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

Prologue

At one end of my desk sits a nearly four-hundred-yearold book cloaked in a tan linen sack and a good deal of mystery. My friend Malcolm came across the book while carrying out the sad task of sorting through his brother’s belongings after he committed suicide. On the sack was a handwritten note that began, “To whom it may concern,” and went on to explain that several years earlier, a friend had withdrawn the book from a college library where she worked and had accidentally taken it with her when she moved away. He wrote that she had wanted the book to be returned to the library anonymously, but that he hadn’t had time to do so. Gingerly, Malcolm lifted the large, heavy tome with gleaming brass clasps from its sack. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said as he handed it to me. My first thought was: Yes, beautiful. My second: It’s stolen.

I woke the next morning with the book in my head. Was the story in the note true? If not, where had the book come from? I could see that it was written in German, with a sprinkling of Latin, but what was it about? Was it valuable? Malcolm agreed to let me borrow it for a while. With the help of a German-speaking friend, a librarian, and a rare book dealer, I learned that it was a Kräutterbuch (“plant book”¹) of botanical medicine, by Hieronymus Bock, a botanist and physician. After book burnings in the Middle Ages, knowledge of traditional medicine had been lost, so at the time of the Kräutterbuch’s publication, in 1630, the book was a way to return to the old ways of healing, revolutionary for its time.²

The Kräutterbuch weighs in at twelve pounds, and its cover, oak boards clad in pigskin,³ is slick but textured with embossed concentric patterns of flowers and leaves and curlicues that have taken on dark shading from the hands of those who have held it. I brought it to San Francisco rare book dealer John Windle, who told me that if you had ordered a copy of a Kräutterbuch in the 1600s, you would have paid an extra fee to have the illustrations painted, which the owner of this copy did. The colors, mostly shades of olive or silvery green, mustard yellow, and wine red, were applied sloppily, which Windle informed me is a mark of authenticity; if you come across a meticulously hand-painted copy, there’s a good chance it was executed by a bookseller’s assistant sometime in the past century in an effort to hike up the book’s value.⁴ To open the Kräutterbuch, you have to squeeze it with two hands, thereby releasing the etched brass clasps shaped like Egyptian columns, flared at the top like regal palm trees. The pages, when turned, make a muffled crack, not unlike the sound of a flag on a windy afternoon, and turning them releases a dry, woody smell, a combination of must and sweetness that I associate with my grandparents’ old books. I always link the aroma of an old book to whatever era it was written in, as though its fragrance had emerged directly from the setting of the story. In the case of the Kräutterbuch, this scent had traveled a long way in time and space, coming to me from Renaissance Germany. When I run my hand over the pages, I feel subtle waves, presumably warping from moisture, but none of its pages are torn. The blank endpaper is missing, but I learned that this is not unusual. Paper was expensive in the 1600s, and a blank page in a book could be cut out and used as stationery, or for wrapping fish,⁵ or for some other more useful purpose than sitting blankly at the front of a book. When I asked Windle about the book’s value, he said that because it was in fairly good shape it was worth $3,000 to $5,000. I was pleasantly surprised, although since the book was not mine, I had no rational reason for feeling such satisfaction.

Going through the book with a German-speaking friend and her mother (who was more familiar with its archaic lettering), we found remedies for all sorts of physical and mental maladies, from asthma to schizophrenia, as well as minor ailments.⁶ On page 50, for example, for a “bad smell in the armpit,” a long list of ingredients is recommended: pine needles, narcissus bulbs, bay leaf, almonds, hazelnut, chestnut, oak, linden, and birch, although it doesn’t indicate how, exactly, they are to be used. Dried cherries help with kidney stones and worms. Dried figs with almonds are recommended for epilepsy. My favorite remedy, though, is for low spirits. “Often we are missing the right kind of happiness, and if we don’t have any wine yet, we will be very content when we do get wine.”

