Free The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Bartlett Hoover Page B

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