Special Collections: Where the old stuff never gets old

SALT LAKE CITY — It's 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the library has just opened, and Cherie Willis is already having a good time.

Cherie is the gatekeeper for the Special Collections section of the Salt Lake City Main Library, a room chock full of treasured books, publications and other artifacts, some of them dating back well before the library's beginnings in 1898.

For Cherie, who has a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Utah and a master's degree in library science from BYU, it's clear that, to her, the old stuff never gets old. It's like we just opened King Tut's tomb.

The materials are all Utah-related. There are no first editions of Shakespeare or Cervantes. But there is a first edition of "Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley." Published in 1855, the lengthy book, a long-ago precursor of Google Maps, goes into great detail describing how to get from England to the Salt Lake Valley without winding up in Bolivia.

"Getting here from England was tough," says Cherie. "Back then, it was like getting to Mars."

Next, Cherie holds up a rare (although not first-edition) copy of "A Study in Scarlet," a book published in 1887 by Arthur Conan Doyle that introduced Sherlock Holmes and his trusty confidant Watson to the world for the first time. The reason the book, written by an Englishman and published in England, is in Special Collections in Salt Lake City is that a major part of it takes place in Utah, where, let's just say, Mormons (as Doyle called them) do not emerge as heroes. No one rushed to buy "Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley" after reading this one.

To counter that, Cherie produces an early edition of "City of the Saints," the 1862 book written by English adventurer and travel writer (think Bill Bryson a century earlier) Sir Richard Burton, who, unlike his countryman A. Conan Doyle, personally visited Salt Lake City and, as Cherie points out, "wrote nicely about us."

There's lots more dealing with Utah's interconnected roots with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including a well-preserved copy of "Manuscript Found," the unpublished and unfinished manuscript written by Solomon Spaulding in the early 1800s that critics of the church contend Joseph Smith used as the basis for the Book of Mormon.

"It's an Indian romance. They're not even close," says Cherie, who also points out that with the advent of the internet, books and manuscripts that used to be largely out of the reach of the general public, like this one, can now be found with a simple online search.

The most valuable book in the Main Library isn't in the Special Collections section. To see it, Cherie takes us to the fourth floor, where "The Birds of America" is on display for all to gaze upon, located in a place of prominence, almost right in front of the elevators. The oversized picture book showing John James Audubon's illustrations of 435 birds is one of about two dozen known to be in existence that used the Bien chromolithographic method to reproduce Audubon's originals.

The Salt Lake City Library bought the book for $230 in 1903 — about $8,000 in 2025 dollars — from Alfales Young, one of Brigham Young's sons. It was an extravagant purchase at the time, but today the book, according to Cherie, is worth "several hundreds of thousands of dollars." But since it's not for sale, "really it's priceless."

The prized possession, by the way, has a sophisticated level of security, including a locked glass lid that weighs 100 pounds.

Speaking of weight, back in the Special Collections vault, Cherie holds up one of the original Salt Lake City bid books for the 1998 Winter Olympics. Each member of the International Olympic Committee received a similar book when they held the vote to determine the winning city in Birmingham, England, in 1991.

Cherie admiringly holds up the book she describes as "absolutely spectacular, bound in wood, with a lovely leather case and a gorgeous book written on handmade paper inside. It is stunning, exquisite."

But it must weigh 20 or 30 pounds.

"I think this is why we lost," she deadpans.

To her knowledge, there's only been one theft in the Special Collections section in all its days. It was several years ago when a copy of a cookbook titled "No Man Knows My Pastries" went missing.

The book had no particular street value. It wasn't a collector's item. It was just part of the rather extensive collection of local cookbooks (including "Angie Earl's Lion House Treasured Recipes" published in 1947).

"I think it was probably a staff member because no one else has access," says Cherie. "They probably took it for the title, a parody on Fawn Brodie's book on Joseph Smith, 'No Man Knows My History.' They must have thought that was clever."

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