I recently interviewed the Utah-based bookdealer, Ken Sanders. Here's the transcript of our brief conversation.
1. So you've been in the trade for a fair while now, where did it all start?
I began selling and trading old comic books back around 1960. By the time I was a teenager I was running a funky mail-order business dealing in fantasy and science fiction and comic art. I opened my first bookshop, The Cosmic Aeroplane in Salt Lake in the 1970s.
2. What inspired you to set up shop and what kind of stock did you start out with?
I have always been both a reader and someone very attracted to visual art. it was an outgrowth of my interest in books and art and as a way to afford my habit.
3. Personally, I'd love a copy of a book signed by Steinbeck to Ed Ricketts, what is your dream book?
I'm very pleased with some of the books that authors I have known the past forty years have signed for me. Such as my copy of Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. He signed it...'for Ken Sanders, one of the defenders, sincerely, Wallace Stegner". I'm pretty tickled by that one. And one of my Wendell Berry's that he signed..."for ken sanders desert rat from wendell berry woods rat", I kinda like that one.
4. You also run Dream Garden Press, was the move to publishing the next natural step?
Collecting, reading, acquiring books, buying and selling and trading them, they're all connected and publishing material by authors I admired was a continuation of my interests.
5. Publishing Edward Abbey must have been a great feeling, what was it like working with such an acclaimed author?
I'm very satisfied with having brought out the R. Crumb illustrated edition of The Monkey Wrench Gang. Likely my most enduring and successful publishing project.
6. Any excitement for the new Monkey Wrench Gang film?
I won't believe there is a movie until I'm sitting in a theatre watching it. We've been waiting for 34 years!
7. Travelling round the South-West US I recall seeing Edward Abbey and similar authors in many a bookshop, but they fascinated me as did the landscape in which they're written. I live a few miles from where the Brontés lived and used to holiday in Whitby where Stoker holidayed and set some of Dracula. Have you travelled much? Do you find an intrinsic connection between place and literature?
In my youth I only wished to travel to wild places and have spent a lot of time in the Uinta mountains of eastern Utah, the Colorado plateaau and the desert southwest. I used to travel a lot in Mexico and managed to get to Alaska and Australia. Later Hong Kong and Japan. Other than the desert southwest and the west in general, Australia is the one place I'm wanting to spend an extended period of time.
8. You play quite a part in the Allison Hoover Bartlett book The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, from reading the book it seems that you've got quite a knack for private detective work. What's the main driving force, justice or preservation of the book?
I suppose a part of me liked the puzzle and yes, I did discover that I seemed adept at tracking down and catching book thieves. But there are far too many of them. At the end of the day John Charles Gilkey is simply a man who liked to steal books too much.
9. Everything happens on the Internet nowadays, how has this affected you and how do you think the next generation of book collectors will respond to changes in the bookselling world? Is there a next generation of collectors?
I can barely peck out an email.I'm not personally threatened by the digital world, I just don't care for it or adapt to it much. Real books and real book people will always be around in some form. We were never mainstay back in Gutenberg's day and we're not now or in the future. But we never have been.
An Interview with Ken Sanders 
