Bartlett, Allison Hoover: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

Riverhead Books © 2009, 288 pages

Note: Review copy received from publisher. Amazon affiliate: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price.

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.