No, Sanders has full-fledged bibliomania. The bookstore owner exhibits all the classic symptoms of the disorder listed by Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia: buying "multiple copies of the same book and [the] accumulation of books beyond possible capacity of use."

Though the Salt Lake City store he owns - Ken Sanders Rare Books at 268 S. 200 East - specializes in rare books, its entire back wall is stocked with paperbacks.

"We're never going to sell enough three-dollar paperbacks to pay the rent," Sanders says. "And it's probably a waste of space, but there's enough of the old, used bookman in me that if someone comes in here and wants Moby Dick or [a book by novelist] Barbara Kingsolver, it irritates me if I don't have it."

Sanders even lets on that he has trouble letting some books go. At his store's annual sale each July, for instance, he sometimes stops his employees from putting certain books out on the sale table.

"I say, 'Don't you touch those Steinbecks,' " he says. "There are some authors, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe - I don't care how many copies I have here, I'm just going to keep buying them until I die. If other people are too foolish or close-minded or un-visionary to see and buy great literature, that's their problem, not mine."

Sanders store is pure bliss for bibliophiles, who delight in its rare Utah and Mormon books, concert posters and antique maps. The owner also specializes in certain authors, including Wallace Stegner, B. Traven, and Edward Abbey. Sanders says a highlight of being in the book business over the years was interacting with such literary lions as Stegner, Wendell Barry, Chuck Bowden and especially Abbey, who became his close friend.

An avid reader as a child, Sanders has logged more than 30 years in the book-collecting business. He got his start in the book trade "wheeling and dealing" comic books.

He grew up in South Salt Lake and remembers his mom letting him ride the bus downtown as a 12-year-old to frequent the junk stores along West Temple.

"It was desolation alley, with gypsy juke joints and fortune-telling places and seedy hotels and junk shops," Sanders recalls. "I would haunt them, searching for comic books."

At 14, he worked at Central Book Exchange in Sugar House. His pay was supposedly $1 an hour, but the store didn't take in enough to even pay that much.

"So I gleefully took it out in trade," he says.

There were other bonuses. Besides paperback books, the store trafficked in Playboy magazine issues.

"It was years before I learned that really good authors wrote articles that were published in Playboy," he says. "It was the reverse of the usual 'I just buy it for the articles.' Who knew there were words in there?"

Sanders' love affair with the written word has taken him into nearly every area of book publishing, trading and selling.

He was a co-owner of the now-closed Cosmic Aeroplane bookstore, owns his own publishing company, Dream Garden Press, and his current store is coming up on its 10-year anniversary.

He describes himself as an undisciplined writer with "a great talent for beginning projects."

"I've always had my hand in books, one way or another," he says. "I don't think I'm going to be a lumberjack or hand-making paper. But I've printed them, published them, sold them - practically eaten them. In some ways I have, I guess. The money I lost in publishing qualifies as eating them."

More than just a place to find an old map, diary or literary classic, Sanders' store doubles as a "secular gathering place for the community." Sanders promotes environmental causes, holds poetry events, small film screenings and political protests.

"When we had our first Bush bash last fall, I think two people resigned from our mailing list," he says. "But I'm not going to pretend to be something other than what I am in order to sell books in this community."

That's in the past. Sanders still struggles to divine his future.

He remembers Ed Abbey asking him about his plans years ago.

"We were sitting there on a beautiful, glorious fall day on a river trip, and Ed says, 'Ken, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?' You know, Ed, you've been dead 17 years and I still don't have a clue."