Bookreporter.com - THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH by Allison Hoover Bartlett

THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession
Allison Hoover Bartlett
Riverhead Books
True Crime
ISBN: 9781594488917

If you are reading this, you are very likely a bibliophiliac. What’s that exactly? Well, allow me to explain. Avid book readers fall into three general categories. The first is the aforementioned bibliophiliac, those who are defined as people who love books and gobble them up for the qualities of their content for the mere joy of reading. We tend to feel anxious if our bedside table is not stacked with several to-be-read books. I’ve heard fellow bibliophiliacs joke about marking off their book stacks with yellow crime scene tape in fear of their toppling and injuring an innocent passerby. Next are the bibliomaniacs. This obsessive-compulsive disorder is closely related to hoarding, which compels its victims to collect books just for the sake of having them. Reading is not the goal for bibliomaniacs; they just feel the need to possess them.

John Charles Gilkey is one of a (fortunately rare) class that falls into a third category called bibliokleptomaniac, one who possess a pathological disorder that results in the senseless stealing of books. In Gilkey’s case, it starts with a desire to own a copy of each book on the “Top 100 Best Books” list, preferably a signed first edition. Encountering his prize in his almost daily prowls through rare book haunts --- perhaps a rare bookstore or fair, a garage sale or Goodwill --- he pounces. Gilkey’s lust soon exceeds the Top 100 list, and any rare book is fair game.

Allison Hoover Bartlett, a San Francisco freelance journalist, learns of Gilkey after a chance meeting with rare bookseller Ken Sanders, known among his fellow rare booksellers as the “biblio-dick” --- the book detective. A 400-year-old book with an uncertain provenance has come into Bartlett’s possession, and she visits his store to learn more about it and how such books were circulated. She finds out that a spate of books has started disappearing from rare book fairs and dozens of rare book boutiques on the west coast. Sanders tells her that when booksellers reported the thefts to the police, who had no concept of the significance or value of an old book, little was done as they were disinterested in tracking down an elusive petty thief.

Sanders chairs a committee in the rare books industry whose task was to track down the huge numbers of stolen rare books and documents that are filched from members of their association. He tells her that there were many culprits, but that a man named John Gilkey stands out as a prime suspect. In the vein of Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, Sanders becomes Javert to Gilkey’s Jean Valjean. But in all fairness, Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread to feed his family; he didn’t make off with thousands of rare books and stash them in basements. Sanders is almost as possessed by the hunger to bring Gilkey to justice as Gilkey is in stealing books. Nailing Gilkey and finding the lost books turns into his obsession.

When Bartlett finds Gilkey, he is in jail, doing a short sentence on a bad check charge. Gilkey, apparently in his vanity, freely divulged his methods to Bartlett. Completely amoral in his “collecting,” he was a prime example of unbridled entitlement. Once out of prison, he leads her to some of his favorite haunts --- the rare book stalls at book fairs, the bookstores with the rarest of merchandise, and even to the phalanx of pay phones where he would order the books on stolen credit card numbers for later gift wrapping and pickup. No tawdry skulking about and tucking a book under an overcoat for him. He blithely wrote bad checks and charged with abandon, all the while convincing himself that he was actually buying the books. The fact that there was no money to back up the purchases was brushed aside because “booksellers are insured” or “those rich people can afford the occasional hit” on their plastic. He had his books and everybody won in his twisted mind. Bookstore owners had insurance, right? Credit card theft is insurable. So who gets hurt?

His motive? To be admired as a man of culture and erudition. The accumulation of rare books and impressive titles is to him a sign that he belonged among gentility --- a position denied to him by his humble beginnings. The irony is that, in his eyes, his pages-long rap sheet had no bearing on his self-generated aura of respectability. Jail time was merely an opportunity to do research, to dream up new schemes to “buy” more books.

THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH does not elevate Gilkey to anti-hero status. What it does do, however, is lead us into the strange and wondrous world of literary obsession. Bartlett, herself a book lover, worried that entering the vast collections of rare books would expose her to some contagious mania virus she might contract in the musty, dusty marvels of collectible books.

Like a mystery unraveling, Bartlett introduces the reader to the minds of two interesting men playing a real-life game of cat and mouse.

--- Reviewed by Roz Shea

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