There Shall Be a Record Kept

An interview with the owner of Benchmark Books

Image: Chris Bench, left, and colleague Bryan Buchanan at a recent conference

Recently, the Utah Monthly had the chance to chat with Chris Bench about his store in Salt Lake City, which sells new, used, and rare LDS books. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So to begin with, could you talk about the history of Benchmark Books? 

My father, Curt Bench, started Benchmark Books thirty-five years ago. Prior to starting Benchmark Books, he worked for Deseret Book. And then in the early eighties, he asked Deseret Book how they would feel about him bringing in some used and rare books, Mormon-related and Western Americana, and they agreed to that. And so they actually formed a rare book department within Deseret Book, and he became the manager of that department. 

So in the 80s, there were a couple of big things that happened, most notably the Mark Hoffman episode. Mark was actually a close colleague and friend of my father’s, and they did a fair amount of business together. Luckily, because he represented Deseret Book and was not a private collector, my father was not a direct financial victim of Mark Hoffman’s forgeries. And so, Deseret Book decided to keep business going after that whole thing happened. But then right after that, unfortunately, my father’s assistant manager was found to have embezzled a large amount of money and product out of their department for which he only received probation and a fine (of which very little was ever paid). Deseret Book, at that point, made the decision to get out of the used and rare book business because it was something that they couldn’t control, there were too many variables for their comfort.

And so, at that point, he had the choice of continuing to be a manager of a regular bookstore and taking a pay cut or opening his own store at that time. Deseret Book was very helpful in allowing him to buy inventory from them and take over the customer lists and so on. And so, in late 1987, he opened Benchmark Books. 

So you said when your father started the rare books division at Deseret Book, that was something that was in the air, there was a market for that. Could you talk about the history of rare book collecting in the Church?

There’s been an interest in collecting these things for a long, long time. But certainly in the 70s and 80s, for whatever reason, I think a lot of people just decided that was something they were interested in and started collecting things, some common things, some more expensive things. And there really was quite a large group of individuals that got into collecting in that period of time. And a lot of those individuals collected all sorts of stuff. They would buy early editions of the LDS scriptures or foreign-language things. Documents and Mormon currency became very collectible as did books by particular authors that became large parts of these collections. There just happened to be quite a bit of interest in Mormon history. And, unfortunately, Mark Hoffman created some of that interest and inserted items that he found into the storyline and really generated quite a bit of interest. There were a number of collectors that nowadays are in their twilight years of collecting that were really involved back then. Now that has changed extensively. Nowadays there are very few collectors, in my experience, who are buying extensively. Most people now, especially in the generation of, say, forty years and younger, they only want very specific things instead of having a lot of everything. Some of them want certain authors or certain bindings or they want signatures or something like that. Whereas not that long ago, there were twenty or thirty different collectors that wanted all of that stuff and would do the best they could to buy and build a collection. But that’s changed a lot. Every once in a while, a person will come along and want to build a collection of early scriptures for example or books signed or inscribed by the author especially if he was a general authority. My father was a collector of books bound in leather and there are several current collectors that are building similar collections. Another collection that my dad really built was that of LDS books in dust jackets. He focused on books published prior to 1950 and currently has over 900 titles. We have encouraged others to build similar collections and there is now a plan in place to create a database of all known LDS books of this time period that had dust-jacket covers.

How did you personally get into the business? Was it just through observing your father and following in his footsteps? 

My dad would try to find ways to get us to work for him at a young age so that he could pay us and then we could use that money towards our education. And so I had a personal interest. I kind of grew up with it. I started working summers when I was twelve, something like that. I couldn’t really work much during the school year, but every summer I’d work there. And then I went off to college with the idea that I would most likely come back and work for Benchmark Books, and that progressed as I went through my college experience. And when I graduated at the end of 2000, that’s when I started working here, and then very quickly became a buyer and then the manager of the store and worked hand-in-hand with my father up until his death in 2021.

What does your day-to-day look like? Is it a mix of buying books from people and working the store? 

