♪ ♪ ♪ >> welcome to gasol lake city on book tv, founded by brigham young and other mormon pioneers in 1847. so lake city would go on to become the capital of the new state of utah, the third state in the country to allow women to vote. known as the city of saints, solid city is home to the norm -- mormon tabernacle choir and still has strong ties to its mormon heritage as well as the native tribal cultures. with the help of our comcast cable partners we learn about its history and literary scene with local authors. we begin our special feature on salt lake city with janet rich and on her motorcycle ride along the mormon trail. .. i started to question that and i started to explore my culture and i started to explore my roots and i started to ask myself questions like why do i have these opinions and why do i think the way i do and why do i act the way i do and what are my values? all of those things lead back to the roots of the mormon church. so i really wanted to discover what was it i walked away from so easily. in my household my mother a devout mormon encouraged us to go to church but my father was the head of the household, there was no doubt about that. when my parents had a bit of and a strained marriage and it was all of around the church my mother loved the church. it was her whole life. after they got married in the temple my father forbade my mother from wearing her temple garments and pulled her away from the church. and that was shocking to her. so for many years she didn't go to church even though she wanted to. he didn't want her to and even though she wanted to she didn't. and one day she simply stood up to him and said i'm going back to the church. that is when she found her liberation as a woman and that is part of what i explored in this book. i was so fascinated by that. how could she find her liberation is a woman in a patriarchal institution like the mormon church. her sisters did the same thing. very strong women and independent women and women who i was inspired by. and devoutly mormon. that seemed incongruent to me so that was part of what i wanted to explore on this trip on the mormon trail in part of what i wanted to explore the book. there was something about doing it on a motorcycle that felt it would put me closer to the trail. i don't want to say it put me closer to my great great-grandmother's experience of walking the trail because they went through such hardships and it was kind of unbelievable what they did. one of them was pregnant when she walks that trail and so i don't want to say that my hardships were anything like that. they were not. but it's somehow on a bike you are somehow closer to the road, closer to the elements, closer to the field. i had to think about rings that they had to think about dangers, logs, trail conditions. i tried to stay as close to the trail as possible. there was something about doing it on a motorcycle vets felt like it would push me out of my comfort level, push pushed me a little bit as a woman and get me closer to understanding the kind of faith that they had to exhibit to walk that trail. i did go all the way back to new york. i started in illinois and then came west. illinois where the joseph smith where founder of the church was assassinated. it's just outside of knoxville and they had established the church there and then they started to have trouble. basically they were run out of town. that's really where the mormon trail starts. that's where the access started and that is where they started coming west from there. i wanted to -- my great great great grandparents were there in not through with joseph smith and then they started west on the trail with brigham young's party. so i wanted to follow that as closely as i could. i was able to go places where you could actually see the rats in the rocks and when i went to those places i was alone in almost all of those places so it was very much a spiritual trip for me to be in the places where my ancestors had gone, literally had been there. martin's cove was one of those places one of my great great grandmother's was in the car company and her son died along the way so martin's cove was one of those places that i went. so it wasn't so much hearing the stories. it was kind of feeling the places that the trip gave me. just sitting and feeling that cool breeze and that feeling that they must have felt sitting in that same place. the fear, the questioning. what i questioned a lot when i was on the trail was their faith how did they hang onto it? how did they keep their faith? faced with what they were facing. i didn't really answer that question other than to say that faith isn't necessarily something women get and hold. it might be something that we practice every single day instead. so i found myself thinking a lot about the question of faith. i did a lot of research before i left to go on the trip and i did a lot of research after i came back from a trip. one thing that happened while i was on the trip is that i was kind of overwhelmed and really touched by the kindness of the people i met and for example i was walking around now to not through and stopped in one of the church buildings. they have a lot of missionaries and the woman there said she was giving me directions someplace and she said why didn't you just hop in the car and i will give you a ride down there. people wherever i went were so kind to me and so helpful. even when i got to salt lake doing research at the mormon archives they were so open so kind and so helpful. again i started to ask myself what did you leave behind when you left behind this church and these people and they all reminded me of my mother and her sisters and my family. they were just really special people to me and really wonderful compassionate people. so along the trail, although i never questioned my leaving the theology of the church along