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

He did not blend in with the rare book fair crowd any better than I. Sanders has an ample paunch, a thinning ponytail, and a long black-and-white beard that he strokes and twists between his thumb and fingers. His eyebrows form sharp inverted V’s over his eyes, making him look curious or indignant; I would soon learn that he very often is one or the other. While he has a suffer-no-fools way about him, if you’re interested in a book or a story, he has all the time in the world. He calls himself the “Book Cop.” His friends call him “Bibliodick.”

We sat in two chairs at the edge of his booth and talked about how things were going at the fair.

“In a fair like this,” he said, “I’m a bottom-feeder. Not like those up on Park Avenue.”

That’s what Sanders called the aisles up near the front of the fair, which is prohibitively expensive for all but the high-end rare book dealers. Sanders, who told me he attends six to eight fairs a year, is an egalitarian and prefers the San Francisco fair, where a dealer’s booth location is decided by lottery. “A lot of New Yorkers hate it,” he said. “They’d rather have it be all elite. I like the mixture.” I mentioned the rumor that Al Pacino was shopping for books, but he was uninterested. He said that twice, at previous fairs, he had spoken to longtime collector Steve Martin (once, while almost backing into Diane Keaton), but hadn’t realized who Martin (or Keaton) was until his daughter, Melissa, exasperatedly informed him, twice.

I asked how things were going.

“We started unpacking at nine A.M. yesterday,” said Sanders. “Other dealers will help you unpack to see what you’ve got. So much depends on your knowledge, though.”

He told me about a book he saw one dealer sell to another for $200 that morning, then watched the dealer resell it for $3,500 that afternoon. One dealer had recognized value where the other had not.

We hadn’t been sitting for more than a couple of minutes when Sanders told me about the first New York fair he exhibited at.

“Ten minutes into opening night, I lost a thousand-dollar book. And my friend Rob Rulon-Miller lost a book by Roger Williams worth thirty-five thousand. The two of us marched over to the Nineteenth Precinct, which is literally out the back door of the Armory. You can imagine a New York police precinct. And the two of us in suits over there. I let Rob go first.”

Sanders explained that dealers are used to police scoffing at news of a stolen book, especially when it’s worth a lot of money. “People pay that for a book?” they ask skeptically.

“Me, being the smart one,” continued Sanders, “I let Rob break the ice and explain to the sergeant on duty that we were there to report book thefts. When Rob gives him the details, the sergeant looks up at him, disbelievingly, and says, ‘Roger Williams? You talking about one of the guys who founded Rhode Island?’ He actually knew who the man was. I was very impressed. Then he says, ‘You let someone walk away with a first-edition Roger Williams?!’ And he looked at Rob like: You’re some kinda moron, right? After that, I decided my thousand-dollar book wasn’t worth making a fuss about.”

Moving on to more recent crimes, Sanders said that based on all the theft notices he had received from fellow dealers, he estimates that from the end of 1999 to the beginning of 2003, John Gilkey stole about $100,000 worth of books from dealers around the country. In the past decade, no other thief has been anywhere near that prolific. What was even more unusual, though, was that none of the items Gilkey stole later showed up for sale on the Internet or at any other public venue. It was this, combined with the inconsistency of Gilkey’s targeted titles (spanning a wide variety of genres and time periods) and the fact that some of the books he stole were not very valuable, that had Sanders convinced that he actually stole for love. Gilkey loved the books and wanted to own them. But Sanders couldn’t prove it.

Weeks earlier, when we had first spoken on the phone, Sanders had told me he was fairly certain that Gilkey had already served time at San Quentin State Prison and that he was now free. He shuddered at the thought, warning me that it would be difficult if not impossible to find Gilkey.

The day after that phone conversation, I looked into it.¹⁹ As Sanders had presumed, Gilkey had indeed done time at San Quentin and had been released. What Sanders did not know was that he was again behind bars, this time in a prison in Tracy, California. I wrote Gilkey a letter asking if he would talk to me. Knowing that he had denied his thefts in court, I didn’t expect him to open up to me about them. In the letter, I told him that I was interested in writing a story about people who have gone to extraordinary lengths to get rare books. It was a euphemism I hoped would keep him from feeling defensive.

While waiting for a reply, I ordered several books about book collecting and read a stack of articles. One of them, from The Age, an Australian newspaper, stuck with me because it indicated that book thievery was rampant.²⁰ Why hadn’t I heard about this? Why hadn’t any of the friends I asked? The 2003 story was about how those in charge of the Secret Archives of the Vatican, an underground vault holding eighty-five kilometers of historical papers, illuminated manuscripts, antediluvian books, and rare correspondence, have to be on guard against thieves. This was intriguing enough, but there was one sentence in particular that caught my eye: an Interpol agent, Vivianna Padilla, revealed that according to the global police agency’s statistics, book theft is more widespread than fine art theft.

Something else caught my attention. It was an online reference to the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America’s profiles of five types of book thieves: the kleptomaniac who cannot keep himself from stealing; the thief who steals for profit; the thief who steals in anger; the casual thief; and the thief who steals for his own personal use. The ABAA had defined them, I suppose, to help dealers and librarians recognize and protect against the range of motivations that might drive a thief. Know thine enemy. Of all these, the one that interested me most was the thief who steals for his own personal use—one who steals out of a desire for books. How different would such a person be from the typical book collector? They all seem to be passionate and driven by want. A few dealers had already confided to me that in decades of working with rare books, they had been tempted more than once to steal a book, but had found the strength to resist it. At the book fair, I saw how easy it could be to walk away with something truly unique and wondrous (Flaubert’s own papers!). What makes someone cross the line from admirer to thief, and how fine is that line? I wanted to find out.

After several weeks of checking my mailbox, I found what I had been hoping for—an envelope stamped diagonally in large red letters: STATE PRISON GENERATED MAIL. Inside was a letter written in fine, small print on lined paper.

Yes, wrote Gilkey, I would be delighted to tell my story.

With the letter, he sent a page ripped from a Department of Corrections regulations handbook. He had drawn two stars next to the section titled “Media Access to Facilities” and written in the margin, It’s easy to get approved!

SITTING OUTSIDE SANDERS’S BOOTH at the New York fair, I watched him talk to customers, some of whom he knew well, others not at all. In either case, he was an accommodating host, taking pleasure in sharing his books with people who appreciated them. Again, I had the impression that the book fair was a kind of theater, and Sanders, a seasoned player. When his booth emptied for a minute, he sat down next to me again.

“Gilkey wrote to me from prison,” I decided to tell him, “and said he’s willing to speak with me.”

For a moment, Sanders didn’t respond. I had expected him to be excited about the news, eager to hear the details (this, after all, was his big quarry), but instead he looked stern, incredulous. Before saying anything, he gave me a sideways glance.

“You should ask him where all the books he stole are hidden,” he said, peevishly. “I bet he’s got a storage unit somewhere out in Modesto, where he’s from.” He stared at the floor a moment, then added, “He’s not going to tell you, of course.”

It had been over two years since Gilkey had stolen books from Sanders’s colleagues, but Sanders was obviously still stung by the experience. Unlike me, merely intrigued by the idea of Gilkey’s thefts, Sanders’s way of life had been violated by them. He had a legitimate grievance against Gilkey. It was time for me to go, but before I left his booth, Sanders needed to give me one more warning:

“I tell you,” he said, knowing I would soon meet with Gilkey, “all, and I mean all, book thieves are natural- born liars.”