Remembering Walt West and Walt West Books

 

I have had a lot of jobs over my nearly seventy years of life. Beginning in the early 1970s while I was in high school and around seventeen or eighteen my job career began. I washed dishes at John’s Awful Awful for a week. Awful. Awful. I cleaned the executive offices at Bathey Industries which made bins, if I recall, for General Motors. Awful. Awful. Awful. I worked in a factory when it was the norm to go from high school to good paying, good benefit, and union represented factory work. That job was a little of this and a little of that but mostly more than a little of that. I worked as an acquisitions editor at a publisher until I was downsized during one of America’s many busts. Not a bad job all in all.  I taught part-time, something I preferred because I really can’t stand to be embedded within bureaucracies of any sort. Teaching was OK even though by that time many of America’s colleges and universities had become politically and ideologically correct slightly more rigorous than high school institutions of higher learning and their bureaucrats, who had increased dramatically in universities and colleges, thought largely in neo-liberal corporate retail terms, a meaning system that doesn’t lend itself to a liberal arts emphasis. And I worked in a bunch of bookstores.

I was a book nerd. My English Mum, who recently passed as did my Swiss Dad, made me that way. She bought me my first books when I was five and I never looked back. In junior high in Dallas I remember falling in love with Shakespeare. In high school I continued to read voraciously and teachers like Mrs. Pugh gave me more and more books than were required in the class. She even gave me book recommendations periodically so I could read even more. 

This love of books, of course, translated into a love of bookstores and for used bookstores in particular. I haunted bookstores and particularly used bookstores since after I went to university since I was one of those legions a poor university students in the many places I lived and visited over the course of my life. In fact, one of the first things I did when I moved to or visited someplace or somewhere was to go to used bookstores in the area. I visited used bookstores, to name a few, in Bloomington, in Dallas, in South Bend, (the wonderful Erasmus Books, one of my favourites), in Austin,  in Toronto,  in Calgary, in Edmonton, in Cambridge, and in Moscow in order to find sustenance and relaxation.

In 1991 I moved to Provo, Utah to study Mormonism, do research, and to teach occasionally at Brigham Young University which had a strong intellectual culture and some of the best undergraduate students I ever encountered during my years of life. As was my Kant like pattern I visited Provo’s used bookstores as soon as I could. I visited Pioneer Books which was then on Columbia near Deseret Industries. My favourite used bookstore, however, was Walt West Books which was initially on a side street east of Pioneer off Columbia.

One day when I was visiting Walt West Books Walt and his lone employee Anita were in the midst of moving from the very small bookstore on the side street to a quite large one on Columbia. I pitched in and helped move books via a grocery shopping cart as I had nothing else better to do and loved talking to Anita and Walt. 

Afterwards I visited Walt West Books once a week and became better acquainted withe both Anita and Walt. Anita and I had a lot in common. She was from, if memory served, the Toronto area and I had once lived briefly in nearby Waterloo and had gotten into the great University of Toronto once upon a time. Walt had lived in the East Bay part of the San Fransisco area. I don’t remember what he did employment wise. What I do remember is that Walt had a part-time book business. As such he knew a lot of booksellers and book buyers in the area including buyers from the legendary and sadly now shuttered Cody’s Books in Berkeley, one of the many great bookstores killed by faux bookstores like Borders, faux because books for them were units to move akin to Serta mattresses, and their ability to buy large numbers of books in bulk and sell them more cheaply than independent bookstores as a result, a practise that almost certainly was planned specifically to drive independent bookstores out of business which it far too often did.

When Anita resigned her position at Walt’s to get married and, if memory serves, to move back to the Toronto area I convinced Walt that he should hire me. It was one of the best things I ever did. I did a lot of the normal things someone who works in a used bookstore generally does. I ran the cash register. I helped customers find books they wanted. I suggested books to customers. I shelved newly acquired books. I alphabetised the books we already had in the many book sections we had in the store from literature to Mormon Studies, which was not surprisingly at the front of the store. I made runs to the Salt Lake area publishers to get Mormon Studies books including some from one of the leading Mormon fundamentalist publishers at the time. I ordered new Mormon Studies releases from publishers like the University of Illinois Press, one of the if not the leader in scholarly Mormon publications at the time. I occasionally perused Walt’s warehouse and brought in new stock including two complete sets of Dialogue, the intellectual Mormon journal. I shovelled snow from the walkway. I went over to Deseret Industries and picked up low cost books if we could resell them. I recall picking up a signed copy of a book by a well-known Mormon author whose name I no longer recall. We quickly sold it for $25 US dollars. I met other booksellers who Walt knew or who would come over to Walt’s including Curt Bench, Lynn, from Seagull books, who once brought a first edition of the Book of Mormon into the store. I met a book buyer from Cody’s in Berkeley who Walt knew well. I met Gary from Pioneer Books who I became very close to. I sold an OED and several religious books to actor Edward Herman, who I had a wonderful conversation with. Bright man who was very real. I met sociologist of religion Stephen Kent from the University of Alberta whose work I knew, and talked with him about Mormonism. I met hordes of Mormons who were not professional historians but who had an intense interest in and extensive knowledge of Mormon history and its controversies and discontents.

From the vantage point of 2024 working at Walt’s was the job I had that I liked most over the course of my life. It was an intellectually stimulating place to work and the bookstore itself was like the Garden of Eden to someone like me who loved books and the intellectual life. I got so much joy from that job that I sometimes wished afterwards that I owned my own bookstore where I could spend all of my days, a bookstore like Walt West Books. Plus by working at Walt West Books I got to meet Walt West.

Walt was a  kind of a surrogate father to me. He gave me opportunities to prove myself. He supported me when I went down to Quaker weekend at the nuclear test site near Las Vegas, Nevada to protest nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons testing, and war. As an early opponent of the war in Vietnam I became acquainted with Quakers and had a degree of respect for them despite my devotion to Groucho’s counsel never to join a group which would have me as a member. He supported me and let me take time off to help plan the Mormon weekend at the test site, the Mormon Peace Gathering. He let me and some of my companions use his computer to set up our alternative newspaper the Deseret Free Press, which barely lasted for two or three issues before it imploded. He supported me when I published opinion pieces in local Provo and Orem newspapers critical of the lack of freedom of speech and academic freedom at BYU. Walt was a gentleman, a gentle person, and one of the finest people i have ever met. I will always remember him for as long as I live.