The Man Who Loved Books Too Much Read online

  Sanders ended this story the way he ends a lot of stories about book thieves. “Nothing—I’m telling you, nothing—ever happens to these guys.”

  It’s a wonder Sanders’s business has been successful for so many years (he reports sales of $1.9 million in 2007), considering many of the decisions he makes. His devotion to fellow book lovers, for example, usually trumps any chance of profit. About midway through my tour of his store, he noticed a customer at the counter. The man had a copy of History of the Scofield Mine Disaster, by J. W. Dilley, published in 1900, which chronicles Utah’s most horrific mining catastrophe. The man said that his grandfather had been one of the few survivors. Sanders took the book from him and flipped open the cover: $500.

  “You don’t want this,” he said, shutting the book. “I’ve got another copy, much cheaper, I’m sure.” He turned to his employee, Mike Nelson, and said, “Go look for another copy in the back.”

  Mike said he was pretty sure that that was the only copy, but Sanders insisted. When Mike returned several minutes later, having dug up a very beat-up copy, Sanders handed it to the man.

  “See?” he said, visibly pleased with himself. “Only eighty dollars—and the bonus is that it looks like it survived the fire!”

  How Sanders determines whether a book is worth $500 or $80 is based on several factors.

  “In fields that I know something about and the few that I have some expertise in, experience weighs heavily on my decisions to acquire certain books or collections,” he wrote in a lengthy e-mail to me, “and ultimately that experience and knowledge will determine how I price the item.”

  Much of a book’s value depends on literary fashion, and tastes change. Supply and demand also affect value. The first printing of Hemingway’s In Our Time, for example, was very small (1,225 copies), in contrast to the fifty-thousand-copy print run of The Old Man and the Sea. Pricing reflects that. Further factors include whether there’s a dust jacket (if not, the value is negligible), and if those jackets are price-clipped, worn, torn, or soiled. Modern first editions in poor shape can be worth as little as ten percent of a “perfect” copy.

  So one copy of History of the Scofield Mine Disaster can be less than a fifth of the price of another—in this case, due to condition. The $80 price was undoubtedly fair, but I noticed that when Mike, who was well aware of what Sanders refers to as “their cash flow challenges,” heard Sanders announce the price of the bedraggled copy, he slumped at his desk behind the counter.

  BORN IN 1951, Ken Sanders was raised in a lapsed Mormon household in deeply devout Salt Lake City. He was encouraged to read and to collect, as his father did. (The elder Sanders, who passed away in 2008, built the preeminent collection of bottles manufactured in Utah, housed in a garage-museum next to his house.) Early on, Sanders began to view the Mormon social landscape with a fair amount of skepticism and the natural landscape with a reverence rivaled only by his love of books. Surrounded by believers at school and in the community, he said he learned “just enough about religion to stay the hell away from it.” It would not be stretching matters, however, to say that from the start, reading was his faith.

  “My dad joked that when my mom gave birth to me I was clutching a book,” he said. As a boy, he devoured every book the librarians let him get his hands on, and some they didn’t. Once, on a school field trip to the South Salt Lake Library, he tried to check out copies of Dracula and Frankenstein , but because they were from the adult section, the librarian refused. He found a way to read them anyway. As much as he enjoyed withdrawing books from the library, though, he preferred owning them. At Woodrow Wilson Elementary, he lived for the Scholastic Book Service and Weekly Reader Books. “They would cost twenty-five, thirty-five cents. I’d recycle pop bottles for a nickel apiece and save up. Once a month, teachers would collect orders. Then the box would come, and the teacher would call out names and hand out a book here, a couple of books there. I was always the last kid called because there was always an entire box for me. I had more books ordered than the rest of the class put together. Such great classics as The Shy Stegasaurus of Cricket Creek. Oh, I loved that one.” To this day, he keeps at least one copy of it and other childhood favorites like Danny Dunn and the Antigravity Paint and Mrs. Pickerell Goes to Mars stocked in his store.

  In junior high, Sanders was still a stubborn, determined boy who did what he needed to get what he wanted, even if it meant going up against formidable forces. It was a trait that he would make ample use of as security chair of the ABAA. On Saturdays Sanders would head downtown, walking all five miles instead of taking the bus in order to save money. With extra change in his pocket, he would try to muster courage for what he was about to do. Back then, he was desperate to get his hands on more comic books, but to do so he had to brave the surly junk store owner, who seemed to take pleasure in taunting kids.

  “I was afraid of that old man,” he said. “If you went in, he’d yell at ya, but I wanted those comic books so bad. I’d go in and hang my belly over the lard barrel and reach down in there and fish out those forties and fifties comic books, then go up to the counter shaking, the man yelling at me all the time. He was probably just pulling my leg, but I was too young to know it.”