the trail i constantly questioned my leading that group of people. i was surprised to find out in my research about the women in the church. i expected because i grew up in a church that i felt was extremely patriarchal and oppressive for women. so i was surprised to find out in a church that women held a lot of power at one point in time. i found that in the mid-to late 1800's the women in the mormon church had a very strong role. they were suffragists. they were going to medical school. they have medical degrees. they had their own businesses. they rand the silk industry. so it has a history of feminism which surprises many people. that is no longer the case i don't think. we are now seeing, about 100 years after that during the 1960s and 1970s i think we saw all the power removed from the women, drain from the women in the mormon church and now we are seeing a resurgence of young mormon women who are saying we want more power in the church. we want to wear pants to church. that doesn't sound like a big deal but it's a big deal. there is a group of mormon women now asking for the priesthood. i don't know how successful that will be good for them for asking. that was one of the questions all throughout the book that i wanted to underscore it. for me as a woman the mormon church felt oppressive so i left. so i was curious about why don't those women just leave and they don't. they stay there and they fight for their rights and i think that's right. the trail made a big impact in the way i thought about the church but at the same time didn't really change my position in the church. so traveling the trail gave me an understanding of my mother's position and other women in my family. but one thing i did know when i finished traveling the trail is that there are parts of me that are undeniably in mormon and that will never change. my values were formed by that. my opinions were formed by that. even my opinions that rebel against it. it's so much of through i am and so much the way i think about the west end so much the way i think about this place, all mormon. even though i don't embrace and i don't attend church and don't consider myself a mormon anymors a mormon. when i first wrote the book and gave it to my editor she sat across from me and i gave for the first draft. she sat across from me and she said something to me and i said i don't know what he and she said well your father. you haven't mentioned your father at all. and i said oh well he's not really part of the book. she said i'll bet he is. [laughter] so i went back and explored my relationship with my father because it's very much a part of probably a part of why i left the church was his attitude toward the church growing up. i started to explore their relationship with my father in the book and he was not happy with that. so he read the book after it came out. he didn't speak to me for two years after that. i let my mother read the book before the book was published. i was living in tucson arizona at the time. she came down and i gave her the book to read. i went to work and i came home and found her in a puddle of tears reading the book and she said to me you got it exactly right. i was relieved to hear that because a lot of the book is about her and her relationship with the church and her relationship with my father. so i was nervous about her reading the book because it exposed very much of her private life. she said you've got it exactly right. i feel good about it. that was to have her blessing mattered a great deal to me. people who were giving me feedback before it was published but it mattered to me. as i wrote this book i think one of the reasons that people pick this book up is that it's an exploration of faith. not necessarily an exploration of mormon faith but an expression of faith and what does faith mean to us? i not necessarily talking about the christian faith in god or a christian god. i'm talking about what faith means to us on a day-to-day basis. whether that's faith and religion are just faith in the universe or faith in humanity, whatever it is. so as i wrote the book i think it's universal appeal beyond the question and the weirdness and the strangeness of mormonism and i had people say to me you know, i picked up the book and i understand mormonism in a way that i didn't get it before but it's universally fills that question of faith and how do we live with the day today in a world that often mix those questioned faith. >> up next on booktv's trip to salt lake city we look at ken sanders. >> i don't recall a time in my life when i wasn't immersed in books. i don't know that when i was a child you could accurately say i was in the rare book business but i was obsessed with comic looks as a kid in grade school so i would hustle and trade them in barter them and buy one for nickel and sell it for a time even in grade school. not the idea to buy and sell them but to get more comics for my collection. the bookstore that we are in downtown salt lake now we discovered and moved in here, my daughter melissa and i moved in here some 17 years ago. we are offered books every single day. most days we buy from a few dozen to a few hundred bucks. though i can definitely get out of control when buying books. i did a recent house call a month ago and bought for 5000 books. it took me about a week to haul them all out of the house. at some point the physics of it all, hauling and 10 times more books than i sell into the store is going to catch up with me and probably this whole place will just sink into the swamp or something underneath and there will just be this empty, vacant hole here. well over 90, probably 95% of the material that's offered to us we turn down. the single biggest reason is condition. you can have a thousand dollar book in poor condition and getting $100 out of this. if it's falling apart or it's incomplete