The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession
Selected Book Details
- Hardcover
- Edition: First Edition
- Author: Allison Hoover Bartlett
- Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
- Release Date: September 2009
- ISBN-10: 1594488916
- ISBN-13: 9781594488917
- List Price: $24.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryIn the tradition of The Orchid Thief, a compelling narrative set within the strange and genteel world of rare-book collecting: the true story of an infamous book thief, his victims, and the man determined to catch him. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
WONDERFUL
Rating:
I love to read a book when I actually learn something I did not know. This book was so enlightening and fun to read. I did not want it to end.
A Too-Long Story About A Thief -
Rating: 
Ken Sanders is a Salt Lake City rare book dealer who also worked as the volunteer security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America. Through his initiative a stolen-book e-mail hot-line was established that led to the capture of John Gilkey, who used bad-checks and stolen card card numbers (mostly acquired working at SAKS) to acquire an estimated $100,000 worth of stolen antique books. Praise to Ken Sanders and the cooperative and alert police, boo to John Gilkey and the author who tries to romanticize Gilkey's life and motives. (She even visits one of Gilkey's crime scenes with him, where Gilkey is recognized by the owner.) The entire story should have been summarized into two or three pages.
The only other point of interest was reading what I have long suspected - that eBay has a reputation as the largest legalized fence of stolen property in the world, avoiding liability because it lacks a physical location for its auctions, and technically is not hosting them. A Washington Post article (01/06/2005) adds that thieves used eBay to net far more than normal for fenced goods. Industry representatives contend that eBay makes selling stolen goods so easy that perpetrators are lured into doing so.
A readable introduction for non-specialists
Rating:
Allison Hoover Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is a quick, readable look at the world of book collection. She dips into the history of bibliomania and provides vignettes of other characters, but mostly the book is an account of two men and the author's experiences in getting to know them. Ken Sanders is the owner of a rare book store in Salt Lake City who served for six years as the security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association. He embraced that role enthusiastically, improved methods for alerting members of the organization to recent thefts during his tenure, and doggedly pursued one particular repeat offender. John Charles Gilkey, like other bibliomaniacs, is obsessed with adding to his collection of rare books, but in his case the books have tended to come free of charge, courtesy of the sorry souls who were unlucky enough to have once handed over their credit cards to Gilkey when he worked at Saks Fifth Avenue. Gilkey methodically collected their numbers and identities and used the cards, months later, to fund hotel stays and book-buying junkets.
Bartlett spent a lot of time interviewing both men, and while neither quite comes alive on the page, Gilkey emerges as an interestingly flawed human being, possessed of a curiously selective sense of morality. For him, stealing rare books is illegal, perhaps, but hardly immoral, a means of evening the score against an unfair world that has not made him rich enough to own priceless books without stealing them. His conscience about his misdeeds is clear. Bartlett spends some time with Gilkey's mother and sister as well--more exploration of this dysfunctional family would have made for a more interesting book. Gilkey's mother, at least, seems to be thoroughly in denial about her son, whom she praises for his outstanding posture.
I don't really get the allure of collecting myself--books or anything else. Like the author, I understand that books can carry secondary meanings as physical objects: a book may be loved because of its place in your or someone else's history. But I don't relate to books in the same way that collectors apparently do, desiring to possess particular copies, and so I approach this story as something of an outsider. Bartlett's book is not a hard-hitting investigative piece by any means, and it probably won't offer anything new to readers familiar with book-collecting from their own experience or from other treatments of the subject. But for the non-specialist it's a good light introduction to the topic and to the lives of the two very different men whom the author profiles.
-- Debra Hamel
Engrossing Non-Fiction on a Favorite Subject
Rating:
The world of antique and collectible books makes for an engrossing backdrop that upstages the core story of a book detective and his nemesis, a man who uses stolen credit cards to purchase rare books. This titled book thief never becomes enigmatic despite the author's best efforts and repeated assurances. It is clear how passionate he is, but his rationales and remorselessness are almost unbearable. But the glimpses of bibliomania are sure to amuse avid readers. If books are your thing, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is nothing short of a delight to devour.
Fun story- nimrod author.
Rating:
I'm enjoying this read, but finding myself annoyed by the author's naivete. She goes around with her subject to a the scene of one of his crimes, and then is dismayed to find herself becoming part of the story. She wonders about his motives, but never seeks the insight of a criminologist or a psychologist. She seems totally unaware that the criminal whose misdeeds she sanctions through her fawning, nonjudgemental curiosity is using her to justify his actions, both to himself and to the world. The pretty blonde finds him fascinating- how could this not stoke his ego, and reassure him that he's in the right?
In all, though I don't like to wish ill on anyone, I can't help thinking that her attitude would change if someone robbed her house- perhaps stole the only copy of her next book just before it went to the publisher- or picked her car clean off the street, never to be seen again. Her tone of amoral equivocation swoops nauseatingly close to that of the crook she's profiling, and essentially ignores the damage and violence he does to the hard work, to the dreams and passions, of others. In her drive to "get" his story- and, we may posit, to sell books and to aggrandize herself- she tacitly condones his destructive behavior. A closer knowledge of the empty feeling of the violated might make her less surprised at the anger his victims still express years after the fact.
But frankly, I doubt it. She's a grown woman with college-aged children and should know better. I will studiously avoid her "work" in future, and recommend that you, gentle reader, do the same. In the end, she proves to be no better a person than the criminal she's profiling, and I feel like a sucker for having thought better of her than that.
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