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

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