we don't go there. it's the hardest thing to learn whether you're a collector or a dealer in the antiquarian book. condition is the most important thing. so that's a big one and you know the general public they think depending on your own age in perspective a book from the 1950s or 1900 is considered old. age, and thus you are talking about in "-begin-double-quote chart books printed prior to 1901, age has got nothing to do with value rage is what we have been talking a gentleman came in here and showed my rear book an old family bible from 150 years ago. if a book is 100 years old that to be valuable doesn't it? we have been printing and producing bibles for more than five centuries. it's the best-selling book in the world and then i try to find a nice -- at this point i have given up on being creative but a nice way to tell them that their family bible is going to have a blot or sentimental value to them than the value in the marketplace. people bringing unusual and unique books in here doesn't happen every day but it does happen and being in the book trade is something that you live for, to see something you've never seen before. that is partly what this is all about and it has happened a number of times. probably one of the most memorable ones is with the obscure mormon book called the book of commandments. it's in 1833 precursor to one of the three mormon books of doctrine and theology. the "book of mormon" of course 1830 is the first and the second is the 1835 doctrine of covenants. this is a transitional precursor to the dnc as we call it called the book of commandments. it was destroyed by an angry wartime mormon mob and the type type, the press and the pages were thrown out the window and the story is some mormon girls gathered up the pages on their long skirts and hid in the cornfield with them and the surviving copies of that book to this day are made up from those blown away pages if you will. to date 170 plus years later there are 29 known copies of that book that have surfaced. the majority of those copies are incomplete and a young 20 something man and his wife came in here many many years ago, in fact at the old store before this one so 20 years ago and he had three books that his dad had given him from grandma's estate. they were in a little drawer. they were all mds books, mormon books. one of them was the 1883 book of commandments. i said i don't want to get your hope of. i need to take us in collated and see if it's authentic that if they were and i simply the young man that i thought it was a six-figure book. he left the store. a couple of days later he came back with his father who was somewhat incredulous and i said well again i have got to authenticate it. but yeah this book is worth $100,000 plus. i researched it and i made certain it was authentic. turns out we collated it and it was only 60% complete and we sold it then that many years ago for a couple hundred thousand dollars. the book of commandments today is the rarest mormon book and it's worth well over a million dollars. >> i founded in the flea market in upstate new york and i really don't know much about it. i looked it up on line and couldn't find much information. i think it's in german. its pictures and they all seem to feature the same guy. i thought it was really cool-looking. that was the only reason i bought especially for $2. speedup of the e.u. funded this flea market is the 19,281st edition of my sarao's masterpiece. it's in beautiful condition. its value at retail would be 1000 to $1500. >> well matt. the antiques roadshow. eight years ago. i think this is my eighth or ninth season with them. in 1997 was the first one. a few weeks -- this was their second time and takes roadshow had come to salt lake city. the producer sam farrell called me on the phone and interviewed me about coming and being a book and manuscript's appraiser for him. he said i've been calling around trying to find someone to do this because they had learned i think from the first time in salt lake that they really needed to have somebody aboard that knew something about mormon material. there are three appraisers at the book table. antiques roadshow praises approximately 25-ish categories and there are maybe 70 to 80 appraisers per city. and they give maybe four or fivt so collectively we are seeing 12,000 items possibly and collections too. most of it is just run-of-the-mill, unremarkable material that's never ever going to get filmed our area. you just live for somebody sitting down that has got some extraordinary item that you know something about and between the guests and the appraiser you can have a conversation and tell a story. that's so much fun. some guess can be very difficult. the vast majority of them are absolutely wonderful and they are very understanding. you mean i'm not going to be on tv? every once in a while you get a surly one and i learned early on there's no percentage and arguing with a guest on antiques roadshow. only bad things will come up so i just try and find a workaround. i had probably a teenaged boy one time who had a paperback of "to kill a mockingbird." he said first edition 1962. you know the old saying a little knowledge is a dangerous thing? the young man was absolutely right. harper lee's famous novel was published in 1962 and that would be the correct first edition but rather than trying to explain to him that the first edition was a hard bound with a desk jacket i asked him i said you know you're right harper lee blog harper lee blah, blah, blah 1962. so i said open your book up. i try to get them to do it. open the copyright page and read what it says here. published in 1973. you have the 1973. now i have gotten him to verbalize it so now i have got them on my side. this was the 1973 edition and oh by the way this is a paperback edition. the first edition of the novel was hard bound in