  Soon after Sanders started collecting old comic books, he discovered Spider-Man. “The guy had problems,” he said, describing the superhero’s allure. “He had powers, but he was messed up. What awkward kid wouldn’t be attracted to that?” In contrast, Superman was invincible and boring. Spider-Man was a questioning, rebellious guy who knew he was doing right, but the world was hostile and suspicious of him. Years later, toward the end of Sanders’s term as security chair for the ABAA, one of his friends, a fellow bookseller, would describe him as “an outlaw who for the past six years has been the law.”

  When he was fourteen, Sanders’s grandparents, Pop and Grammy, took him on a trip that would set the course of his life. They took him and his brother Doug to Southern California, where they visited Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, and the one place Sanders had requested specially: Bertrand Smith’s Acres of Books. “I have no idea how I ever heard about them in the first place, but I still remember the address: 240 Long Beach Boulevard, Long Beach, California. It was a really hot, hot day. Pop and I drove through the shipyards in Long Beach in a 1950s Ford Sedan. He parked right in front of the store. I was in there for hours, and the whole time, he just sat there in the car, chain-smoking the unfiltered Camels he would one day die from.”

  There’s a difference between those who simply love books and those who collect them, and an experienced dealer can spot a collector in the time it takes to ask where they’ve stashed the first edition of The Hobbit (not likely to be sitting on open shelves). Bertrand Smith’s heart must have skipped a beat when young Sanders strolled in, eyes wide.

  “The store went on seemingly to infinity,” said Sanders. “Stacks and stacks, tangled and overgrown, like a deep dark forest, but instead of trees, there were books. You had to climb up a rickety ladder to get to them, and it was hard to see because the only light in the place came from skylights way, way up. There was a locked room to the left where the rare books were. Bertrand Smith was a crusty old man, but somehow, I worked up the courage to ask him about my passions: Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, Maxfield Parrish. He actually let me into the rare book room, where I sat at the table, leafing through Poe’s The Raven. Each quatrain of the poem got a ten-by-fourteen-inch engraving by the nineteenth-century French illustrator Gustave Doré. I was thrilled. I remember it vividly—two feet tall and sixteen inches across, for seventeen dollars and fifty cents. I also bought a Maxfield Parrish, The Arabian Nights, for a few dollars, and an Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by Gwynedd Hudson, for two-fifty. She illustrated only two books in her life, and still, it’s one of my favorites. I had been putting coins in the piggy bank at Pop and Grammy’s, and Grammy had matched my deposits. I spent every blessed nickel I had on books that day. Still do. I’m older, balder, fatter, but not n
ecessarily wiser.”

  In 1975, Sanders and a couple of friends took over a hippie head shop called the Cosmic Aeroplane in Salt Lake City, moved it to a new location, and began selling books. Among those looking for cheap paperbacks were budding collectors. Sanders went about stocking his shelves for them while listening to his favorite tunes, like the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night.” The store was a huge success. At its height, according to Sanders, he and his two partners were pulling in $1.4 million a year in sales and had thirty employees. But the store was not without its struggles.

  “The Cosmic Aeroplane was big and sprawling, and shop-lifting was a constant problem,” said Sanders. “The most memorable case involved the wife of an old friend. She began by selling me her knitting-book collection. She’d bring in a bag of books every week or so, then with more frequency and increasing quantity. The funny thing was, the books started getting newer and newer, until it became painfully obvious that she was stealing them from somewhere.”

  Sanders sighed. His telling of this story lacked the vigor of others. This woman may have been a thief, but she was also a friend, and the awkwardness of the situation, even twenty-five years later, seemed no less painful to him.

  “We began by assigning someone to watch her every time she set foot in the store. The knitting bag she used to transport the books she wished to sell turned out to be full of books again by the time she was done browsing and left the store. Only thing was, the books were all stolen from us. I called around to the King’s English and Sam Weller’s bookstores and discovered that she was a regular at those shops as well. I read off a list of the most recently purchased titles from her to both stores, and, of course, they both had copies missing from their new-book inventories. Next time she came in I called the police and had them waiting outside the shop. When she departed with her knitting bag full of books, I had her arrested.”

  The knitting thief was one of a few success stories. Most thieves were never caught, and the anger and frustration they caused Sanders seems never to have completely subsided.

  In 1981, the year Sanders left the Cosmic Aeroplane, he would commit his own crime, although it was for a noble cause. Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Desert Solitaire, and The Fool’s Progress, had become a friend of Sanders, “in spite of my telling him I didn’t think that Hayduke [protagonist of The Monkey Wrench Gang] should go around littering the countryside with beer cans. He quietly listened, but I don’t think he gave a shit. One day, he called me, which he almost never did because he hated telephones, and said in his gruff voice, ‘I’m going to be conducting spring rites at Glen Canyon Dam. If you want to talk [about a publishing project Sanders had proposed], meet me there.’ ”

  When Sanders arrived, Abbey and a few friends were preparing to drop a three-hundred-foot tapered sheet of black plastic over the edge of Glen Canyon, a symbolic crack in the dam. It was the first national public event for the radical environmental group Earth First! Abbey, Sanders, and the rest of the group escaped arrest for trespassing and left with their appetites whetted for more pranks that might open the public’s eyes to what they considered crimes against the environment.

