July Events at Weller Book Works

EVENTS | JULY 2024

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July Events

Visit our events calendar for up-to-date information on all of our events.

7/2 TUESDAY 10AM

Breakfast Club at Moka Meets Boba

Join us for a literary Kaffeeklatsch! Books, coffee, snacks, and chats every Tuesday morning at Moka Meets Boba, located directly across from our first floor entrance.

HELD WEEKLY ON TUESDAYS

7/4 THURSDAY — We will close at 6PM in honor of Independence Day

7/9 TUESDAY 10AM — Breakfast Club at Moka Meets Boba

7/10 WEDNESDAY 6PM

Lit Knit

Join Catherine and the crafters of WBW in the store for casual, bookish chinwags. All crafts and crafters welcome.

Lit Knit is held every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of each month.

7/13 SATURDAY 2PM - 3PM

Park City resident Dick Gary has lived quite a life. In fact, he's lived several lives. As you may tell from the title, this book is not by the book, but it has a definite arc. Dick, our hero, had given little thought to his future and it shows. The book opens with him getting kicked out of college, having a rollicking two-year career in the military in Germany, finding a future in radio, operating a car and motorcycle racetrack, working closely with Ed Koch in his successful fun for congress, moving to LA and starting a business that became the premier ad agency for the music business.

He also has an interest in politics and art and has raised a bunch of money in those fields for good causes.

He moved from New York to Malibu and now lives in Park City where he can satisfy his skiing mania.

His has been an interesting, highly diversified life and he tells the story in a highly humorous and self-deprecating way.

7/16 TUESDAY 10AM — Breakfast Club at Moka Meets Boba

7/23 TUESDAY 10AM — Breakfast Club at Moka Meets Boba

7/24 WEDNESDAY — In honor of Pioneer Day, we will close at 6PM.

7/26 FRIDAY 6:30PM

Book-lovers and collectors meet in the Rare Book department for the Collectors' Book Salon every final Friday of each month, January through October. We begin casually around 6:30 PM with socializing, light refreshments, and shared bibliolust. At 7:15, an invited bibliophile leads the Collectors' Chat about a topic of her or his particular knowledge and passion. Each Salon, Tony offers a special deal on rare books that is only for Salon guests.

I met Brent Gundlah in our rare book department, where he browsed frequently, widely and thoughtfully. After numerous purchases and discussions of books, I befriended Brent and learned that he is the minister in the United Church of Christ here in the Salt Lake Valley. He earned BA and MA degrees in English Literature and previously worked in finance for 25 years. He dreamed of being a literary scholar before coming to his senses.

Brent and Valerie, his wife, moved to Utah in 2021 during the throes of the pandemic. He had not visited this part of the country before moving here to assume the ministry. Doing what any nerdy, bookish person would do, he started reading about Utah and the region. Being an inveterate collector, he amassed a mountain of better than ordinary books about these topics. Over three years, Brent’s interest grew to an obsession with writings about the American West. He started with novels and then spread in myriad other directions. At the Salon on Friday, July 26th, Brent will show us some of his books and tell us about his literary rabbit hole journey.

7/30 TUESDAY 10AM — Breakfast Club at Moka Meets Boba

7/31 WEDNESDAY 6:30PM

An in-depth account—grounded in new archival discoveries—of the most consequential development in Mormon history since the end of polygamy

On June 9, 1978, the phones at the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) were ringing nonstop. Word began to spread that a momentous change in church policy had been announced and everyone wanted to know: was it true? The answer would have profound implications for the church and American society more broadly.

On that historic day, LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball announced a revelation lifting the church's 126-year-old ban barring Black people from the priesthood and Mormon temples. It was the most significant change in LDS doctrine since the end of polygamy almost 100 years earlier.

Drawing on never-before-seen private papers of LDS apostles and church presidents, including Spencer W. Kimball, Matthew L. Harris probes the plot twists and turns, the near-misses and paths not taken, of this incredible story. While the notion that Kimball received a revelation might imply a sudden command from God, Harris shows that a variety of factors motivated Kimball and other church leaders to reconsider the ban, including the civil rights movement, which placed LDS racial policies and practices under a glaring spotlight, perceptions of racism that dogged the church and its leaders, and Kimball's own growing sense that the ban was morally wrong.

Harris also shows that the lifting of the ban was hardly a panacea. The church's failure to confront and condemn its racial theology in the decades after the 1978 revelation stifled their efforts to reach Black communities and made Black members the target of racism in LDS meetinghouses. Vigilant members pestered church leaders to repudiate their anti-Black theology, forcing them to live up to the creed in Mormon scripture that "all are alike unto God." Deeply informed, engagingly written, and grounded in deep archival research, Harris provides a compelling and detailed account of how Mormon leaders lifted the priesthood and temple ban, then came to reckon with the church's controversial racial heritage.