it dust jacket and would only have the 1962 date. that way i get out of arguing with the guests. let me say this about antiquarian books. we live in this far distant corner of the universe that almost no one in habits and those of us whether we are institutional librarians, private collectors or we deal in trade of the books in antiquarian book trade we are a tiny minority of increasingly the population of this country. you are either a booker or you are not. book people, they are some of the most eccentric people in the world. anyone of us collector, dealer would bore you to tears with just trivial information about an arcane subject that couldn't possibly be of interest to anyone but ourselves. and there is just such quirky personalities in the business. i don't know that we always tend to be very good people persons. we are book people and book people spend a lot of time in their own heads and almost everything i have known in my life was worked out of books. there are direct experiences too but books are still to this day the world i like to live in. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> and we wanted build an iconic structure for the city since it was part of the area. because the city blocks are smaller this really wouldn't fit in other urban areas just because it's very wide and that crescent wall that sweeps around it is very well again but also very large and very eye-catching and just its openness, its ability and is just a great place to be. one thing we liked about the design is he combined different geometric features. we have the triangular main part of the building and we have around auditorium on the side of the building. a rectangle or structure on the west side that we call the bar and then that crescent wall that hugs the library on the north and east side. all of these different geometric features are bridged together with skylights. so just light flows to the building at all levels and we have a total 360-degree view of our surroundings. the city, the mountains and the area we are in. see this library has a lot of unique features. when it was designed it was geared towards being a community space in one of the things the community wanted were some shops. along with our external wall and inside what we call the urban broom which is a large atrium we have a lot of shops and services. we had a hair salon which i think is kind of unique for a library to have a hair salon inside. we have a gift store that is geared towards literary gifts and we have a flower shop. we have an art gallery. as you walk through the library you will notice as you go fl flaura gets quieter which was a really big part of the design of the building. our urban room is geared towards bringing people getting together there are some public seating in front of our cafés where people spend a day or grab a cup of coffee or head out. in our first floor razzing area we have soft seating so people can grab a magazine or check out the music collection and just hang out. it's really a lounging area and as you move throughout the building again it's quieter. along our ball where our windows are on our northside it's where we have most of our study area so anyone who's sitting there that wants to study or be on the internet or just sit and hang out they have an amazing view of the northside so they see the downtown area. >> the unique architectural features -- we gave the architectural team a challenge to try to find a way to contribute to the old library since it sits next to us. could we honor at? we didn't feel like we were turning our backs on the building. that is how the idea for the climb up all crescent wall came about. people can walk up from the south side and come up, kind of leaving our past looking up and then reaching our rooftop garden which is our present and we thought that was a really nice metaphor for what the building encompasses. we really planned this building at the right time. we figure it would cost about $65 million. to build a building of a similar square footage, 240,000 square feet and now we are using twice that amount, we did not want it to come from private donations. we wanted it to be a truly public buildings that we wanted to get that tax base public support. so we spent like i said two years asking the public what they wanted. our friends of the library was instrumental in putting it on the ballot measure and asking for a tax increase, and levy on property taxes to raise the money to build the structure. it came in just over $65 million the bond was for 85 million and pass by 68% which really is remarkable. other cities have tried bonding for libraries and they just fail time and time again. he was very supportive of this from the very inception. >> i think it is vital for a community to have a library that brings people together. this particular space was geared in bringing the community together. the way that it's laid out this across to city walks and now it's across three city blocks where public safety building is to the east and the city and council building is to our west. across three full city blocks we have dedicated what we call our civic campus which is a space for the community to get together for fun. there are a lot of rallies that are held on the space. it's an opportunity for people to remember that the things that hold the city together, the public safety officers, the mayor and the library works together to build the city and i like that we have visibly done that with our architecture. >> up next stacey bess talks about her book "nobody don't love nobody." she spoke with booktv during our recent visit to salt lake city utah with the help of our partner comcast. >> recess. >> i been baking for weeks to get somebody down here. my keys. these will open the door from the hall. keep them locked. hello? hello? keys. wade and power to do the count. they