Weller's looks to carry on

Somewhere in the three quarters of a million volumes that line the shelves of his massive, three-level downtown bookstore, there must be a book that tells about a bookseller who, thoroughly battered by tough economics and a world in technological flux, reinvents himself and helps save the industry.

No, wait, that story is yet to be written.

One of the cruel facts of life is that the facts of life can be cruel. Take the business of selling books. A simple, straightforward enterprise, right? You buy a book from a publisher and then you turn around and sell it to a customer who wants to read it. The profit keeps you in business and keeps the world better informed and entertained.

But throw into the equation something called the Internet, where customers can bypass your store completely and purchase their books online, where the price is usually cheaper and they never have to brave a snowstorm to get them because they're delivered right to their door.

Also throw in billions of pages of reading material freely available day and night on the Internet, everything from encyclopedias to maps to novels to (alas) newspapers.

Now add in new devices that let people download books and other reading material electronically, eliminating paper entirely.

And finally, finish with a bookselling industry full of Barnes & Noble and other corporate behemoths that have overbuilt the past few years to the point that you'd swear they couldn't spell Internet if you spotted them the i.

Welcome to Tony Weller's world.

Tony owns the famous bookstore on Main Street in downtown Salt Lake City. It was once his father's bookstore and bears his father's name — Sam Weller's Zions Bookstore.

Before that it was his grandfather's bookstore. Gus Weller opened the business in 1929 as an antique shop that also sold a few books in a little rented space on 100 South. The antiques soon gave way to all books all the time, which gave way to a succession of moves to better and bigger places, culminating in the present Main Street location where the thriving business landed in 1961, the year before Tony, the only son of Sam and Lila Weller, was born.

The bookstore only took up about 8,000 square feet back in '61, but people kept buying Sam Weller's books and Sam Weller's kept expanding, sprawling into the spaces that were once night clubs in the basement and business offices upstairs.

Today Sam Weller's is 37,000 square feet and three stories of bookstore awesomeness, with creaky floorboards, well-worn carpet, nooks, crannies, reading chairs, a place to buy coffee, muslin-wearing sales clerks, rare books tucked away in a sanctuary and places where Stegner and L'Amour once sat and signed their books.

All that and more reflect 80 years of progress.