Read Online The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Bartlett Hoover - Free Book Online
Authors: Allison Bartlett Hoover
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with several thousand dollars (depending on its condition, whether or not it’s inscribed, has an original dust wrapper, etc., it’s valued at up to $6,500). The box of pink sheets Sanders had inherited contained some that were over a year old but had not yet been distributed. He knew that at that point it was probably too late to send them out to dealers around the country.
What the hell good is this doing anybody? thought Sanders. The job hadn’t come with instructions, and he knew little about technological options. “You know that scene from Kubrick’s 2001 where the apes are grunting around the black monolith?” Sanders likes to say. “That’s me and my computer every morning, seeing if it will work.”
But he wanted to find a way to broadcast news of thefts immediately. First, he started using a private ABAA online discussion list to reach members. Then he campaigned the board of governors, declaring with characteristic zealous-ness, “I’m the security chair, dammit, I want a security line! I want a way to contact everyone, and since over half the membership doesn’t subscribe to the discuss list, I need something else!” So although Sanders calls himself “a Luddite in cyberspace,” he convinced the Internet committee to create a stolen-book database and an e-mail system to alert the hundreds of members of the ABAA and, soon thereafter, members of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), which includes two thousand booksellers in thirty countries.
In November, about six months after the e-mail system had been set up, John Gilkey was reading the San Francisco Chronicle when an advertisement caught his attention: Saks Fifth Avenue was hiring salespeople. The next day, he dressed in a shirt, tie, and slacks from a too-tight pin-striped suit, and took the ninety-mile train ride from Modesto to San Francisco.
Saks Men’s Store sits just outside the center of Union Square, on a block with glittering sidewalks and neighbors like Armani, Burberry, and Cartier. It is a high-rent district that attracts big spenders, something that Gilkey found attractive. He figured that by working in a place like Saks, he would come in contact with wealthy clientele, “no riffraff.” He also assumed that since it was a quality place specializing in luxury goods, he would get paid more, maybe even earn commissions and discounts. He was right on all counts. (Saks declined my repeated requests to respond to Gilkey’s claims.)
Saks would turn out to be an almost ideal working environment for Gilkey, offering him opportunities to speak with people who belonged to a world he desperately wanted to be a part of. Almost ideal, however, because while these people had money, they weren’t necessarily well educated or in possession of large libraries, as he knew he would be, given the same means.
Sitting in the Saks employment office, Gilkey completed the application, noting his brief experience working at a Robinson-May department store in Los Angeles. He must have seemed perfect for the job: polite, experienced, and not too badly dressed. Where they asked for his name, he neatly filled it in, but when he reached the part of the application where he was supposed to write whether he had ever been convicted of a crime, he left it blank.
He was asked to start the next day.
WHENEVER I HAVE ASKED Gilkey to describe the allure books have for him, he struggles, but ultimately settles on the aesthetic. “It’s a visual thing, the way they look, all lined up on the shelf.” He once suggested an almost sexual attraction to books. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a man, but I like to look.”
As Patricia Hampl wrote in a book about beauty’s bewitching qualities: “Collecting is not a simple matter of possessing. It’s a way of looking: a looking that is itself a kind of craving. To look this way is to be possessed, lost.” 3
Collectors talking about the books they have just acquired, or the ones
What the hell good is this doing anybody? thought Sanders. The job hadn’t come with instructions, and he knew little about technological options. “You know that scene from Kubrick’s 2001 where the apes are grunting around the black monolith?” Sanders likes to say. “That’s me and my computer every morning, seeing if it will work.”
But he wanted to find a way to broadcast news of thefts immediately. First, he started using a private ABAA online discussion list to reach members. Then he campaigned the board of governors, declaring with characteristic zealous-ness, “I’m the security chair, dammit, I want a security line! I want a way to contact everyone, and since over half the membership doesn’t subscribe to the discuss list, I need something else!” So although Sanders calls himself “a Luddite in cyberspace,” he convinced the Internet committee to create a stolen-book database and an e-mail system to alert the hundreds of members of the ABAA and, soon thereafter, members of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), which includes two thousand booksellers in thirty countries.
In November, about six months after the e-mail system had been set up, John Gilkey was reading the San Francisco Chronicle when an advertisement caught his attention: Saks Fifth Avenue was hiring salespeople. The next day, he dressed in a shirt, tie, and slacks from a too-tight pin-striped suit, and took the ninety-mile train ride from Modesto to San Francisco.
Saks Men’s Store sits just outside the center of Union Square, on a block with glittering sidewalks and neighbors like Armani, Burberry, and Cartier. It is a high-rent district that attracts big spenders, something that Gilkey found attractive. He figured that by working in a place like Saks, he would come in contact with wealthy clientele, “no riffraff.” He also assumed that since it was a quality place specializing in luxury goods, he would get paid more, maybe even earn commissions and discounts. He was right on all counts. (Saks declined my repeated requests to respond to Gilkey’s claims.)
Saks would turn out to be an almost ideal working environment for Gilkey, offering him opportunities to speak with people who belonged to a world he desperately wanted to be a part of. Almost ideal, however, because while these people had money, they weren’t necessarily well educated or in possession of large libraries, as he knew he would be, given the same means.
Sitting in the Saks employment office, Gilkey completed the application, noting his brief experience working at a Robinson-May department store in Los Angeles. He must have seemed perfect for the job: polite, experienced, and not too badly dressed. Where they asked for his name, he neatly filled it in, but when he reached the part of the application where he was supposed to write whether he had ever been convicted of a crime, he left it blank.
He was asked to start the next day.
WHENEVER I HAVE ASKED Gilkey to describe the allure books have for him, he struggles, but ultimately settles on the aesthetic. “It’s a visual thing, the way they look, all lined up on the shelf.” He once suggested an almost sexual attraction to books. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a man, but I like to look.”
As Patricia Hampl wrote in a book about beauty’s bewitching qualities: “Collecting is not a simple matter of possessing. It’s a way of looking: a looking that is itself a kind of craving. To look this way is to be possessed, lost.” 3
Collectors talking about the books they have just acquired, or the ones
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