come in late. food services does not want the lunch services -- discipline is entirely up to you. turn the lights off and show movie. those are shame names. nobody likes to have a the name on the board. it's really bad. you call the police. >> i have a degree in elementary ed k-8. i have to tell you the truth. i wasn't dying to teach right away because i have children. it was the middle of the school year and my mom and husband coaxed me into it and they said they are probably not going to hire you right now so just look at all your paperwork done. to my surprise they did offer me a job and offered me the most unusual job in the entire district let alone the state. i was offered the job to teach i was told k-6 inside of the shelter for homeless families. i was asked to teach in a one-room school and the idea was emergency education, to make sure the children who lived in that shelter ,-com,-com ma the families had no other worries that their children would have public education. right on site so the moms and dads could work on the other issues that were getting in the way of housing. my first day was terrifying. i remember the personnel director said we are going to go underneath the south bridge and go as far she can. you will see some railroad tracks and as far should go you will look to your left. you will see the school. i remember pulling down the very first day i went down the wrong side of the street. i got all the way to the end and i looked around at the school. all i could see were 12 boxcars boxcars -- boxcars scattered in the dirt and i saw this big huge shed and i said to myself i'm on the right street. i panicked a bit and i turned a corner and noticed an 11-year-old boy jumping out of one of boxcars and he ran right in front of my parked car. he began to tie shoelaces away rolled the window down to say hey buddy and looking for a school grade he just glared at me with the most amazing hatred and i panicked and i started to turn to leave. within truly seconds one of the dads was leaning in my window on the passenger side trying to get my attention. that was my first exposure to what i was going to be doing. jim was the death and he was leaning in the window in knocking on the window and get this big long beard. he kept leaning into the window in knocking and i looked and he had a big chunk of scrambled eggs on his beard and it kept touching the window. i screamed. i was absolute terrified. he ran around to my side of the door and said hey. i panicked and i said, no. then with a pretty smile and the funniest teeth he said are you the new teacher? and i wanted to lie so badly and say no. he pointed to the shed and he said this is your school and he said can i help you? so i parked the car and i went to get out and i handed him my briefcase, my leather purse and my wire basket because my girlfriend said all good teachers carry a wire basket. i stood up and mentors to tell you this but i had my navy blue suit on in my navy blue tights and my navy blue pumps. i got out and he just looked at me and he said who hired you? it was just this proper little 23-year-old schoolteacher who had no knowledge really of where where -- what i was getting into. he said can i teach you how to work with the people who live on the streets? we became best friends. when i walked into the classroom that first day i had 15 chairs, 15 desks and 37 students. and i panicked. i looked around and i said what will the duke? kids brought my nightstand to returned garbage cans over and we put clip towards on it and the kids knelt up to those. and we made do. we may do and the first day was very scary but i remember walking out of there that night after lying my head down on my desk crying and crying thinking, i've loved these kids. i'm all ready falling in love with them. i stayed for 11 years because of it. the children at the shelter were fascinating. they were strong-willed. they were incredibly empathetic. they were so hungry to be children. they were tired of worrying about adult worries. when i would come to work in the morning they would all be piled up in my door well waiting for me to unlock that door or they would run to the car when i pull up and they'd say she's here, she's here. it wasn't because i was a remarkable teacher. it was because i was here and i was the representation of childhood. and they loved it. and the parents loved it which i thought was even more beautiful. my whole philosophy was if i can teach mom and dad the value of education and they can come and and they can see that this feels good then when they leave me they will set the alarm to get their child up. they will go in and get their child up. they will help them and support them out the door to get on the school bus. for the most part i found them, the streets to be behind because of the transient nature of their education. they always worried me that in the earlier parts of my career they came with no records so i had to devise testing to figure out what they understood what they didn't so we could start from there. i wished so badly that today i would be teaching now because today's plan especially in utah, the districts follow -- each school follows the same content so i would have known where these kids were and what ages they were and where they needed to go. i found third, fourth and fifth-graders who couldn't read. it had nothing to do with their intellectual abilities. it had nothing to do with learning disabilities and clearly to some degree now in some kids i know that it was because of the transient nature because i taught some fifth-graders to read in six weeks. their parents were amazed. if they would just stay stable for six weeks to 90 days their child could learn to read. see in your seat please. sit down in your chair. thank you. my name is ms. bass and i'm your new teacher. >> you already said that reid. >> there