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Authors: Allison Bartlett Hoover
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He was careful not to take every account record, however, hoping to avoid raising suspicions.
It was not long before Gilkey realized that he had yet another source for credit card information. In those days, customers’ entire credit card numbers were printed on receipts. Each receipt included a copy for the customer and a copy for the auditing department at Saks. Salespeople were asked to cross out the number on the customers’ copies, but the audit copies remained fully intact. According to Gilkey, when salespeople were rushed, they sometimes threw away copies, so even if, from time to time, he were to forget to turn one in, it would not be noticed.
Gilkey didn’t use the information to buy anything right away. He needed to wait enough time so that customers notified of fraudulent activity wouldn’t trace the last use of their cards back to Saks. He would save the account numbers for a rainy day. Holding off spending, he harvested five to ten receipts a week.
5
Spider-Man
K en Sanders Rare Books is located on the edge of downtown Salt Lake City in a four-thousand-square-foot former tire shop endowed with high ceilings and abundant sunlight. The store is chockablock with so much old, beautiful, and bizarre printed matter—books, photographs, broadsides, postcards, pamphlets, maps—that a quick in-and-out trip takes more willpower than the average book lover can summon. The first time I visited, Sanders, dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, showed me around.
Standing near the entrance, he gestured toward a room to the left, where he keeps the rarest of his books. Although he is not religious, many of these are Mormon texts. This is Utah, after all, where demand for such books is high, and as he reminded me, he needs to make a living. Next, he directed my attention to the glass case separating the rare book room from those who might be inclined to tuck a nice little volume into the waistband of their pants (a common hiding place for book thieves). Inside the case were several books he loves: first editions of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac, in a display Sanders had set up the week before for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ginsberg’s Howl .
Sanders led me to the main part of the store. In addition to more than a hundred thousand books and other materials (“If it’s printed, it’s here”), there are busts of Mark Twain and Demosthenes, cardboard cutouts of R. Crumb characters, and headless mannequins modeling T-shirts printed with characters from Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang . The store reflects much of what Sanders cares about—books by Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and B. Traven; music from the sixties; radical politics; the environment; and beautiful graphics. But of all that he cares about, it’s clear that his children are at the top of the list. Sometimes, Sanders’s daughter, Melissa, who used to work in the store, visits from California and lends a hand. When Melissa and her brother, Michael, were young, Sanders’s marriage fell apart and he took over their rearing himself.
“To have that kind of anchor . . . They probably saved my own sanity at certain points in my life,” he said. “It’s not easy for any single parent to raise children, whether it’s a mom or dad, it’s just more unusual for it to be the father. I have no regrets. I probably raised them like wild wolves, but I did the best I could. Melissa still remembers the summer I dragged them through Death Valley when it was a hundred and thirty-seven degrees. I made them get out of the car and walk in the sand dunes. ‘Dad tried to kill my brother and me,’ she says.”
Sanders will tell me this story several times, always with a proud and mischievous grin.
Next to the counter sat a gathering of armchairs and a few red plastic glasses left over from the evening before. At about five P.M. every day, Sanders offers wine, bourbon, and beer from a small fridge next to the
It was not long before Gilkey realized that he had yet another source for credit card information. In those days, customers’ entire credit card numbers were printed on receipts. Each receipt included a copy for the customer and a copy for the auditing department at Saks. Salespeople were asked to cross out the number on the customers’ copies, but the audit copies remained fully intact. According to Gilkey, when salespeople were rushed, they sometimes threw away copies, so even if, from time to time, he were to forget to turn one in, it would not be noticed.
Gilkey didn’t use the information to buy anything right away. He needed to wait enough time so that customers notified of fraudulent activity wouldn’t trace the last use of their cards back to Saks. He would save the account numbers for a rainy day. Holding off spending, he harvested five to ten receipts a week.
5
Spider-Man
K en Sanders Rare Books is located on the edge of downtown Salt Lake City in a four-thousand-square-foot former tire shop endowed with high ceilings and abundant sunlight. The store is chockablock with so much old, beautiful, and bizarre printed matter—books, photographs, broadsides, postcards, pamphlets, maps—that a quick in-and-out trip takes more willpower than the average book lover can summon. The first time I visited, Sanders, dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, showed me around.
Standing near the entrance, he gestured toward a room to the left, where he keeps the rarest of his books. Although he is not religious, many of these are Mormon texts. This is Utah, after all, where demand for such books is high, and as he reminded me, he needs to make a living. Next, he directed my attention to the glass case separating the rare book room from those who might be inclined to tuck a nice little volume into the waistband of their pants (a common hiding place for book thieves). Inside the case were several books he loves: first editions of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac, in a display Sanders had set up the week before for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ginsberg’s Howl .
Sanders led me to the main part of the store. In addition to more than a hundred thousand books and other materials (“If it’s printed, it’s here”), there are busts of Mark Twain and Demosthenes, cardboard cutouts of R. Crumb characters, and headless mannequins modeling T-shirts printed with characters from Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang . The store reflects much of what Sanders cares about—books by Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and B. Traven; music from the sixties; radical politics; the environment; and beautiful graphics. But of all that he cares about, it’s clear that his children are at the top of the list. Sometimes, Sanders’s daughter, Melissa, who used to work in the store, visits from California and lends a hand. When Melissa and her brother, Michael, were young, Sanders’s marriage fell apart and he took over their rearing himself.
“To have that kind of anchor . . . They probably saved my own sanity at certain points in my life,” he said. “It’s not easy for any single parent to raise children, whether it’s a mom or dad, it’s just more unusual for it to be the father. I have no regrets. I probably raised them like wild wolves, but I did the best I could. Melissa still remembers the summer I dragged them through Death Valley when it was a hundred and thirty-seven degrees. I made them get out of the car and walk in the sand dunes. ‘Dad tried to kill my brother and me,’ she says.”
Sanders will tell me this story several times, always with a proud and mischievous grin.
Next to the counter sat a gathering of armchairs and a few red plastic glasses left over from the evening before. At about five P.M. every day, Sanders offers wine, bourbon, and beer from a small fridge next to the
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