THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH
very insightful story
THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession
Between 1999 and 2003, John Gilkey used dozens of credit card numbers acquired from his department store job to steal more than $100,000 worth of rare books before being caught and sent to jail, partly through the effort of one bookseller named Ken Sanders. In “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much,” Bartlett uses these two men as a starting point for a series of vignettes in which the love of books turns to madness.
Bartlett’s sketches of bibliomania are breezily drawn and often fascinating. If they ultimately fail to cohere into something more, the fault rests at the book’s center, with Gilkey himself. Throughout his interviews with Bartlett, he speaks of “free” air travel, hotel rooms and meals. In other words, Gilkey is not a bibliomaniac whose need for books eventually drives him to steal, but a kleptomaniac whose need to steal eventually drives him to books. As such, he is a difficult figure around which to build a work about “literary obsession.”
There is a related problem with the thief’s antagonist, Ken Sanders, the “rare-book dealer and self-styled sleuth” who helped to track him down. Bartlett seems nearly as puzzled by Sanders’s interest in the crimes as she is by the crimes themselves. Bartlett’s attempts at New Journalistic self-implication aren’t always convincing, but they provide some riveting moments, as when Bartlett and Gilkey tour a bookstore he once victimized while the owner looks on in helpless rage. In this scene, we glimpse Gilkey’s true strangeness, which is only incidentally related to books.
Given the problem at the heart of “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much,” it is a testament to Bartlett’s skill that it reads as well as it does. “Every man must die,” explained that murderous Spanish monk, “but good books must be conserved.” His story and others Bartlett tells really are about “intimate and complex and sometimes dangerous” relationships to books. Gilkey’s story, on the other hand, is mostly about the crimes.
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