were quite a few that stood out that one young man and i won't tell you his real name but in my book i call him zachary. he's the same boy that knelt in front of my car that day. he was powerful. i think he was 11 turning 12 and he commanded everybody in the room. it fascinated me because he wasn't a real big kid that he would say things like i think it was my first day of teaching and i was showing them the painting and i think it was the second day of teaching because i was trying to figure out what i was going to present to them. i'm in the middle of showing them the ballerinas and he stands up and says recess and the whole class leaves. i'm marching him out at recess thinking how incredible. you literally could lead anybody. i was watching him walk over to moms and dads who had babies and had a cigarette in the with ring the babies to me. i would watch him day after day feed toddlers during his recess time or help them. he was a little bit weird to me. every day he would give me this look of you don't belong here. he would give me a a little shove and say go home proper. we don't need you. i have had it with him one day and i grabbed him by the arm and i said get in my room. we are talking. he sat in my desk and he put his cowboy boots up on my table and i said what is it? why don't you like my? he said ms. stacey i really don't like women. i said well zach i came that way. you've got to help me. so he talked to me a little bit further and he told me a very tragic story that his mama had left him with his daddy and had kept the rest of the kids. he was devastated. he said every time i attach to a woman who attends my building or anybody who cares about me i always have to leave her because dad tonight with move from city to city. he said i'm not going to trust you. but he said i can see your good teachers would just be a teacher and don't try to be my friend. i was so disturbed by that. i went home that night and i said to my husband what do i owe this kid? he's powerful, he's smart, he's good-looking. what should i leave him with? what should i focus on? my little daughter looked up at me and she said you be the lady that never leaves him. so i really stayed for him. i stayed knowing that kids repeat the cycle with their families. i stayed until they graduated from high school and he came back as a young man and volunteered at my school. he came and lived with us for a little while in my home and talk my boys how to play basketball. he turned out to be a really tender young man and really all they wanted was consistency. he wanted somebody to follow through. i had written the first book and i was getting asked so many times to come and train teachers in common talk to teachers and after counseling with my family and my district and my superintendent and this district superintendent they said please do what you have to do and you can reach more teachers and more kids by going to speak, do it. i also wanted more kids. i didn't want to drag any more children through my career. but i will tell you what was devastating to my own children when i left. they said mom what will the kids do? please don't leave the kids. but it was a smart choice. 11 years was a long time. i learned things that i will never learn in the regular public setting. and it was 11 great years of my life. and i had a new plan clearly to follow after that. the day after the movie aired on cbs i had my laptop up on my kitchen counter and i got messaged. i hit the message button and i was mae king breakfast for my kids. i read his message and the tears just flowed. my youngest son said mom, what's the matter? what's the matter? i said i had this beautiful little girl in my classroom and she's now a mama and she just wrote to me. she said ms. stacey i saw the movie last night. i was one of your students. and i want you to know that the movie told the truth. i pause for a minute because i wanted to reread what the truth was. she said you did always tell us how smart you were and that we could be somebody. and she said i am starting my degree in field biology and i want you to know that you did convince me that i was smart. and you know you couldn't pay me enough to duplicate those emotions and that knowledge that that's what i did for that kid. and that they have the ability to read anything. i think my biggest worry for the public's understanding of what poverty is is that they think these people just won't work and that's not true. we have a lot of single moms. we have a lot of single dads who couldn't afford daycare, who couldn't afford transportation who clearly couldn't afford housing and raising children. simple things that make sense to you once you invest the time to understand them. i think there's a disconnect between those who have and those who don't because we don't take the time to understand. we don't take time to rub shoulders with people who are not like us and that's a shame. we all have so much to offer. we need each other and homeless families meet families who have stability in housing and those of us who have housing and seem to have life pretty darn good, we need those opportunities to serve and to reach out. it makes us better people. and they are so grateful for what we are doing. >> no from booktv's trip to salt lake city utah the collection of pulitzer prize-winning author wallace stegner from utah's j. willard library. >> is there such a thing as being conditioned by climate in photography and i think there is it's the conditioning that has the forms, the light into colors that i respond to in nature and in art. if there is a western speech i speak it. if there's a western character or core personality i am some variant of it. if there is a western culture and the small anthropological sense i have not escaped it. it has to have shape. i may have contributed to it in minor ways. culture is apparent in