Salt Lake City, UT --Sam Weller's Books -- July 22, 2007

Reading The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, by Russell Hoban, which she's writing a review on for Sam Weller's bookstore.

Her favorite book--The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, about a man’s treacherous soul, how he wants to stay young forever and makes a pact with the devil but inside he still becomes old and even though he himself doesn’t physically age, a picture of him ages, showing what’s going on inside of him. She’s read it three times, the first time when he was sixteen. People can be sinister, she said. It’s a book about reality. Her mother gave her the book to begin with so it’s a tie to her. It was the first thing that really got her interested in reading.

Right now she’s reading a book by Chuck Klosterman who wrote for Spin and writes humor.

She writes writes descriptions of the rare books and their condition for store and
online customers reviews. Many of them are history books. Reading them, she said, helps her build a fuller, more well-rounded base. In college she studied literature.

The bookstore itself:
At this large, rare, new, and used bookstore, Harry Potter is, of course, a big seller, as are Western Americana, LDS books and books of all topics. They have about 150,000 used and rare titles.

What else is popular? Stegner, Edward Abbey, a lot about Lewis and Clark, USGS maps, nice fiction. They sold a first edition of Fear and Loathing for $600, lots of rare Stephen King, including the Dark Tower series which was sold for $2100. They have a signed Elinor Roosevelt autobiography. They sold a fifth edition of the Book of Mormon for $22K.

People are always looking for a first edition book of Mormon, and also for Twain, Dickens and Shakespeare.