The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

by Allison Hoover Bartlett

  “Once you’ve done time, you start to feel that way,” he said. So he made a promise to himself and his aging father, who was almost eighty.

  “I’m going to build us a grand estate.”

  4

  A Gold Mine

  When, at the start of 1999, Ken Sanders received a letter from the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America asking him to vote on whether to dissolve the southwest chapter to which he belonged, it was out of pure orneriness that he voted against the change.1 With only seventeen members, it was one of the smallest, and unlike larger chapters, it didn’t hold fairs or meetings. Soon he discovered that he was the only member who had voted against dissolution, and although the votes in favor were enough to shut it down, the board decided otherwise. And since every chapter needs a representative and a president, they asked Sanders which position he would prefer to fill—a fair request, he thought, given his vote.

  “I don’t care—as long as it doesn’t have to do with money,” said Sanders, who has had financial problems for much of his life. “Whatever you do, don’t make me treasurer.”

  He began his term as representative.

  “The next thing I know I’m supposed to be at the board of governors’ meeting in New York City. What the hell is that?!” said Sanders. He found out on the seventeenth floor of a Rockefeller Center building at his first board meeting, where they put him on a membership committee. Shortly thereafter, they also assigned him the position of security chair, about which he knew nothing.

  A few weeks later, sitting at his desk, perched in a loft overlooking his store, Sanders got a call from the secretary in the ABAA’s New York office.

  “Have you vetted the pink sheets yet?” she asked.

  “What pink sheets?” said Sanders.

  He hadn’t opened the box she sent him, assuming it was full of reference materials. When he pried it open, he uncovered a problem much bigger than abandoned pink sheets, the term for theft reports sent by dealers.

  Since 1949, the ABAA has worked to promote and maintain ethical standards within the trade. There are now 455 bookseller members, and to join, each of them has to have been in business for at least four years, undergone intense scrutiny, and been recommended by ABAA members.2 Until Sanders started working as security chair, when someone stole books from an ABAA dealer, that dealer would fill out a pink sheet and mail it to ABAA headquarters in New York. There, copies would be sent out with the next mass mailing, whenever it happened to come about, so that all members could be on the lookout for the stolen books. This would take considerably longer than the time it would take a thief to saunter out the door of one bookstore with a first edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, for example, tucked into his coat and into the door of another, where he could sell it and walk away 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 they haven’t been able to get their hands on, or those snatched away by another collector, sound a lot like lotharios reminiscing about lovers. At a San Francisco book fair, Peter Stern, a gray-haired Boston dealer clad in a tweed jacket, with a plaid scarf around his neck, said he doesn’t collect anymore, but occasionally a book will catch his eye. When this happens, “I ache to buy it. I want it desperately.”4 But acquiring the object of his affection changes everything. “The moment I own it, even if it’s for a few seconds, that’s enough. I could sell it the next minute, and I don’t even remember it sometimes. I’m looking forward to the next book.”

  It is not uncommon to read pronouncements from besotted collectors that make the “mania” in “bibliomania” seem an understatement. “Too few people seem to realize that books have feelings,” wrote collector Eugene Field, who wrote The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac in 1896. “But if I know one thing better than another I know this, that my books know me and love me. When of a morning I awaken I cast my eyes about my room to see how fare my beloved treasures, and as I cry cheerily to them, ‘Good-day to you, sweet friends!’ how lovingly they beam upon me, and how glad they are that my repose has been unbroken.”5

  AT SAKS, Gilkey was in a world of tasteful luxury. He had been assigned to work in the Men’s Store on the first floor, in “men’s furnishings,” where meticulously folded garments of fine cottons, silks, and wools sat in floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted wood cabinetry. He would start his day checking the floor, c
learing away any detritus left by the previous day’s shoppers. He would stroll past hand-stitched Borrelli shirts (starting around $350) and Etro ties ($130 and up), and chat with fellow workers. Because it was the holidays, when Saks customers can’t seem to get enough luxury goods, the floor was usually packed. They needed extra help, “floaters,” to work in various departments, which is why Gilkey was hired. He enjoyed the job and took special pleasure in spying local socialites and celebrities, such as Ann Getty and Sharon Stone, who was then married to San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein. Gilkey prided himself on being a good employee, always on time. He was friendly and thought that everyone at Saks, “especially the people in the loss prevention department,” were nice to him. He had snowed even the watchdogs, and I could imagine how. His decorous way of speaking, deferential affect, and calm demeanor would be valuable assets on the sales floor, where big spenders would be accustomed to being treated with such regard.

  In addition to consulting Gilkey about their purchases, customers sometimes asked to open instant credit accounts. He would dutifully take down their information—names, numbers, addresses, and so on—and when they would tell him that they needed higher credit limits, he would call the business office and communicate their requests. When the office checked a customer’s credit rating and decided to grant a more generous limit, increasing it from, say, $4,000 to $8,000, Gilkey noticed.

