Excerpt
Among the Mormons
On any map of Salt Lake City, it's hard to ignore the Mormon temple-not so much because Temple Square is the spiritual heart of a religious enclave as because the street system uses the temple itself as heart and hub: each address in the city-proper is plotted in terms of direction and distance from this one central point. Thus, The King's English Bookshop at 1500 East, 1500 South, is 15 blocks east and south of (you've got it) the Mormon temple.
In a town where every address is derived from its proximity to their spiritual Mecca, Mormons are clearly not a force one can ignore. We Salt Lakers seem to define ourselves vis-à-vis the LDS (Latter-day Saint) church just as surely as we define our street numbers vis-à-vis the temple. The waxing and waning of our mutual hostility (Mormon and non-) makes for a complicated social and professional life, but an endlessly interesting one, full of the crosscurrents-animosity, scorn, humor, respect, jealousy, distrust, grudging admiration-one might expect in what is essentially a petri dish for human comedy.
Comic or not, the fact is that any bookseller who tries to bridge the chasm between the two cultures in Salt Lake must (in addition to the dog and pony show carried out by any retailer) be a skilled high-wire artist, master of the artfully changed subject and of spin-be, in fact, all things to all people. They also need a fairly schizophrenic inventory.
Such high-wire acts are what good independent booksellers do best. Contortionists one and all, we delight in climbing into other peoples' skins or clothes or shoes in order to walk a mile or two along another's path, view the passing scenery through another's eyes. We learn this skill from the books we read. We also learn it by studying the shoes, dress, expressions (facial or verbal) of the people who walk into our stores. We chat with them, question them, listen carefully to their replies, intent on deciphering what they want. We're natural-born matchmakers, and the truth is that most of us would do anything to sell a book. But not just any book, and not just to make a buck. Not even because we believe in certain books, although assuredly we do. The real pleasure in bookselling comes in pairing the right book with the right person. That's what drives us as we look, listen, assess, ask questions, and then quick-flip through the file of recently read and distantly remembered titles that are logged in every bookseller's beleaguered brain. Until bingo! We come up with a match.