The Man Who Loved Books too Much

I am finally coming up in the world. I am getting Advance Reading Copies to review. I feel so special. So my first one I really wanted to read was one where Allison Hoover Bartlett gives you an insightful glimpse into the world of rare book collecting. In this world of e-technology, people seem to have gotten away from the bonding experience of holding a first edition of a old rare book and stroking it's spine, wondering where this book has been and who has touched it. Though you hear about all the glamorous thefts of priceless artifacts and paintings, you never really hear about old and fragile books that have been easily stolen and disappearing only to possibly showing up on Ebay for sale as there is no real means of tracking them. But there are people in this world who obsess about obtaining books through many illegal means, such as the ones used by the one this book is based, John Charles Gilkey. Allison shows you the workings of Gilkey's mind and his rational for stealing rare books for his amusement. She takes you through the many facets of rare book collecting, book fairs and exclusive rare books stores and introduces you to the many challenges of this collecting business. Because to some it is and to some it is a passion to possess these rare tomes. And on the other side you meet a special book dealer named Ken Sanders, who seeks justice for the victims of book theft and spends much of his time tracking down Gilkey, as a "bibliodick" for an organization of book sellers. To think it all starts with the delivery, to the author, of a 400 year old book supposedly not returned to a library on time and so it was pawned off from generation to generation, partly I'm sure of fear of the fines involved. This is a must read for sure!