  Sanders had started Dream Garden Press, and in the following few years published Western wilderness calendars with excerpts of Abbey’s writing, the R. Crumb illustrated edition of The Monkey Wrench Gang, and a couple of other projects. He invited Abbey and Crumb to Utah for book signings. One of his favorite stories from this time took place at a university bookstore.

  “I had a car full of cartons of books. Two hundred people were standing in line for autographs. There were Crumb and Abbey, dutifully scribbling their names. One guy walks up to Crumb and says, ‘Mr. Abbey?’ And Crumb, before he answers, looks over at Abbey, and they exchange this glance. Crumb looks back to the guy and says, ‘Yes?’ And he signs that copy of the book ‘Edward Abbey’! Then he passed it to Abbey, who signed it ‘R. Crumb’! I would kill for that copy,” said Sanders. “I’m sure that to this day, that guy doesn’t know of the deception. I keep praying that someday that book will wander in here. I’ve been searching for it for twenty years.”

  Later, because of disagreements with his partners, Sanders left the Cosmic Aeroplane. This was the same period that his marriage split, and alone he began raising Michael, age nine, and Melissa, age seven.

  Sanders kept his family going with a small office and a warehouse of books to sell and in 1996 founded Ken Sanders Rare Books. The white brick building is adorned with two stained-glass windows near the front door. One is of a stegosaurus, Sanders’s favorite dinosaur; the other, pulled from a demolished Catholic church, is of Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Inside, the store is so full that if a fourteen-year-old should ever wander in with a list of books in his back pocket, as Sanders had at Bertrand Smith’s Acres of Books, he would have enough to keep him enchanted for as long as he wished. On the other hand, if he were to consider slipping out without paying for a book, he would regret it. Sanders has chased these guys down streets and alleys and parking lots. He has taken them to court. He has scared them half to death. He will do whatever possible to get his books back and prevent thieves from ever, ever thinking of stealing another book.

  6

  Happy New Year

  It was the start of a new millennium, and Gilkey had noth ing but good feelings about the year to come. He had a dream and a thick stack of credit card numbers to make it come true. With the holidays over, his job at Saks was done, and to start the year off right, he decided to take his father to Los Angeles, one of their favorite cities. “We loved the malls, the shops, the weather. There were celebrities there, more opportunities,” he said.

  One such opportunity arose on a sunny afternoon. Gilkey and his father had lunch at a fancy hotel in Beverly Hills, after which he decided to walk around and check out some of the shops nearby. The neighborhood was wealthy, the kind where shoppers with drivers were not uncommon, and he was enticed by a small but particularly impressive store with a large locked area. They were selling rifles for $500,000, jewelry well into six digits—and books, displayed in neat, becoming stacks. Gilkey thought he might pick up something small, with a price tag of about $2,000. (When I asked him what his father was doing while he was scouting loot, Gilkey said he was sitting outside, waiting. I doubted this, but became more interested in why Gilkey was protecting him than I was about the extent of his father’s involvement.) Given the cost of most items in the store, he thought, surely they wouldn’t care about such a small loss. He looked at the books and took mental notes about what he wanted. The next day, while doing his laundry at a laundromat, he called the store from a pay phone. It was time to use the first of the credit card numbers he had pilfered from Saks.

  “I was in your store the other day,” said Gilkey. “Do you still have that first edition of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse?”

  The woman put the phone down to check. “Yes,” she said, “we do.”

  “Well, let me see,” said Gilkey, as though he needed to think about it. “I’ll take it.” He explained that it was a gift and asked the woman to wrap it, adding, “Do you mind if I pay for it now?”

  Gilkey gave her the credit card number and finished his laundry. From the laundromat, he called to confirm that the charge had gone through.

  “It’s ready to go,” she said.

  “Do you mind if someone else picks it up, because I’m rather busy,” said Gilkey. “I’m getting ready for this party.” He figured that way when he arrived at the store he wouldn’t be expected to be carrying the credit card.

  Gilkey raced to the store right before closing time at six. He went in, took a quick glance at the books, and said, “Wow, this is a great place you’ve got here. He certainly did a great job picking it out.” She handed him the book, and he left.

  As Gilkey would say, it was that easy.

  By now, Sanders’s e-mail system had been up and running for several months, an
d he received notices of theft occasionally, but most of his time was spent attending to his store. While his daughter, Melissa, worked with customers, cataloged new items, stocked shelves, and answered the phone, Sanders attended estate sales, provided appraisals, and also helped customers. Often, he was upstairs at his cluttered desk, writing bibliographic entries. Sanders sells to other shops, collectors, libraries, and other institutions, so when he acquires items that might be of interest, he sends them a bibliographic description. It’s a way of drumming up the next month’s business. A surprising number of people wander in off the street with boxes or bags full of books they’d like to sell, and Sanders will take a look. Most times, they are not worth much, but occasionally he comes across a gem, like the time a man in his twenties walked into the store with a book his parents had given to him. It was his grandmother’s, and they had no idea whether or not it was valuable.