I would say that we probably field at least three or four calls or emails a day with people saying they have books to sell. So they’re contacting us and we’re asking them to identify what they have and then going through it and picking out things that we feel like we can use. We’ve always been an active buying company. Ever since I’ve worked here, we’ve never stopped buying, while others have done that in the past. Part of that is good and bad. I’ve acquired a ton of inventory, but at the same time that’s bad, because I have a ton of inventory that needs to be processed. My day-to-day is constantly pricing and posting books online that we have for sale or in our inventory system. It’s helping customers, it’s handling emails, going through people’s book collections that they’ve sent us pictures of and indicating which ones we want to buy. Probably the most time is spent finding buyers for specific things and trying to work deals out to pay the bills.

What role do you see your store playing in the LDS intellectual community? 

One thing that my father felt was very important, and I share his belief, is that we’re accepting of people all along the spectrum of Mormonism. We are a gathering place. We have a lot of people that are just average individuals who are just looking for a random book but probably more that are repeat customers that want to read the latest new book or are building their collection and wonder if we have anything new that fits into it.. Then a lot of our customers are Mormon fundamentalists that belong to various fundamentalist groups, and they can find the kinds of books they are interested in at our store. We sell them a lot of books and we know they are reading them voraciously. We have a lot of customers that are former Mormons. We have a lot of those that are parts of different branches of Mormonism. We get customers from the Community of Christ, from the Strangites, from various other small schisms that have come through. We participate in various conferences that focus on the history and the involvement of those other groups, and so they naturally come to us as a source for books. And we have a lot of people that have left organized religion but are still interested in the history of it. We have a number of those that have never been Mormon that are interested in books of this church and the history of it and so on. We try to accept everybody and allow our store to be a place where people can discuss things that they may not elsewhere. 

And we try to stay on top of the topics of the day, whether it’s books in particular or some of the topics that are going out around us that end up in conversations or that people write books about or articles about or that sort of thing. I think a big part of it is that we have a very knowledgeable staff. We can usually answer a lot of questions, especially history-related, and come up with some good book recommendations that cover a lot of topics. Whereas I think that’s just not the focus of a lot of the other LDS bookstores. Especially here in the Wasatch Front, they’re there just to help people with a particular book or whatnot, but they probably haven’t read it, they probably don’t know a lot about those topics.

What’s an aspect of your job that our readers might find unexpected?

My father tells a story of a guy that he dealt with back in his Deseret Book days. In the Pearl of Great Price you have the facsimiles, one’s the Hypocephalus, and this individual told us that he could see things in that Hypocephalus, like messages that he would receive, but that every copy was different. So he would collect multiple copies of the same book because when he would look at it, he could see different messages in that Hypocephalus. So that’s just one example of an extreme thing. And so this guy ended up having multiple copies of the Pearl of Great Price because every time he read them, he would receive some kind of a different message in that facsimile. 

So that’s kind of a wild example, but over the years we’ve dealt with, and in certain cases known quite well, a lot of these individuals who are known to some degree because they have started their own groups of people and believers. In some cases, they’ve written books that, you know, are teaching certain doctrines or ideas that may be outside the mainstream. But because we do focus a lot on history, they feel welcome in our space, which we want them to. 

But in some cases, some of those individuals have turned out to be scandalous in a lot of ways or done things that we certainly don’t approve of. But in their early days, they were curious about a doctrine or practice or whatever it was. And so they would buy books to study up on those things. In some cases, they would publish those books or publish a book on a particular topic to help people understand them better. And so it’s a fascinating business in that way. And absolutely, one of the main reasons I’ve stayed with it was that, you know, you never know who’s going to walk through the door. It could be a very famous author, the leader of a fundamentalist group, it could be a general authority. You just never know what it will be. You just work with a lot of different people, and that’s what I love about it. So the LDS book world draws people of all types, but here at Benchmark Books we definitely value all those people. They all make up what we do in our business. And so it’s unexpected and sometimes hard to deal with. But overall, that makeup is important to us. 

