Legendary Sam Weller, Salt Lake City's red-headed, charismatic bookseller, is now a blind bookseller. While most chain stores occupy something like 3,000 square feet each, Weller's operation spreads over three floors and 30,000 square feet. He loves every square foot. He should. He has spent 56 years of his life there. But now he spends much less time at the store, originally known as Zion's Bookstore, at 254 S. Main.
In 1997, he endured a three-week mystery illness everyone thought was the flu, but at the end of the three weeks, he was left blind. Physicians called the phenomenon "neuropathy of the optic nerve caused by an unknown virus.""I'll tell you one thing," says the 78-year-old Weller. "It sure screwed up my career as a book seller!"
Still as feisty as ever and every inch the Pollyanna, Weller prophesies that his sight will return. "I've been blind 2 1/2 years. Within three years I figure I'm going to be getting my eyesight back. I've been talking to the higher powers. You know who that is, don't you? Tony!"
Weller is referring to his only child, a wiry, curly-haired, 37-year-old man who peers intently through tiny round glasses and wears an earring in one ear. He has been energetically running the family business since Sam was stricken. Although father and son are as different as night and day, they clearly hold each other in high regard and share the unique love of books that is a Weller genetic trait.
Tony says, "If anyone can defy reality with willpower, you're the one, Dad!"
Before Sam it was Gus, his father, a German immigrant, who on Aug. 11, 1929, started a secondhand junk shop that suddenly turned into a bookstore. Gus picked up a fascinating collection of secondhand books and decided he would rather deal in books than antiques. Sam was only 4 years old at the time. By the time he was 8, he was the official "go-fer, delivery boy and doer of little jobs." After 10 years, Gus wanted to leave the business to his kids, all named for strong biblical characters, including John, Ruth, Samuel, Rachael, Eve, David, Esther, Miriam, Jared, Mary, Sarah and Joseph.
The only one who would accept the responsibility was 18-year-old Sam, who was freshly graduated from East High and had planned to study musical composition in college. "I seriously wanted to get into background music for movies." Instead, he was destined to be a genuinely fine connoisseur of Western Americana.
So Gus moved to Kamas in 1939, leaving the store in Sam's youthful but capable hands. But in February 1943, Sam left for the army, meaning his sister, Rachael was left with the store, also at the age of 18. When Sam returned at the end of 1945, Zion's Bookstore was badly in debt. "There was only one direction to go," says Sam, "and that was up."
The hallmark of Zion's Bookstore became FS for full service, meaning the store purported to be equally effective in new, used and rare books. There were ups and downs along the way. The original store was located at 14 E. 100 South, but to secure additional space, it moved a year later to 28 E. 100 South. After Sam took over, it moved to 65 E. 200 South where it developed its unparalleled reputation for housing books on Western Americana and Mormonism. In 1961, the store moved to its present location.
The most fortunate event of Sam's life, he says, was meeting Lila Nelson, who came to the store one day when he was knocking out a wall and covered with plaster dust. Lila says, "We walked around the store, but I
began to get sick, because I ate something that didn't agree with me. Sam said he would drive me home. At the house I ran for the bathroom! That was our romantic story. Then he pursued the acquaintance to make a customer out of me, and he complains that I've been reading free ever since."
"That's right!" barks Sam.
Sam and Lila married in 1953, and the following year, she came to work at the store, where they enjoyed an intellectual collaboration. She read all the books Sam didn't read, especially mysteries. "It was a great romance," says Sam. "I LIKED this gal! There was something very genuine about her."
But there were rough spots, such as when Lila would tell Sam about a great book she was reading, and he would promptly sell the book before she finished reading it. Otherwise, they made a great team. While Sam schmoozed the customers and exercised his amazing memory for books and authors, Lila was watching the money.
"I took care of the bills, and I told Sam what I'd done with his money after I'd already done it," she says.
