Salt Lake City: Livability in the 21st Century

Salt Lake City native Ken Sanders, owner of Ken Sanders
Rare Books, became a bookman while still in high school
in the 1960s, when he started a comic and fantasy and
science fiction mail order business. In 1975 he co-created
the Cosmic Aeroplane Books and Records shop out of the
original Cosmic Aeroplane head shop in Salt Lake City’s 9th
and 9th neighborhood, which quickly became a gathering
place for the city’s burgeoning avant garde. Sanders founded
Dream Garden press in 1980, publisher of many Utahcentric
tomes over the years, including the R. Crumb illustrated
edition of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang.
In 1990, Sanders founded Ken Sanders Rare Books, which
has since evolved into a critical component of the city’s
flourishing literary arts community. “Salt Lake has a vibrant
and diverse arts community that in the past and now
continues to produce a body of work that we can be
rightfully proud of. The depth of cultural and artistic talent
here lends more room to breathe here in the city than
the sparsely populated geography that surrounds us,”
Sanders says.
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Ken Sanders, owner of
Ken Sanders Rare Books.
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