Text from the reverse sides of pages in the Kräutterbuch bleeds through in a ghostly way, making it seem that what exists on these pages might at any moment blend together or fade away entirely. But in 375 years it hasn’t. The Kräutterbuch remains much the same as when it was bound. That it hasn’t lost its fullness, its ability to resist against the clasps, is one of its most awe-inspiring qualities. It seems a stubborn, righteous thing that has lasted all these years, and it took me some time to come to the realization that in turning its pages, I probably wouldn’t harm it.

I had learned a lot about the book, but still had no clue where it was from. I searched the Internet for information about stolen rare books, but while nothing turned up about the Kräutterbuch—even the librarian from the library mentioned in the note said that they had no record of it—I stumbled upon something even more intriguing: story after riveting story of theft. Some had occurred weeks or months before, others years ago, in Copenhagen, Kentucky, Cambridge. ⁷ They involved thieves who were scholars, thieves who were clergymen, thieves who stole for profit, and those whom I found most compelling: smitten thieves who stole purely for the love of books. In several accounts, I came across references to Ken Sanders, a rare book dealer who had become an amateur detective. For three years Sanders had been driven to catch John Gilkey, a man who had become the most successful book thief in recent years. When I contacted Sanders, he said that he had helped put Gilkey behind bars a couple of years earlier, but that he was now free. He had no idea where Gilkey was and doubted that I would have any luck finding him. He also believed that Gilkey was a man who stole out of a love of books. This was the sort of thief whose motivation I might understand. I had to find him.

The more I learned about collectors, the more I began to regard myself as a collector, not of books, but of pieces of this story, and like the people I met who become increasingly rabid and determined as they draw near to completing their book collections, the more information I came across, the more I craved. I learned about vellum and buckram, errata slips and deckled edges. I read about famous inscriptions and forgeries and discoveries. My notebooks grew in number and sat in piles thicker than ten Kräutterbuchs stored, as they would have been in 1630, on their sides. As I accumulated information about the thief, the dealer, and the rare book trade, I came to see that this story is not only about a collection of crimes but also about people’s intimate and complex and sometimes dangerous relationship to books. For centuries, refined book lovers and greedy con men have brushed up against one another in the rare book world, so in some ways this story is an ancient one. It’s also a cautionary tale for those who plan to deal in rare books in the future. It may also be a lesson for those writers who, like me, approach a story with the naive belief that they will be able to follow it the way a spectator passively follows a parade, and that they will be able to leave it without altering its course.

As I wrote this book, the noble Kräutterbuch sat in its sack at the end of my desk. I knew my friend wanted to return it, but because the librarian had told me that as far as she knew it was not theirs, I figured, what’s the hurry? Besides which, I discovered that if a book has been missing for many years, librarians will sometimes toss the attendant documents—an act of frustration, perhaps, but also of self-protection: they don’t want anyone to know they’ve let a book go missing, especially if it’s rare and valuable. The librarian from the Kräutterbuch’s supposed home informed me that as they have updated their computer systems, records of the library’s holdings have been lost. Maybe this was the case with the Kräutterbuch. As weeks, then months, passed and the book was still in my possession, I thought, I’ll deal with it later. In the meantime, I would open the book and leaf through it. An illustration of an apple tree (Apffelbaum ) shows, among the fallen fruit at its base, a skull and bone. A poisonous apple! Under another tree, men in caps and knee-length breeches vomit. Next to yet another, cherubic boys wearing nothing but sashes around their copious bellies squat and defecate. On another page, under a different kind of tree, men and women dance drunkenly. Even the illiterate would have had no doubt about each of these plants’ effects. Toward the back of the book is one of my favorite illustrations: an elaborate circular depiction of twelve faces representing twelve winds, each from a different direction, and each, cheeks out, blowing its particular remedy or threat. Overlapping this illustration, and throughout the book, are irregular brown blotches, which I learned are called foxing, a book’s age spots, usually caused by dampness or lack of ventilation.⁸ Some of the darkness on these pages, however, appears to be from spills of some sort. Mead? Candle wax? Tears? Every page is a mystery, a story to be puzzled out.

Whenever I would close the Kräutterbuch and push its covers tight, there was an exhalation, a settling, before I affixed the clasps. Of course I would return it, I reassured myself. But in the meantime, I kept a book that did not belong to me, and tried not to think about what that made me.