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Ken Sanders has been in the rare book business in Utah since the 1970s. From 1975 to 1981 he co-owned The Cosmic Aeroplane. He founded Dream Garden Press in 1980, and Ken Sanders Rare Books in 1990. He has been engaged in buying, selling, appraising and publishing new and old books, photography, cartography, and documents for over thirty years. Sanders also has a long history of promoting the arts and literature.

Have you always been a book lover?I can't remember a time I didn't read and devour books. Third and fourth grade is when the habit really kicked in. As a reader, I was an omnivore and quickly burned through all the books in the Woodrow Wilson library. Well, at least the ones I had any interest in. At that time, in addition to the Oz books and Alice in Wonderland, I devoured the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, although I had to read the Nancy Drews clandestinely; but they were better stories than the Hardy Boys. We used to get in school The Weekly Reader and ordered books by mail from BS [Scholastic Book Services]. That really expanded my horizons. Some of my favorites from that time period included The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek, Sea View Secret, Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint and Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars. I recall a field trip to the South Salt Lake library, where I found and attempted to check out Frankenstein and Dracula, but the librarian took them away from me because they were “adult” books, and she wouldn't let me read them. I no longer recall how I did it, but needless to say that long-ago librarian wasn't able to keep me from reading those books. But perhaps, along with Alice in Wonderland, my favorite childhood book was The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. With its tale of a little boy and a princess, and magic and goblins and high adventure, it's still one of my favorites. At some point I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and read all the Tarzan books, along with Mars and Venus and Pellucidar as well. I went on a pulp fiction kick and read through series like Doc Savage, The Shadow, Phantom Detective, and every horror book and magazine I could get my hands on. I also loved the old comic books of the '40s and '50s — everything from Uncle Scrooge and other “funny animal” comics, like Pogo, etc., to the science fiction and horror titles; and then of course superheroes like the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man and X-Men. By seventh grade, I was reading Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam and other great literature. My love of illustrated books and visual graphics led me into a lot of really great authors at an early age.How did your childhood love of books develop into being co-owner of The Cosmic Aeroplane and founding Dream Garden Press?As for being in the book business, that also came naturally. I was wheeling and dealing comic books in grade school, buying them for a nickel and selling them for a dime, and by age 15 or 16, I was running a mail-order business selling comics and comic art, fantasy and science fiction and advertising in fan magazines like ERB-DOM [Edgar Rice Burroughs] and RBCC [Rocket's Blast Comic Collector]. At the time, underground comics had just hit the scene in California and I can remember running ads for R. Crumb and Zap Comix, stating one had to be 18 or over to buy these comics. I, of course wasn't, but I was selling, not buying! I discovered the Cosmic Aeroplane back in 1967, when Steve Jones first opened it at 9th & 9th. He later moved to South Temple and 4th South into a cavernous space (now the steps of the Delta Center) and used to let me and a lot of other folks do their thing there, as we used to say back in the day. The Smoke Blues Band practiced there, the Human Ensemble Theatre produced “Dracula” and other plays in the back room, SLC's only draft counseling center was there, Utah Phillips launched his campaign for U.S. Senate there; Ben's Railroad Exchange Bar on the corner morphed into Utah's first openly gay bar, The Sun; Richard Taylor did his psychedelic artwork in the old Cosmic, and so much more happened there. By the 1970s the late Bruce Roberts [a '60s SLC radical] and I formed a partnership with Steve and opened Cosmic Aeroplane Books and Records on 1st South, in the same block as present-day Nostalgia Coffee. We had a new, used and antiquarian book shop that I ran, Smokey Koelsch ran the record shop, Steve Jones ran the original head shop and we also had a jewelry dept. I parted ways with Cosmic in the 1980s, as did its founder Steve, and unfortunately before the '80s were over, the legendary Cosmic Aeroplane was no more. In 1980, I formally incorporated Dream Garden Press and began a book- and calendar-publishing career. Beginning with the Edward Abbey Calendar, for 10 years I published a line of wilderness and national park calendars and numerous books, including: Utah Gateway to Nevada, the 10th anniversary edition of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, illustrated by R. Crumb [still in print today] and many, many other books. In recent years I have published books of poetry of two of Utah's finest poets: Whale Song by Ken Brewer, and Poetry Is Wanted Here by Alex Caldiero. Forthcoming publishing projects include Starlight on The Rails, a song book of Utah Phillip's songs, that his son, Duncan Phillips, and myself are publishing, and a volume of poetry by Paul Swenson, the younger brother of renowned poet May Swenson. We also issue letterpress broadsides, postcards and chapbooks and a line of R.Crumb/Edward Abbey Monkey Wrench Gang T-shirts.