to which each of us brings a stone. >> wallace stegner lived in the 20th century and experience most of the 20th century. his writings depict that as you move from the earliest of his publications through the last of his publications prior to his death in 1993. we are absolutely thrilled to have the papers of wallace stegner. we of course think of them as somewhat of a native son to salt lake as he thought of himself. he saw this as his residence of note and the clutch is a very sizable collection. it's very important. it has a good deal of materials. we have some of it here with us to look at. it details his career and his writings, his correspondence and even some of his diaries from early on. certainly his salt lake time and is university of utah time. you don't find a lot that shows his writing. he was a typewriter guy. he would be a computer guy, a laptop guy if he were in the corpus writing today. here we have a notebook where it's basically a diary note. he is traveling. he is traveling in the west. he is traveling in nevada and has been it appears to be a has-been into the mexico arizona and spent time in navajo country. if you look at his body of work and even the titles of the term place comes in a lot. and so this idea of place and what place means and what characteristics does it hold it seems to me are enormously important to him. and he was looking at a west that was changing dramatic way from the time of his youth, which basically he is born in the era of the horse still and i think he was looking for ways to maintain the concept of the west that was part of his earlier life. we have one of wallace stegner's typewriters. i think we have three. i don't know how many he wore out in his career but he almost never wrote first drafts. he typed which is a little challenging to the archivist because it's hard to figure out okay so which was the originating draft of this work and which was the submitted draft? you can kind of get their. he does a lot of his editing by pencil so you can distinguish that. it's clear he was a very good self editor. you could edit his own work and was rigorous about it and appears to me he did it with a good deal of patience. for instance this is how you would see his manuscript developing as he writes and you can see where he has crossed out pieces. he has edited. i believe this is a recapitulation and these are galleys and examples of a galley. that would be the first of recapitulation. one of my favorite works partly because i am a historian is the work that he did entitled beyond the 100th meridian. beyond the hundredth mayor etienne is about john wesley powell and what he calls the second opening of the west. in not work he lays out the career of john wesley powell as explorer of the west and what he accomplishes and the importance of john wesley powell is that he is saying that the on the 100th meridian and west the scarcity of water will define how those parts of the west are developed. this book is about that and about the way in which john wesley powell gets to that conclusion. it's wonderful work and you write so well. it's just a splendid read. it is a work of history. some people refer to stegner as a historian. i have heard contemporary historians today that don't quite see stegner as a historian but they see him as a writer in the history of the west. they will make that distinction. nevertheless the book is still in print and we still sell a number of titles and earnings a very important work and they biography of the west. of course the major title and novel that wallace stegner is known for its angle of repose. it was published in 1971. it wins a pulitzer prize in 1972 and it elevates him to very much so the national status. he always was angry, bitter, frustrated if you will about the fact that writers of the west and from the west have a very hard time being recognized as part of the american literary group. he felt that. angle of repose is a major achievement was his pulitzer prize award. in trying to counter that. and get recognition for western writers by the nation. this is the official letter informing him that he won the pulitzer prize. it's dated may 1, 1972. very brief. i take pleasure in confirming the award of the 1972 pulitzer prize for fiction to you for angle of repose. in accordance with this section today by colombia's -- the columbia university trustees i enclose a university check for $1000. congratulations. as we move further away from that period of wally being active as a writer i think he is probably less red, less well understood as a force on and about the west. in a lot of ways i think he is still a very viable and articulate interpreter of the west. even though the west has changed a lot since his passing but i think there's a lot to be taken from his writings that educate you on the west about who we are and what we are in the west. from booktv's recent trip to salt lake city utah learn about peabody award winner scott carrier's in his latest book "prisoner of zion." >> "prisoner of zion" is a collection of nonfiction stories that i wrote somewhat wrapped around the theme of trying to figure out what the proper response to terrorism is or should be because i believed right from the beginning that if we struck back militarily we would only make things worse. i was pretty sure of that from growing up in salt lake city among the mormons and reading their history and being familiar with the history of basically the persecution of mormons and how they responded to that. .. book tv. >> i would say leave them alone. leave them severely alone, which is the same advice that captain dennis and gave the secretary of war when he came to sell lake city in 181551. the core of topographical engineers came out here in salt lake city for a year. mapping the great salt lake, which has never been mapped to into the year-old happen, to