An Interview with Rare Book Collector Ken Sanders

Collectors Weekly recently caught up with famed book collector, and dealer, Ken Sanders about book collecting, specifically in regards to collecting books from, and about, the West.

From the interview...

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the most sought-after Western titles of the 20th century?

Sanders: To stick with the Beats for a moment, a beautiful copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, in its dust jacket, is a $10,000 to $15,000 book now. An autographed copy of the little first edition of Howl, depending on who’s signed it, could sell from $5,000 to $25,000. Gary Snyder’s first book, Riprap, from 1959, sells in the $2,000 to $3,000 range.

The rarest book by Wallace Stegner, one of the giants of Western literature, is a little monograph published by the University of Utah that sells for around $15,000. His rarest novels are his early ones, Fire and Ice, On a Darkling Plain, and Big Rock Candy Mountain. Nice copies of those are always in the thousands of dollars.

A lot of early books aren’t necessarily rare or valuable, such as Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang; N. Scott’s Momaday’s House Made of Dawn; Frank Waters’ novels and his book on the Colorado River, The Man Who Killed the Deer; the William Eastlake’s trilogy; and Vardis Fisher’s books.

As for rarities, David Seals, a relatively unknown Sioux writer, had a hit movie made from his self-published first novel, Powwow Highway, in 1989, but I’ve never been able to get my hands on a first edition on that book. The University of Chicago Press published several thousand copies of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It as a favor to a former professor. He wrote the book at age 70 after he retired, and it became a hit movie, but that first edition is tough to find.

Before The Big Sky, A.B. Guthrie wrote a murder mystery called Murders at Moon Dance that he was so embarrassed by he never allowed it to be reprinted. It’s never listed on any of his books, so a lot of people don’t even know he wrote it. That book in its original jacket is very hard to find. Another bad first novel of note is The Indians Won by best-selling author Martin Cruz Smith. In it, the Indians and the Mormons team up and take over the interior of the United States. That book is really hard to find in the true first edition.