In this Cornucopia column, Curt Bench, owner and operator of Benchmark Books (www.benchmarkbooks.com), a specialty bookstore in Salt Lake City that focuses primarily on used and rare Mormon books, will tell stories—both humorous and appalling—from his 35-plus years in the LDS book business.

In the used and rare book business, we see books in about every condition you can imagine, from looking like they’ve been used mainly as doorstops or coasters for coffee cups (and by “coffee,” we LDS booksellers assume Postum, of course!) to seeming as pristine as the day they were bound at the press. Some books have obviously been read in the bathtub (a close friend of mine continues this barbaric habit despite my vehement protests) or at the kitchen table. Some book owners freely underline, highlight, and annotate their books while others would die before they’d put a mark in their precious possessions.

I thought I had just about seen it all until I bought an 1876 copy of the bound Skandinaviens Stjerne (Scandinavian Star), the official publication for the Scandinavian Mission in the nineteenth century. About a third of the way up from the bottom, dead center in the book’s back strip, is a neat little hole—courtesy of a small-caliber bullet, which penetrated well into the book. Part of the fun of finding a book in this condition is speculating on how the bullet found its way into this bound mission newspaper—in the spine, no less. Was the shooter a disgruntled Oslo missionary who had had one too many doors slammed in his face? Was this volume the victim of random target-practicing at a dump? Or perhaps something more faith-promoting had happened: A missionary under attack by a violent, anti-Mormon mob clutches the book to his breast and bravely faces his armed assailants. An attacker fires, and the bullet enters the book, stopping just inches from the missionary’s heart. The mob gasps in awe at the miracle and instantly converts.

Some years ago, we bought a used paperback copy of The Measure of Our Hearts by Marvin J. Ashton, priced it, and put it out for sale. The customer who bought it soon returned the book, saying that it wasn’t the book he’d expected. Puzzled, we opened the cover and looked at the title page which read: You Don’t Have to be Gay: Hope and Freedom for Males Struggling with Homosexuality or for Those Who Know of Someone Who Is. A previous owner had taken the book block of the Ashton title out of the cover and glued the block of this book in its place. I suspect that the previous owner perpetrated this radical rebinding so he could read about his same-sex attraction without anyone around him knowing about it. On two levels, this story confirms the wisdom never to judge a book by its cover!