AS WE SETTLE INTO FALL...
Despite a global pandemic, a turbulent election season, and a lot of uncertainty, life in the book world goes on. Our newest release is The LDS Gospel Topics Series: A Scholarly Engagement, edited by Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, with a foreword by Armand L. Mauss. The book features thirteen essays reviewing the Gospel Topics essays written and published online under the auspices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints between 2013 and 2015. "An excellent collection providing readers with a scholarly assessment of the Gospel Topics essays," writes retired BYU professor Brian Hauglid. "This book acknowledges the positive and points out where greater transparency would have been more helpful to the church in the long run. The introduction itself is worth its weight in gold." Paperback, $19.95; ebook, $9.99. Click below for more information.
Before year's end we will release two more titles: The Complete Ezra Taft Benson FBI File on October 13 as an ebook for only $4.99. Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, author of the bestselling novel Dancing Naked, is back, this time with The Contortionists. Look for that in November. Paperback, $16.95. An ebook will also be available.
And then there is 2021. Stay tuned.
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We Have a Gift For You!
Signature Books marks its fortieth anniversary in 2021. To celebrate we have created a beautifully designed 2021 commemorative calendar with most of the dates filled in with significant events in LDS church history. You can get this free calendar at one of the bookstores listed below, or email devery@signaturebooks.com with your name and address and we will send one to you. Supply is low, so respond right away!
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YouTube Update
As of today we have thirteen videos featuring several of our authors on our YouTube channel. Click here to have a look. The videos discuss history, poetry, fiction, and personal essay. Get a feel for what we publish and please subscribe to the channel! New videos will be added in October.
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New Review
One of our titles published over the summer is Michael Hicks's Spencer Kimball's Record Collection. Check out the great review by Julie Nichols at Dawning of a Brighter Day. Click below to purchase the book as well.
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Michael Hicks
paperback: $17.95
ebook: $9.99
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Edited by Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst
Afterword by Armand L. Mauss
paperback: $19.95
ebook: $9.99
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BOOKSTORE SPOTLIGHT:
Ken Sanders Rare Books
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 Ken Sanders Rare Books has been a cultural icon in Salt Lake City since 1997. Ken, a book collector since his childhood, had years in the business before opening his shop downtown. In the 1970s, he co-founded Cosmic Aeroplane. The shop offers a variety of new, but mainly used and rare books, along with other collectible items such as maps, photographs, and a large selection of postcards. Ken's specialty centers on Mormons and the West.
The store is open to customers, but due to COVID-19, staff is letting in only six customers at a time. You may call and place an order, which you can either pick up inside or at curbside. You may also choose to have it shipped to you. Standard shipping charges are free on orders over $50.
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 Store hours are Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m., and Sundays, noon until 5:00 p.m.
To get a taste of the offerings at Ken Sanders Rare Books, check out his website here. You can call the shop at 801-521-3819.
Independent bookstores, as vital as they are to communities, often struggle, and the current pandemic has seriously affected profits for all. Ken's sales are down around 50 percent of what they were before COVID. In July he began a GoFundMe campaign to save his store, and set a goal to raise $250,000. To date, donations have brought in just under half of that. If you want to help keep him going, click here to make a donation.
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Why did you write this book?
I have so many answers, some jokey ("money"), others dubious ("fame"), and most along the lines of "I'm not sure." But I think two things were at work for me. One is that I feel a constant duty to assert the role of music as a revelator of broader Mormon history. Partly, that's my training in music rearing its slightly uppity head. But it's also borne out by responses to earlier work I've done. My book on the Tabernacle Choir, for example, elicited remarks like, "This is about so much more in Mormonism than a choir." Another reason for writing this book is more personal: I felt like there was one final book I needed to write in what I now regard as a trilogy on Mormon music. But this final book needed to be an anthology of things I felt were (a) important essays first published elsewhere and recently updated, alongside (b) new essays that merited reading. I suppose that in some ways I was writing a festschrift to myself, by myself, on the eve of my retirement as a BYU professor. That self-festschrift included the final chapter, a memoir on the rocky path of writing Mormon musical history books at all.
What myths do you hope your book will dispel or issues it can help readers understand better?
Small ones abound: how and why "Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief" has been unjustly elevated in Mormon lore; how and why "Amazing Grace" was in and then out of Mormon hymnbooks; how Mormons dealt with African-American imagery in both of the previous centuries, etc. But one large myth the book means to dispel may be that music is about sound more than about human experience and human relationships. I think the sociality of music pervades all my writing about American musical history, Mormon or not.
What is the most interesting discovery you made while researching and writing your book?
There are really two, both chronicled in new essays. One is the history behind a dazzling record album package put out by Columbia Records in 1965 called The Mormon Pioneers. The other discovery is the history of a very strange, exotic Mormon musical pageant, People of the Book, first produced in 1967 and intended to rival the Hill Cumorah Pageant, while targeting Native American audiences as prospective converts. I love these new essays for the windows they opened up in my own mind, pop culture archivist that I am at heart. How much they'll tantalize readers, I'm not sure. But they certainly fortify the structure of this new anthology. And I'm always about having a book be a scenic landscape you explore with the author as tour guide.
So, what's your next project?
As one would expect, I have lots of small ones, especially during this shelter-in-place season of the world. The big one, though, is my religious memoir entitled "Wineskin: Freakin' Jesus in the '70s." It takes me from Baptist boy to non-denominational "Jesus Freak" to tongues-speaking Pentecostal firebrand to orthodox Mormon convert to polygamist cultist to artsy BYU student—all before 1980. It's a difficult book to write, but a rewarding archeological dig.
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