The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Ob

sent an e-mail to the ABAA and ILAB, noting the content of the thief’s phone calls to Brick Row, the physical particulars of the stolen copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge , and most important, a description of the thief: elderly, pretty shabby-looking, gruff voice.

Now everyone could be on the lookout.

A couple of months later, Gilkey was eager to get a book from another county. He had been having one success after another and was feeling bold, confident. He called Heldfond Book Gallery in San Anselmo, a small town in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. He spoke with proprietor Lane Heldfond, telling her he was on the road and wanted to buy a couple of gifts: a children’s book and an autographed book. Heldfond suggested The Patchwork Girl of Oz, listed at $1,800, and Joseph in Egypt, a book by one of Gilkey’s favorite authors, Thomas Mann, autographed and priced at $850. He said that he was, at that moment, looking at their website, which was a careless slip, since he had just said he was calling from the road,¹ but Heldfond, who noticed the slip, didn’t call him on it. Gilkey told her his cousin would pick up the books the next day.

The next day was sunny and clear, so Gilkey decided to take a ferry across the Bay. San Anselmo is a sleepy little town, one of the few in wealthy Marin County that still benefits from the charm of disheveled thrift stores and coffee shops that pour coffee-to-go into cups without logos. Occupying the angled end of a wedge-shaped building, Heldfond Gallery is a triangular shop with a small cushioned window seat at its tightest corner. Heldfond is a petite woman in her forties, with olive skin, long, wavy dark hair, and a disarming smile. In addition to working as a bookseller, she is a sculptor, and her visual sense is reflected on the shelves. Heldfond and her husband, Erik, had both been lifelong collectors when they opened the store in 1991. They bought what they could afford and hoped prices would rise; they were usually right, because despite the tough climate for mom-and-pop stores, the business grew.

After Gilkey placed his order for the two books, Heldfond hung up and called to her husband.

“Something’s not right,” she said. She had a bad feeling about the order. It had been too easy.

“Was the charge authorized?” he asked.

It was, so he assured her there was nothing to worry about.

Heldfond pulled the books from the shelves—Joseph in Egypt in its somber black covers, The Patchwork Girl of Oz in its vibrantly illustrated dust jacket—wrapped them in paper, and set them under the counter.

When Gilkey arrived in San Anselmo, he walked to the post office a block away from the store and placed another call to Heldfond to make sure the order had gone through. It had.

At the threshold of Heldfond Book Gallery, Gilkey looked around to make sure there weren’t any undercover cops’ cars parked on the street, then walked in with one hand covering his mouth.

“I’ve just come from the dentist,” he said to Heldfond, talking out of the side of his mouth in an effort to distort his voice so that she would not recognize it as the caller’s. He knew it was a gamble and began to feel agitated. After all, he was supposed to be the caller’s cousin. He decided to skip the small talk; he stayed in the doorway and left as soon as he got the books, making a run for the bus stop once he was out of view. Now he had two more books to deliver to the storage facility.

On a wall in Heldfond Gallery hung a bookmark with a quotation from Oscar Wilde: “I can resist everything except temptation.”

I BEGAN to sense that the urge to collect is not born all of a sudden, but gains momentum after, say, one or two purchases. I wondered, if I bought a few first editions of books that had inspired me in my own writing, whether I might feel what collectors felt: I might actually become one of them. A good place to start would be first editions of some of my favorite works of narrative nonfiction: In Cold Blood, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, The Professor and The Mad- man , The Orchid Thief. I began perusing online booksellers’ websites to get a sense for how much they would cost. As I read descriptions of inscriptions and other one-of-a-kind traits, I felt the first stirrings of what I imagined was the collector’s hunger.

In reading about this hunger, I had repeatedly come across evidence of the widespread fondness for first editions. Other than original manuscripts, they are the closest most readers can get to an author. This sense of a book as an extension of a person is not remotely new. In 1644, John Milton wrote: “For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”² Nearly three hundred years later, in 1900, Walt Whitman echoed that sentiment: “Camerado! this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.”³ A collector of paintings can get his hands on the one and only; a book collector’s best option, aside from the original manuscript, is the first edition. Collectors can’t get enough of them. But according to a riddle I came across, this predilection can be problematic: Which man is happier, “he that hath a library with well nigh unto all the world’s classics, or he that hath thirteen daughters? The happier man is the one with thirteen daughters, because he knoweth that he hath enough.”⁴

I plunged forward anyway and decided to start with a couple of books by Gay Talese, since he would soon be coming through San Francisco and might sign them. I had been warned about the dangers of ordering books from non-ABAA dealers, but I was in a hurry, and the few ABAA dealers I called didn’t have what I was looking for. I ordered first editions of The Overreachers and The Bridge, about $40 each, from two non-ABAA dealers I found online. When they arrived, I eagerly opened the bubble- wrapped packages. The Overreachers was in “very good” shape, my first first edition! The Bridge, while also in “very good” shape, was not a first edition at all—where The Overreachers’ copyright page clearly identified it as a “First Edition,” The Bridge made no mention of its printing. I had no idea what edition it was. I contacted the dealer, who admitted that she was mistaken and agreed to reimburse me the difference in price. Lesson learned.

Gay Talese did sign my copy of The Overreachers, and when I brought it home, I put it on the shelf with my non- first editions. I felt that maybe it needed a place of greater honor, but I never got around to moving it. Having touched the pages of a Flaubert manuscript at the New York book fair, I could appreciate why someone might want an original manuscript. Yet, I had to admit, I could not fully grasp the ardor for printed first editions. So much of collecting is driven by emotions, probably most of it, and although I understood the attraction of first editions intellectually, I didn’t feel it. The strongest attachments I have to books are those with which I have a personal history. When I was a child sick with the flu, my mother gave me her childhood copy of Anne of Green Gables. I was as charmed by its old-fashioned beauty as I was by the story. It had faded taupe linen with an illustration of Anne in profile on the cover. Inside was an inscription: “To Florence from Aunt Freddie, Xmas 1911,” meaning that not only had my mother read it, but also her mother, Florence. I also treasure my father’s vividly illustrated Peter Rabbit (in which Peter looks like a lunatic with devilish eyes) and his family of cat books (Mother Cat, Fluffy Kitty, Muffy Kitty, and, best of all, Puffy Kitty). Of all my grandparents’ books, none is more bewitching than Lettres de mon moulin, a 1948 book with lovely watercolor illustrations of French country life. (Does the fact that I adore a book I cannot read a single word of indicate at least some leaning toward bibliomania?) It has a soft cover with an illustration of a windmill and is wrapped in cracked glassine. The way it obscures the illustration makes me think of an old train’s window. None of these books is of any value in the marketplace (I checked), but I will always appreciate them for the stories they hold, both on the page (those in English, that is) and in their histories. I doubt I’d feel any different if they were first editions—unless they were worth enough, say, to pay for my children’s education, in which case I’d have to part with them. But it would be a sad parting.

So my Talese first edition sat on my shelf wedged between my second or third or twelfth editions of other books. As passionate as I am about reading, and as appreciative as I am of the aesthetic, historic charms of old books, the collecting bug hadn’t caught me yet.