Pivoting a little bit to the rare book side of your business, is there a recent acquisition you could talk about that was particularly exciting? 

Yeah, I mean, we’ve had a really great year. I think this year I’ve sold six different copies of the 1830 Book of Mormon, which is a really big year for us. A lot of years you only see one of those a year, or less sometimes. I sold a package of early editions of the Book of Mormon that included the first 1830, the 1837 in Kirtland (the second edition), the 1840 in Nauvoo, as well as the 1842 Nauvoo, which is very rare, and then an 1841, which is the first European edition of the Book of Mormon. There was also a first edition Pearl of Great Price (1851) in that collection in the original wrappers. And an 1844 Doctrine and Covenants, which is the second edition, produced in Nauvoo, and then a set of The Times and Seasons published in Nauvoo. So all of those items were part of one deal that was the largest of my personal career. It was really fun to see all of those things together at once. The copy of the 1830 Book of Mormon that was a part of that had actually belonged to a former president of the church, so it was a significant piece by itself. 

Last year this individual came in with a box of books and he said to one of my employees, “There’s probably nothing here you’d be interested in, maybe it’s just kindling for the fireplace.” Well we went through this very carefully and there was a book in there that was missing the front cover. It was just a little small book—we’re talking really small— and it happened to be a hymn book from 1840, which is extremely rare and was nearly a six-figure book. And so I get some fun surprises sometimes out of places that you just never expect. The original hymn book was published in 1835 by Emma Smith, and then not long after that, they sold out, so they needed to make a new edition. This one was published in 1840. So it’s the second edition of the general songbook. So that was a really fun acquisition that was very unexpected. 

Thinking back over the years, we’ve had a number of books that belong to certain individuals; for example, a number of years ago we had quite a few books that belonged to Spencer W. Kimball, and it was fun to see what he had on his shelf, what he had read, what he’d marked up, you know, stuff like that. We’ve had a number of documents that have come down through the line of the presiding patriarchs, so Eldred G. Smith was the last presiding patriarch of the church, and these were items that were in his family line. So we had stuff that went all the way back to Hyrum Smith. So those are the kinds of things that really make this job fun because you get to see some absolutely amazing things. 

Those are the kinds of things in this business that really do pay the bills. It’s the rare stuff that we can sell, even if in some cases that requires spending a lot of time working out the details. But that’s really what makes us successful and keeps us going. The new books and used and out-of-print books—which usually range between five and maybe one hundred dollars—are great items, and we like getting good books and at whatever level it is, but this business definitely does depend on the sale of rare books or documents or photographs or artifacts. I’m just one store, we have about four thousand square feet, but it’s expensive to run a business. Absolutely. And so it requires a pretty steady stream of those little deals to put together. And so the big deals, when they happen every once in a while, really help keep us going long term.

Are there any books coming out later this year that you’re looking forward to or excited about in the field of Mormon studies?

I was just talking today with the marketing representative from Signature Books that we work with a lot. They have a book coming out that’s actually in transit from the warehouse right now that’s a treatment of the September Six excommunications. And so there’s an author that has interviewed those individuals and then did significant research to do a retrospective thirty years later, where those people are and everything. Also from Signature Books, Michael Quinn’s memoirs are supposed to be published at the end of the year, so that’s probably the next biggest release that’ll be out. Also, a short biography of John A. Widtsoe by Tom Alexander, who was a professor at BYU for many years and a long-time historian, writing into his twilight years, just like Richard Bushman and several others.

I also just wanted to say that my wife, Wendi, has been an amazing support to me. Especially the last couple of years, but across my entire career here, and I really owe a lot to her in allowing me to do this business that I find fun that she doesn’t always. She’s not the same person that I am, which is great. We make a great team, but I wanted to say that having a spouse at home, if that’s their choice, they become part of the business in lots of ways. And I know that my mother was that for my father and my wife is that to me. And the spouses of all the employees that have worked here over the years have also been a part of those things. Because, you know, what we do all day long affects our lives. And anyway, I just feel it’s important that I express that.