future.
“I could have a T-shirt made that says, ‘Will Work for Rare Books,’ ” he said. “There could be a picture of me wearing it over a suit. That might be good to include in your book.”
That was not all.
“I had a couple notes here. I was thinking maybe at the end of the book . . . and I think it’s a perfect ending, if the people who read it want to donate a book to me to keep me out of jail or something. I was thinking of something cheesy like that.”
And then, “What do you think about bobble heads? Of famous writers? I’ve been doing research on copyright, and I thought maybe a limited edition of, like, a thousand bobble heads. I’d sell the books with them.”
He was also hoping to visit ghost towns in New Mexico with a video camera and a metal detector. “I’d talk about the history a little and then try to search for treasure,” he said. He would record his experiences and broadcast them on the Internet.
He was thinking about publishing books with expired copyrights now in the public domain. He speculated that Booth Tarkington’s
“I got another idea. I’m working on it. I’m gonna get a database of rare book collectors, and I’m just gonna ask them if I could have a book. It wouldn’t hurt to ask. I mean, I’m trying not to do anything illegal.”
“You can’t stop, can you?” I asked, but it wasn’t really a question.
“I just like to collect books, collect stuff. Actually, I was gonna tell you about a new plan that I have, but I guess I better not. I’ll tell you later. I don’t want to do anything criminal, ’cause I don’t want to go back to prison. But somehow, if I can get my books for free, it would be better.”
The next time we met, when I was almost accustomed to Gilkey’s eagerness to contribute to his own story, he surprised me. Speculating that maybe there wasn’t enough action in the book I was writing, he looked at me with a quizzical expression and asked, “So, do you think I should get all one hundred books now?”
“I’m not going to answer that question,” I said, stunned. He had begun orchestrating his life with an eye to how it might appear on the printed page, but I was still trying to cling to the notion that I was recording a story that was progressing without my influence. I was not going to become its director.
Gilkey elaborated on his reasoning.
“I was trying to think of a grand finale . . .” he said. “Getting a hundred books from that one-hundred-books list. To say that I had won.”
I was astounded, but I was also at ease, a dawning that came to me unexpectedly. Nearing the end of my encounters with Gilkey, what was once tense and awkward had become routine, sometimes even pleasurable. He loved books; this we had in common. Over the course of a couple of years, I had sat across numerous cafe tables from him and listened to him tell his story. What became clear was that although he was a criminal, he was also curious, ambitious, and polite, three qualities I respect. But later, at home, I would listen to our taped conversations and realize how the con man’s physical presence had distracted me from the content of his narratives. The surface charm of a con man, like most enchantments, is a form of manipulation, and behind the facade stood a sturdy buttress of greed.
Once, after Gilkey had told me about a book he stole and later sold, he said, “Greed is greed.” I had assumed that he was referring to his own motivation, until his next comment. “Dealers can’t resist buying them.” He had mentioned a dealer in San Francisco, but wouldn’t give me the man’s name. According to Gilkey, the dealer regularly bought books and other collectibles from him at a fraction of their market value on those rare instances when Gilkey needed cash. The dealer told him more than once that he ought to stop. He knew the goods were hot, yet he bought them, no doubt confirming Gilkey’s conviction that many in the trade are corrupt. I asked for the dealer’s name again, but Gilkey declined. Greed is greed.3
ONE OF THE most astonishing books I ever encountered was at a book fair. I can’t remember the title or any other detail, except one. The dealer picked up the gilt-edged book and, holding it in front of me, slowly bent the block of pages as though he was about to fan through it in search of something. As he bent the pages, the gilt edge disappeared, revealing, along the long side, an intricate painting of a nautical scene, men navigating a stormy sea. “It’s a fore-edge painting,” he said. I gawked, then asked him to do it again. I learned that for centuries, artisans have been adorning books with fore-edge paintings for clients. They are delicately executed images, usually thematically related to the text: elaborate battle scenes, presidential portraits, Art Deco beauties, even erotic renderings, which, given the paintings’ clandestine quality, is no surprise. As if one hidden treasure were not enough, books are sometimes painted with two fore-edge images, so that when you bend the block of pages one way, one picture emerges, but when you bend it the other way, another appears. They are not usually applied to highly valuable books (doing so would be regarded as a form of vandalism) but to books that are of special interest or sentimental value to their owners. Emerging unexpectedly, these paintings seem like magical apparitions, as though bending a book’s pages can make the inert black type within metamorphose into sumptuous color images. When the pages, no longer swayed, are back in place, no one would guess what lies just a hair’s distance beyond the gilt.
After two years of meeting with Gilkey I’d seen the gilt pages of his book, so to speak, and I had been witness to their being fanned one way, then another. If I had to reduce him to a sentence, I’d say that Gilkey is a man who believes that the ownership of a vast rare book collection would be the ultimate expression of his identity, that any means of getting it would be fair and right, and that once people could see his collection, they would appreciate the man who had built it.
But he was more than that. I listened to the tapes of our conversations repeatedly, and each time, Gilkey’s selfishness, which in person is thickly veiled by his affable demeanor, was as clear as boldface type on a page. Like a book with a fore-edge painting, Gilkey had hidden much of himself behind gilt. Polite, curious, ambitious—or greedy, selfish, criminal? Of course, he is all these things, but what intrigued me was how different he seemed to me in person versus on tape. Physical form had refracted meaning, or at least favored one interpretation over another. This is not only why I perceived Gilkey differently, but also precisely why a library, a visual representation of culture and learning, is so desirable to him: he is aware of how persuasive the physical can be.
Meeting with Gilkey those last couple of times, I had another epiphany. I realized that the man I thought was stealing books so that others would consider him a cultured gentleman, the man who was building a phony image, a counterfeit identity, was in fact working diligently to
One morning, while working next to my shelf of books about book collecting, I considered all the time I had spent with rare book lovers at their fairs, their shops, their homes. I had savored being around so much beauty and, even more, appreciated the stories behind the books. In my reading, one aspect of the history of books I had come across repeatedly was their destruction. From the Qin Shi Huang in China, who in 213 B.C. ordered the burning of all books not pertaining to agriculture, medicine, or prophecy,4 to the Nazis’ literary cleansing by fire (