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

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Spider-Man

Ken Sanders Rare Books is located on the edge of downtown Salt Lake City in a four-thousand-square-foot former tire shop endowed with high ceilings and abundant sunlight. The store is chockablock with so much old, beautiful, and bizarre printed matter—books, photographs, broadsides, postcards, pamphlets, maps—that a quick in-and-out trip takes more willpower than the average book lover can summon. The first time I visited, Sanders, dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, showed me around.

Standing near the entrance, he gestured toward a room to the left, where he keeps the rarest of his books. Although he is not religious, many of these are Mormon texts. This is Utah, after all, where demand for such books is high, and as he reminded me, he needs to make a living. Next, he directed my attention to the glass case separating the rare book room from those who might be inclined to tuck a nice little volume into the waistband of their pants (a common hiding place for book thieves). Inside the case were several books he loves: first editions of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac, in a display Sanders had set up the week before for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ginsberg’s Howl.

Sanders led me to the main part of the store. In addition to more than a hundred thousand books and other materials (“If it’s printed, it’s here”), there are busts of Mark Twain and Demosthenes, cardboard cutouts of R. Crumb characters, and headless mannequins modeling T-shirts printed with characters from Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. The store reflects much of what Sanders cares about—books by Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and B. Traven; music from the sixties; radical politics; the environment; and beautiful graphics. But of all that he cares about, it’s clear that his children are at the top of the list. Sometimes, Sanders’s daughter, Melissa, who used to work in the store, visits from California and lends a hand. When Melissa and her brother, Michael, were young, Sanders’s marriage fell apart and he took over their rearing himself.

“To have that kind of anchor . . . They probably saved my own sanity at certain points in my life,” he said. “It’s not easy for any single parent to raise children, whether it’s a mom or dad, it’s just more unusual for it to be the father. I have no regrets. I probably raised them like wild wolves, but I did the best I could. Melissa still remembers the summer I dragged them through Death Valley when it was a hundred and thirty-seven degrees. I made them get out of the car and walk in the sand dunes. ‘Dad tried to kill my brother and me,’ she says.”

Sanders will tell me this story several times, always with a proud and mischievous grin.

Next to the counter sat a gathering of armchairs and a few red plastic glasses left over from the evening before. At about five P.M. every day, Sanders offers wine, bourbon, and beer from a small fridge next to the counter to friends who drop by. One of those friends, “Captain Eddie,” digital artist Edward Bateman, told me that the bookstore is the nexus of Salt Lake City’s counterculture. I could see why. Sanders’s store has the appeal of an eccentric great-aunt’s attic, where in every corner you might just happen upon treasure. Add to that his raconteur’s charm, and it’s no wonder the store is a favored gathering spot. With the hum of slow-moving fans in the background, writers, authors, artists, and filmmakers sip and reminisce about recent readings in the store, the best of them raucous literary happenings, while Sanders starts planning the next one. Around them, the R. Crumb characters, the busts, and the faces of the Monkey Wrench Gang seem like ghostly participants in the conversation. On the wall behind the counter hangs a large portrait of Sanders that a friend of his painted. “I call it my Dorian Gray,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to get those Disney eyes for it—to watch the store.”

The store could use them. Before my visit, during our first phone conversation, Sanders had mentioned the Red Jaguar Guy, and during the tour, when I asked for details, he gave me a look that said, Are you ready for this? I had already heard enough of Sanders’s stories to know that I’d opened the door to a good one, and nothing seems to make him happier than finding a willing ear for his tales.

“It’s actually an embarrassing story. For six years I’ve been leading the charge against theft—how booksellers can protect themselves from credit card fraud—and this punk-ass kid in his twenties gets me. ‘Ryan’ comes into the store and tells me that he and his father are selling books online and being real successful at it. Over the next week or so he buys some copies of the Book of Mormon, some other books. Makes three purchases totaling five thousand five hundred dollars, and each time the credit card company approved the charge. Then I get a call from another Salt Lake City bookseller who complained to me that he had just received a chargeback for a Book of Mormon sale a month back. I was curious and walked over to his shop. The individual he described to me matched the description of Ryan. I began to get a sinking feeling. I called other shops and found that Ryan had been to at least two of them. So I called the credit card company, and they did nothing, those swine. I began alerting every book dealer from Provo to Logan and discovered that there were five of us who had been visited by Ryan. I then received a phone call from a Provo dealer who had seen one of my stolen copies of the Book of Mormon on eBay (an 1874 edition). Thinking I had found my thief, I called up the seller, who turned out to be an elderly man named Fred who mainly sold low-end books on eBay—and I put the fear of God into him. Fred says, ‘I didn’t steal your books, but I know Ryan.’ Says he meets him in parking lots and pays cash.”

Sanders coerced Fred into arranging a rendezvous with Ryan, then Sanders called the police. “Ryan agrees to meet Fred at three in the Smith’s grocery store parking lot,” explained Sanders. “Ryan says, ‘I’ll be driving a red Jag.’ I called the cops, who didn’t give a shit. They say to me, ‘Who are you? Why’d you call?’ Just try to find a cop who cares about stolen books. I tell him I’ve pieced it together: five booksellers, fifteen grand. I tell him, ‘If you’re not going to do anything about this, I’ll go over and take him down myself. ’ So the cop came to my shop and reluctantly agreed to set up the sting, with the admonishment that I stay away.”

Ambivalence is not in Sanders’s emotional vocabulary, and his storytelling engine was revved up, rolling forward in full fury.

“Fred calls me and says the cops just showed up in the black-and-whites and scared the shit out of Ryan—then he says, ‘Wait, he’s runnin’ away!’ So I get there as fast as I can and see—oh, I tell you, it was a beautiful sight—a brand-new red Jaguar from Hertz with its doors wide open.” Sanders leans forward and takes a quick breath. “There’s this kid in a squad car with his head in his hands, bawling. The officer says to him, ‘You know who this is?’ And the kid looks up at me with this look, like, Oh no, I’m doomed. Then, get this: the cops forget about me. They leave the doors wide open, and here’s this kid, so I get in his face and say, ‘WHERE THE HELL ARE MY BOOKS?!’ He tells me there’s this drug ring. Fourteen others involved. I tell you, he was scared. This kid was really scared, because he knows they’ll come after him. So the next day I call the cops to see what’s going on and they tell me they tried questioning him this morning, but he wants an attorney. I couldn’t believe it! Why didn’t they question him while he was scared? Why did they wait?” Sanders finally pauses to take a deep breath. “So, anyway, this morning, I get a call. It’s been six months since they questioned him. Turns out the kid’s from a well-to-do family. He was allowed to promise to go into drug rehab in exchange for not serving any time.”

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 necessarily 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.