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

3 UC Santa Cruz confirmed that Gilkey graduated.

Chapter 3

1 Modesto Convention and Visitors’ Bureau. “Area Information History.” http://www.visitmodesto.com/areainfo/history.asp.

2 “Stanislaus County Is ‘Picture Perfect.’” http://www.visitmodesto.com/films/default.asp.

3 U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Criminal Justice Information Services Division. “Crime in the United States 2007.” http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_08_ca.html.

4 Celia Sack. Interview with the author.

5 Gilkey offered another childhood memory. He said he watched a lot of television, and one of his favorite shows was Amazing Stories. The episode he remembers best is “when the mother keeps telling her son he’s crazy to collect so much stuff. So one day the boy loaded up his car with his belongings and left. Years later, his collections were worth millions of dollars.” John Gilkey. Interview with the author.

6 Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the famous sex researcher, who was a collector, wrote: “Most of us like to collect things. . . . If your collection is larger, even a shade larger, than any other like it in the world, that greatly increases your happiness. It shows how complete a work you can accomplish, in what good order you can arrange the specimens, with what surpassing wisdom you can exhibit them, with what authority you can speak on your subject.” As quoted from Kinsey’s An Introduction to Biology (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1926), in Geoff Nicholson, Sex Collectors (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 236- 237.

7 As quoted in Janine Burke, The Sphinx on the Table (New York: Walker, 2006), p. 290. Burke cites Max Schur, Freud, Living and Dying (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1972), p. 247.

8 As quoted in Burke, The Sphinx on the Table, p. 7. Burke cites Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 398.

9 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 67.

10 Rick Gekoski, Nabokov’s Butterfly (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 12.

11 In 1998, the members of the editorial board of the Modern Library released a list of what they considered the one hundred best novels in English published since 1900.

Chapter 4

1 Ken Sanders. Interviews with the author.

2 Susan Benne. E-mail interview with the author.

3 Patricia Hampl, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (New York: Harcourt, 2006), p. 52.

4 Bibliomania: A Documentary Film of the 34th California International Antiquarian Book Fair. Directed and edited by Paul Ryall, 2003. An Antiquarian Booksellers’Association of America Production of a Session Seven film.

5 Eugene Field, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), pp. 97-98.

Chapter 6

1 Ken Sanders. Interview with the author.

2 According to Sanders, a complete copy was recently sold for more than $1 million.

3 James Thorpe, Henry Edwards Huntington: A Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

4 www.huntington.org (website of The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens).

5 Barbara Pitschel, Head Librarian, San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum. E-mail correspondence with the author.

6 For a thorough account of the world’s violence toward books, see Fernando Baez, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York: Atlas, 2008).

7 Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, pp. 42-43.

Chapter 7

1 This was before the availability of Wi-Fi.

2 John Milton, Areopagitica.

3 Walt Whitman, “So Long,” Leaves of Grass.

4 Quoted in Basbanes, A Gentle Madness, p. 20.

5 Tony Garcia. Interview with the author.

6 Ken Lopez. Interview with the author.

7 Kenneth Munson. Interview with the author.

8 Ken Sanders. Sequence of events reported in interviews with the author.

9 Kenneth Munson. Interview with the author. Munson explained that suspects will often use the physical details of someone they’re close to when describing a nonexistent accomplice. In Gilkey’s case, Munson assumed it was Gilkey’s own father he was describing.

Chapter 8

1 This is a common misconception, stemming probably from the fact that his 1876 The Hunting of the Snark is one of the earliest books by a famous author for which the jacket still exists. Earlier jackets from the 1830s by relatively unknown authors are still around.

2 Ken Sanders. Interview with the author.

3 Arnold Herr. Interview with the author.

4 Kenneth Munson. Interview with the author.

5 Ibid.

6 Confirmed as standard procedure for prisoners residing in the Reception Center by San Quentin State Prison public information officer Lieutenant Samuel Robinson.

Chapter 9

1 John Crichton. Interview with the author.

Chapter 10

1 Andrew Clark. Interview with the author.

2 Alan Beatts. Interview with the author.

3 Bob Gavora. Interview with the author.

4 This lax attitude was not always so. In the time of King Henry IV (late fourteenth, early fifteenth centuries) a man named Johannes Leycestre and his wife, Cedilia, stole “a little book from an old church.” His punishment: “Let him be hanged by the neck until his life departs.” Apparently, the fate of Cedilia, like that of most women of her day, was not worth recording. See Edwin White Gaillard, “The Book Larceny Problem,” The Library Journal , vol. 45 (March 15, 1920), pp. 247-254, 307-312.