After The Read - The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

Oooohhhh, how spooky!!

It's almost October, isn't it?

Here's the spooooooooooky tale of the Man who Loved Books.... TOO MUCH!! (by Allison Hoover Bartlett) 

I've been excited lately to learn about antiquarians, and book dealers and collectors, and this journalistic short book about a thief, John Gilkey, and the dealer who was instrumental in his identification and arrest(s), Ken Sanders, seemed to fit the bill. 

But... I was disappointed in the whole thing. It was an interesting thing, to read all about thefts and the network and brief histories of the booksellers, but it was nowhere near as in depth as Lawrence & Nancy Goldstone's Used And Rare: Travels In The Book World. (I just found out they've written a whole series of books about the rare-book world!!). All the information was presented in small bites: a great quote here, a funny story there, but without much connecting them together.

I say "without much", because there was a connection -- the thief. But even he wasn't particularly interesting. The book was selling him as someone who stole for love of books, but it was made clear over and over that his motives for stealing were deeper, and had to do with what having an impressive collection would mean to the self-esteem of the thief, and his social place, and his presentation of self. He was speculated to be amoral, with a running theme of getting even, or settling the score with book dealers (or the world in general) based on whatever he thought wasn't fair. 

In most cases, he wanted a book, but couldn't afford it, and that was unfair somehow. Somehow it's not cosmically right that his desire for a rare book doesn't trump the fact that the item is worth 5k.

It wasn't that I wanted some charismatic of hero-thief. This is the real world, where theft is bad. But I was expecting the theft to be about the books, and instead it was about a man's issues, and books were just an incidental outlet.

And then, the book just ends. It just tailed off. The thief kept stealing. The bookstores kept bookselling, with a weird mixture of trust and distrust. It just... eh! I don't even want to write about it!

Ah well... you can't win with everything, right? I definitely was interested enough to keep reading, but by the end I was ready for it to be over because it was quite repetitive. Apart from a few facts and stories there was nothing greater for me to learn, and that actually felt shocking. 

Or perhaps I'm learning about disappointment, and what real life is like. We want our lives to be stories and for the possibilities of being a hero in that story, but not all stories are the way we want them to be, right?

Check it out from the library, and see what you think. I'd be keen to know.