The Wellers had meetings and dinners with talented writers like Ernest Hemingway, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, Dale Morgan, Juanita Brooks and Louis L'Amour. It was a heady experience. "You know a bookstore is a great melting pot. You meet all sorts of characters, both literary and non-literary. "
Maybe that's why he read Dale Carnegie's best-selling book, "How To Win Friends and Influence People," more than once. But he also read voraciously in Western history, developing an encyclopedic knowledge. One of his favorite Western books remains Irving Stone's "Men to Match My Mountains," which was partly researched in Weller's store.
The greatest physical challenge was a devastating fire that ripped through a dozen Main Street businesses, including Zion's Book Store, Aug. 25, 1972. The four-alarm blaze did half a million dollars in damage and burned through the night. So many people rushed to his aid that Weller actually had his feelings of humanity warmed and broadened.
The biggest historical change in the store occurred in 1960 when Lila noticed that "ZCMI was getting our books and we were getting their bills." It seemed that an attempt to differentiate between the two Zion's stores was in order. Lila engineered a name change to "Sam Weller's Zion Book Store."
To British visitors or devotees of Charles Dickens, the name seemed a deeply literary one. That is because Dickens' "Pickwick Papers" includes a bookseller named Sam Weller. Many visitors suspected there was no such person as Sam Weller. A few years later, the Pickwick bookstore chain in California tried to hire Sam, because they thought it would be fascinating to have "a real live bookseller named Sam Weller."
Sam turned down the job, but he and Lila decided to name their little son, born in 1962, Tony, after another character from "Pickwick Papers" called Tony Weller.
Tony says he thinks "modern people don't have the patience for Dickens. He's a little verbose for the attention-deficit crowd." Tony also believes that the name Zion's had other problems. "I sensed we were falling between cultural cracks. The Mormons knew Deseret Book was the 'church store,' whereas non-Mormons had had about as much of Mormonism as they cared for." That is why the recent emphasis has been on Weller, and the legal name is simply "Sam Weller's Books."
Like his father before him, Tony Weller grew up in a bookstore. By the age of 16, he was spending considerable part-time hours at the store, and he continued to do so through "eight years of undirected college study at the U. of U." Most of his credits were in English, art and French, but he took numerous other courses in sociology, anthropology, accounting and dance.
"I never graduated. I think because of the book store, I had trouble focusing. I was enchanted with the breadth of knowledge available. In my seventh year, I met an academic counselor who said, 'I've never met a senior with more lower division credits than you have!' I said, 'Thank you! ' I thought it was a compliment."
By that time, Tony was pretty sure he wanted to end up in the book business. "I had generally high hopes for humanity. The adults to whom I was exposed were generally a very intelligent, well-educated bunch of people. My childhood perception mistook these people for being ordinary."
Tony's type of people were readers, people who browsed Weller's store, and his strongest friendships were developed with those who had a deep interest in books, as he did. But he had to get out from under Sam's "overbearing personality" for a while, to feel his own way. "He didn't say, 'I hope some day you'll run the book store. ' He said, 'Some day YOU WILL RUN THE BOOK STORE.'"
Sam doesn't remember being quite that forceful.
Tony says, "Sam instilled in me almost a perverse sense of my own abilities." Tony learned "drive and determination" from his dad, and an ability to face problems with a calm attitude from his mom. So Tony now runs the store, and his wife Catherine presides over the computers. Tony dares to hope that some day their 2-year-old daughter, Lila Ann, named for both her grandmothers, will someday follow in the family footsteps and keep the Weller name alive in the book world.
Different though their personalities may be, Tony is reverential toward his dad, who, he says, has always been "foremost a book man, because of the way he has defended the right of people to choose their own books." Sam reads books for the blind, now, having recently enjoyed "The History of the Atlantic Monthly." Lila reads others to him, and she reads so expressively that he loves it.
"If I can't read books," says Sam, "just open the hole and throw me in!"