  This was a part-time job, only two or three days a week, but even if Gilkey had been working full-time, his salary would never have afforded him what he wanted. One day, while he was opening a new account for a customer, he realized what he held in his hands. A gold mine, he thought. Whenever he opened the instant accounts, he could put the audit copy in his pocket, go out to lunch, and write the information on a separate piece of paper, which he could refer to later when placing orders over the phone. That day at lunch, he did just that. He walked down the street to the Westin Hotel, took the elevator to the second-floor lobby, which offered some degree of privacy, and wrote down the credit card numbers listed on the instant account. The next day, he did it again. So it went, through the holidays. 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

  Ken 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 counter to friends who drop by. One of those friends, “Captain Eddie,” digital artist Edward Bateman, told me that the bookstore is the nexus of Salt Lake City’s counterculture. I could see why. Sanders’s store has the appeal of an eccentric great-aunt’s attic, where in every corner you might just happen upon treasure. Add to that his raconteur’s charm, and it’s no wonder the store is a favored gathering spot. With the hum of slow-moving fans in the background, writers, authors, artists, and filmmakers sip and reminisce about recent readings in the store, the best of them raucous literary happenings, while Sanders starts planning the next one. Around them, the R. Crumb characters, the busts, and the faces of the Monkey Wrench Gang seem like ghostly participants in the conversation. On the wall behind the counter hangs a large portrait of Sanders that a friend of his painted. “I call it my Dorian Gray,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to get those Disney eyes for it—to watch the store.”

  The store could use them. Before my visit, during our first phone conversation, Sanders had mentioned the Red Jaguar Guy, and during the tour, when I asked for details, he gave me a look that said, Are you ready for this? I had already heard enough of Sanders’s stories to know that I’d opened the door to a good one, and nothing seems to make him happier than finding a willing ear for his tales.

  “It’s actually an embarrassing story. For six years I’ve been leading the charge against theft—how booksellers can protect themselves from credit card fraud—and this punk-ass kid in his twenties gets me. ‘Ryan’ comes into the store and tells me that he and his father are selling books online and being real successful at it. Over the next week or so he buys some copies of the Book of Mormon, some other books. Makes three purchases totaling five thousand five hundred dollars, and each time the credit card company approved the charge. Then I get a call from another Salt Lake City bookseller who complained to me that he had just received a chargeback for a Book of Mormon sale a month back. I was curious and walked over to his shop. The individual he described to me matched the description of Ryan. I began to get a sinking feeling. I called other shops and found that Ryan had been to at least two of them. So I called the credit card company, and they
did nothing, those swine. I began alerting every book dealer from Provo to Logan and discovered that there were five of us who had been visited by Ryan. I then received a phone call from a Provo dealer who had seen one of my stolen copies of the Book of Mormon on eBay (an 1874 edition). Thinking I had found my thief, I called up the seller, who turned out to be an elderly man named Fred who mainly sold low-end books on eBay—and I put the fear of God into him. Fred says, ‘I didn’t steal your books, but I know Ryan.’ Says he meets him in parking lots and pays cash.”

  Sanders coerced Fred into arranging a rendezvous with Ryan, then Sanders called the police. “Ryan agrees to meet Fred at three in the Smith’s grocery store parking lot,” explained Sanders. “Ryan says, ‘I’ll be driving a red Jag.’ I called the cops, who didn’t give a shit. They say to me, ‘Who are you? Why’d you call?’ Just try to find a cop who cares about stolen books. I tell him I’ve pieced it together: five booksellers, fifteen grand. I tell him, ‘If you’re not going to do anything about this, I’ll go over and take him down myself. ’ So the cop came to my shop and reluctantly agreed to set up the sting, with the admonishment that I stay away.”

  Ambivalence is not in Sanders’s emotional vocabulary, and his storytelling engine was revved up, rolling forward in full fury.

  “Fred calls me and says the cops just showed up in the black-and-whites and scared the shit out of Ryan—then he says, ‘Wait, he’s runnin’ away!’ So I get there as fast as I can and see—oh, I tell you, it was a beautiful sight—a brand-new red Jaguar from Hertz with its doors wide open.” Sanders leans forward and takes a quick breath. “There’s this kid in a squad car with his head in his hands, bawling. The officer says to him, ‘You know who this is?’ And the kid looks up at me with this look, like, Oh no, I’m doomed. Then, get this: the cops forget about me. They leave the doors wide open, and here’s this kid, so I get in his face and say, ‘WHERE THE HELL ARE MY BOOKS?!’ He tells me there’s this drug ring. Fourteen others involved. I tell you, he was scared. This kid was really scared, because he knows they’ll come after him. So the next day I call the cops to see what’s going on and they tell me they tried questioning him this morning, but he wants an attorney. I couldn’t believe it! Why didn’t they question him while he was scared? Why did they wait?” Sanders finally pauses to take a deep breath. “So, anyway, this morning, I get a call. It’s been six months since they questioned him. Turns out the kid’s from a well-to-do family. He was allowed to promise to go into drug rehab in exchange for not serving any time.”