I’m halfway through my interview with Reid Moon, collector of rare and cool artifacts, when he tells me about this game he likes to play when he’s talking to groups about his collection of rare and cool artifacts.
“I say, name a person, place or event, anything that’s happened in the history of the world since the printing press, and I’ll show you something that ties to whatever you say with no more than one degree of separation.”
“Have you ever been stumped?” I ask.
“Never been stumped,” he says.
So, being a skeptical journalist, I give him a name I think might stump him.
“My favorite baseball player from when I was a kid: Duke Snider of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers.”
Moon thinks about this for at least half a second. Then he goes to his safe, punches in the combination, spins the wheel and opens the door.
“OK, we’re talking about baseball,” he says, and then he produces a beat up old baseball with “Babe Ruth” written on the side. This, he’s quick to say, isn’t an actual autograph from Babe Ruth, but it is a prop from “Sandlot,” the movie filmed in Salt Lake City in 1992. This is the ball (or one of them) the dog chewed up and the kids spend the movie trying to retrieve.
But wait, we’re not done.
Behind that baseball is another one that Reid picked up just a year ago. He shows me the two signatures that caused him to buy it: Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle.
Then he turns the ball over in his hand and we can see there’s another signature.
We study the neat, cursive writing and almost simultaneously figure out what it spells.
Duke Snider.
“You’ve got a Duke Snider autograph!” I gush.
“Hmm,” says Reid, who it appears has managed to surprise even himself, “I didn’t know that was on there.”
So, zero degrees of separation.
Moon’s Rare Books is located in The Shops at Riverwoods mall in north Provo. Not the first place one would look for an autograph of Duke Snider, or, more to the point, expect to find a truly stupefying assortment of historical treasures.
Reid isn’t quite sure what to call it: “We describe ourselves as a bookstore disguised as a museum or a museum disguised as a bookstore,” he says, “because half of the items aren’t for sale, but half are.”
So, why Provo? Short version: because 40 years ago Reid attended BYU, where he staggered through four majors “because nobody told me there was a profession called treasure hunter, like Nicolas Cage in ‘National Treasure,’” before finally graduating in six years with a degree in international relations. After that he moved back to Dallas, Texas, his hometown, to help run a little Latter-day Saint bookstore next to his dad’s insurance agency. He loved the old books more than the new ones and started to specialize in unearthing rare books and artifacts — not just Latter-day Saints rare books and artifacts, but in all genres. After the turn of the millennium, with bookstores disappearing like telephone landlines, he boxed everything up, moved to Provo and in 2015 set up Moon’s Rare Books in The Shops at Riverwoods.
Surely and not so slowly his rare shop has turned into “a bucket list item.” He gets visitors from all over the country and the world: 75,000 on average a year. On Saturdays it’s not unusual for 1,000 people to visit. “Ninety-nine out of 100 people who come in are not buying, they’re just looking,” says Reid, “but almost everyone will see something they like.”
He has things the Smithsonian covets — like Alexander Hamilton’s law journal, kept up to the year he died in the duel. He has books the British Museum would love to get their hands on — a King James Bible that belonged to King James. He has multiple first-edition copies of the Book of Mormon, including Hyrum Smith’s personal copy.
He has letters, notes, sketches and doodles from Neil Armstrong, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, Helen Keller, C.S. Lewis, Nikola Tesla, Marie Antoinette, J.R.R. Tolkien, Abraham Lincoln. He has the desk Charles Dickens wrote “A Tale of Two Cities” on and Dickens’ personal copy of “A Tale of Two Cities.” He has first editions of all Jane Austen’s books, a first edition of “Dracula” signed by Bram Stoker, the original “Star Wars” script, letters from Hemingway, a letter written during the revolutionary war from George Washington, a postcard from Albert Einstein (with e=mc2 jotted underneath his signature). He has Orville Wright’s pilots license, a Christmas card from Princess Diana, a letter written from the Titanic while it was sinking, a 1479 bible, Charles Manson’s fingerprint card, a note from Mother Teresa.
And we’re just warming up. There are over 5,000 items at last count, and Reid is continually bringing in new stuff. Since July he’s been on artifact hunts in Tokyo, South America and the U.K., twice.
He’s 65 but insists he’ll never retire, “because doing what I do, you get better with age … and if I retired, I would do what I’m doing.”
Besides, he could never leave all his priceless “friends” and the pleasure he gets out of seeing the impact they have on others.
“I bring out something, their favorite author, whatever, I bring out a first edition Jane Austen to someone who loves Jane Austen and it just brings tears to their eyes. People get so excited.”
At the end of the day, he’ll tell you, it isn’t how old something is, or how much it would sell for, it’s how it speaks to us here in the present. The past has its own language, one that knows no boundaries, no tense, no expiration date. When you hold it in your hands, history will talk to you. Like Duke Snider talked to me last Thursday.
