The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

Chapter 3

1 Modesto Convention and Visitors’ Bureau. “Area Information History.” http://www.visitmodesto.com/areainfo/history.asp.

2 “Stanislaus County Is ‘Picture Perfect.’” http://www.visitmodesto.com/films/default.asp.

3 U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Criminal Justice Information Services Division. “Crime in the United States 2007.” http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_08_ca.html.

4 Celia Sack. Interview with the author.

5 Gilkey offered another childhood memory. He said he watched a lot of television, and one of his favorite shows was Amazing Stories. The episode he remembers best is “when the mother keeps telling her son he’s crazy to collect so much stuff. So one day the boy loaded up his car with his belongings and left. Years later, his collections were worth millions of dollars.” John Gilkey. Interview with the author.

6 Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the famous sex researcher, who was a collector, wrote: “Most of us like to collect things. . . . If your collection is larger, even a shade larger, than any other like it in the world, that greatly increases your happiness. It shows how complete a work you can accomplish, in what good order you can arrange the specimens, with what surpassing wisdom you can exhibit them, with what authority you can speak on your subject.” As quoted from Kinsey’s An Introduction to Biology (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1926), in Geoff Nicholson, Sex Collectors (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 236-237.

7 As quoted in Janine Burke, The Sphinx on the Table (New York: Walker, 2006), p. 290. Burke cites Max Schur, Freud, Living and Dying (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1972), p. 247.

8 As quoted in Burke, The Sphinx on the Table, p. 7. Burke cites Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 398.

9 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 67.

10 Rick Gekoski, Nabokov’s Butterfly (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 12.

11 In 1998, the members of the editorial board of the Modern Library released a list of what they considered the one hundred best novels in English published since 1900.