arrived during the Gold Rush, their pockets empty and their heads filled with dreams of striking it rich, but like most immigrants drawn to California in the mid- 1800s, most of them did not find their fortunes panning for gold. Over a hundred years later, Modesto developed into the idealized suburb popularized by native son George Lucas in
American Graffiti
. Today, the town solicits the television and film industries to use its “all-American” appearance as a backdrop.
²
Behind the fresh-scrubbed façade, however, is a town with one of the highest rates of car theft in the United States,
³
air quality that’s often hazardous, and, according to 2007 statistics from the FBI, more rapes, violent crime, larceny, and property crime per capita than New York City. It is fitting that a man like Gilkey, intent on constructing his own false front, should have grown up in a place like Modesto, where the public image is so misleading.

Taking sips from his bottle of orange juice, Gilkey told me that he grew up the youngest in a family of eight. His father worked at Campbell’s Soup Company as a transportation manager, and his mother was a housewife.

“My parents were just a normal couple, I guess. My mom’s a homemaker. She loves to take care of children, take care of the house, that’s all she likes to do. My father worked all the time. Eight to five, to bring in the money. My father did a lot of the gardening. My mom used to like to go to garage sales. Just regular stuff, I guess. Just regular family stuff.”

When I asked Gilkey about when he started collecting books, he said, “I kept a collection of Richie Rich comic books in my bedroom.”

Richie Rich was an odd-looking character who wore short pants and a large bow tie, but was a pleasant and likable boy from a family with bottomless wealth. The allure for kids was the fantasy of great riches and instant gratification. Richie Rich could get whatever he wanted with minimal effort. That Gilkey, a man whose dream is to be wealthy and refined, would have collected not
Superman
or
X-Men
or
Fantastic Four
but
Richie Rich
seemed the kind of detail a B-movie writer might propose to a director. Gilkey seemed unaware of the irony as he explained the attraction.

“I liked the kid, wearing a bow tie . . . and the colorful cover. Nice stories, easy to read. He was so rich. [He was] just playing baseball with Pee Wee or Freckles, doing the things that kids do. But they were rich, they had vaults and all that, where all the money was, diamonds and jewelry, treasures. I guess everybody wants to be rich.”

Maybe, but not everyone wants desperately for others to see him as rich. It was this aspect of Gilkey’s collecting that set him apart from other collectors I had met and read about. For them, however gratifying it might be to have the admiration and envy of others, it is not the driving incentive of their collecting. There are, undoubtedly, those who collect to impress (Sanders likens them to African big-game hunters: “Take aim—boom—you’ve got a trophy!”), but I had the sense that it was usually secondary to other reasons. One collector I met was delighted to show me her extensive and varied book collection.
⁴
She had been gathering them for over a decade, but no one had ever asked to see them before. “None of my friends get it,” she said. Her growing library was a private pleasure, pure and simple. Gilkey had other motivations, as his enthusiasm for Richie Rich indicated.

I wouldn’t be able to name a single issue of a comic book I read as a child. Occasionally, I glanced at my older brother’s issues of
MAD
or a friend’s
Archie
s, but I was not interested in comics. I did collect, though. Huddled on my childhood shelves were glass animals, carnelian stones I had dug up at the beach, ceramic animals that came packed inside my mother’s boxes of tea, and, for reasons that now escape me, the striped paper straws that Pixy Stix candy came in. The difference, however, between my desire to accumulate and the true collector’s was that I added to each assemblage with mild pleasure, not fevered focus. The haphazard, infrequent expansion of my collections gave me a sense of constancy (another carnelian! bigger than the others, but
like
them) and confirmed identity (no one I knew collected these objects; it was
my
thing)—two common satisfactions of childhood. But eventually, after I’d amassed a couple dozen of each object, I would forget about them. I was easily sated, something probably no collector would say about himself. My only true passion as a child was an intense study of ballet, where what I collected were strained muscles, blisters, and, more than anything, a deep sense of purpose and joy. Throughout those years, I was drawn to classmates who were troublemakers, those who talked back to teachers and pulled off pranks that landed them in the principal’s office. (I’ve heard that two of these kids ended up in prison.) I never dared disobey, but got a secret thrill from their doing so. Being around Gilkey was similarly exciting, although instead of the visceral thrill I remember having as a kid, it was an intellectual one. I couldn’t fathom what it was about books that made him continually risk jail time for them.