Special Collections: Where the old stuff never gets old – Deseret News
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Special Collections: Where the old stuff never gets old
Librarian Cherie Willis shows off the Main Library’s historical treasures
Published: Aug 31, 2025, 8:00 p.m. MDT
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Librarian Cherie Willis shows “The Birds of America” by John James Audubon, printed in 1860, at The City Library in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025. It is the library’s most valuable piece. Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
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By Lee Benson
Lee has written slice-of-life columns for the Deseret News since 1998.
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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.”
A list of those with scarlet fever, smallpox and diphtheria is pictured in the special collections area of The City Library in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025. If someone on the list had library materials, the books were burned upon their return in an attempt to stop the spread of disease. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
Purchase ImageNext, 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 because 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 contended Joseph Smith used as the basis for the Book of Mormon.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Special Collections: Where the old stuff never gets old – Deseret News
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