Book #11: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

Title: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of  a Thief, a Detective and the True Story of a Literary Obsession
Author: Allison Hoover Bartlett

Last summer, I was a speaker on a couple of panels at the Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium. I mostly just ran in for my own presentations and ran home to do kid duty, but I did attend one other session, a panel with speakers discussing the best Mormon books. Two or three of the presenters talked about what I expected them to talk about, books with interesting content for one reason or another. But the third presenter talked about bookbinding and deckle edges and clamshells and a whole bunch of stuff about the physical presentation of the books themselves. He said that he didn't actually read the books, he just collected them.

I didn't get it. And after reading The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, I'll admit that while Allison Hoover Bartlett did a great job talking about the obsession of John Gilkey, who loved books so much that he stole hundreds of them just to have in his possession, I still don't really "get" the whole idea of having books as for the pleasure of owning and looking at them (as one might a vase or a pretty plate) instead of actually reading them. But then again, I am a girl who would much rather borrow a book from the library than buy it, who feels no compunction about reading in the bathtub or dog-earing pages (yes, even of those library books), who wants to consume more than to hold on to. But why buy a book if you're never going to read it, if it's just going to sit on your bookshelf and be?

That said, Bartlett did a great job telling Gilkey's story, and trying to figure out why stealing books became such an obsession for him. Gilkey is, at best, an unreliable narrator, so Bartlett's job was tough-- recreating a narrative from the perspective of someone who wanted to tell a self-important version of his story, but whose best interests were in sharing as little as possible. Gilkey is complex, amoral, and striving, someone who is willing to spend time in prison to build his empire of stolen rare books. Pitted against Gilkey is Salt Lake City's own Ken Sanders, the crusader who organized rare book dealers around the country to track Gilkey down and put him back in jail. The story of the chase isn't really a nailbiter (it's a book thief we're talking about, after all) but Bartlett's own experience with books, along with those of Gilkey and Sanders, makes The Man Who Loved Books Too Much a worthwhile read for anyone who has ever wondered if they love books too much.