(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tony Weller assists his mother Lila as she logs books into a computer at Weller Book Works, August 7, 2019. Weller Book Works — formerly Zion Bookstore and Sam Weller's Books — is celebrating its 90th year.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Lila Weller uses a magnifying glass to help her read as she logs books into a computer at Weller Book Works, August 7, 2019. Weller Book Works — formerly Zion Bookstore and Sam Weller's Books — is celebrating its 90th year.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tony Weller talks with a customer in the rare book section of Weller Book Works, August 7, 2019. Weller Book Works — formerly Zion Bookstore and Sam Weller's Books — is celebrating its 90th year.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gary Teare of Salt Lake City thumbs through a potential book to buy on the floor of Weller Book Works, August 7, 2019. Weller Book Works — formerly Zion Bookstore and Sam Weller's Books — is celebrating its 90th year.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Weller Book Works — formerly Zion Bookstore and Sam Weller's Books — is celebrating its 90th year.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tony Weller talks with a customer in the rare book section of Weller Book Works, August 7, 2019. Weller Book Works — formerly Zion Bookstore and Sam Weller's Books — is celebrating its 90th year.
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Weller Book Works employee Chance Miller shelves newly acquired books, August 7, 2019. Weller Book Works — formerly Zion Bookstore and Sam Weller's Books — is celebrating its 90th year.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) With Weller Book Works in Trolley Square — formerly Zion Bookstore and Sam Weller's Bookstore downtown — turning 90 years old this month, third-generation owners Tony and Catherine Weller talk about their love for books and the store's family history.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) With Weller Book Works in Trolley Square — formerly Zion Bookstore and Sam Weller's Bookstore downtown — turning 90 years old this month, three out of four generations of the book store owners, including Tony and Catherine Weller, left, along with Tony's mother Lila, 103, and their daughter Lila Ann, gather at the store in Trolley Square on Friday, Aug. 9, 2019.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) With Weller Book Works in Trolley Square — formerly Zion Bookstore and Sam Weller's Bookstore downtown — turning 90 years old this month, third-generation owners Tony and Catherine Weller are joined by their daughter Lila Ann, and Tony's mother, second generation owner, Lila Weller, 103, as she describes funny stories at the bookstore over the years.
(Photo courtesy of Weller Book Works) Founder Gus Weller, right, at the entrance to Zion Bookstore at its location at 28 E. 100 South, around 1932.
(Tribune file photo) Sam Weller speaks to Janeen Bailey at his bookstore in 1978.
(Tribune file photo) Sam Weller and author Alex Haley at Weller's bookstore.
(Tribune file photo) Lila and Sam Weller are photographed at their bookstore in 1985.
(Courtesy photo) Sam Weller at the scene of the fire that destroys much of the building that houses the Sam Weller's book store. Sam and his staff race in and out, rescuing books. The next morning, Sam rents a storefront nearby, and within days holds a “fire sale.” Months later, the store moves back to the Main Street location, expanding into spaces his old neighbors didn’t reoccupy.
(Courtesy photo) Fire strikes Sam Weller Books in August 1972.
(Tribune file photo) Sam Weller, proprietor of Sam Weller's Bookstore, in a 1960 photo.
(Courtesy photo) Lila Weller, wife of Sam Weller. The Wellers owned Weller's Books, which this year celebrates its 90th anniversary.
(Tribune file photo) Sam Weller, center, celebrates the 70th anniversary of the Weller bookstore at a party with, from left, son Tony Weller, granddaughter Lila Ann, daughter-in-law Catherine, and wife Lila in 1999.
(Trent Nelson | Tribune file photo) Raul Gonzalez, a regular customer, browses the shelves at the Rincon de Libros, a section of Spanish books in Salt Lake City's Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore, May 18, 2004.
(Trent Nelson | Tribune file photo) Tony Weller is photographed at Sam Weller's Bookstore, March 23, 2006.
(Trent Nelson | Tribune file photo) Sam and Lila Weller, who ran Sam Weller's Bookstore for years, are interviewed in their Avenues home on March 23, 2006. Lila, now 103, continues to work part-time at Weller Book Works
(Rick Egan | Tribune file photo) The entrance to Sam Weller's Bookstore is pictured on Main Street, Wednesday, November 25, 2009. Shortly after Sam died in June, his son, Tony, who had managed the store since 1992, begins to search for a new location.
(Rick Egan | Tribune file photo) Author and Salt Lake City native Roseanne Barr signs copies of her new book "Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm" at Sam Weller's Bookstore, Thursday, January 13, 2011.
(Trent Nelson | Tribune file photo) Sam Weller, who ran Sam Weller's Bookstore for years, talks in his home in the Avenues and surrounded by books on March 23, 2006.
(Steve Griffin|Tribune file photo) Lila Weller, 98, at Weller Book Works in Trolley Square in Salt Lake City, Utah Monday, December 30, 2013. Lila is the wife of Sam Weller and the "glue" that held the back end of the bookstore together, according to daughter-in-law and current co-owner Catherine Weller. She returned to work at the family business after Sam died in 2009.
Lila Weller, the lively lover of the written word who kept her family’s Salt Lake City bookstore humming for seven decades, has died.
Weller died in her Salt Lake City home Thursday morning, according to a post on the Weller Book Works’ website. She was 105.
“I love books, and everybody that I meet loves books,” Lila Weller told The Salt Lake Tribune in August 2019. She was 103 then, and still came into the store nearly every day to work in the rare books section with her son, Tony.
Only in February 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began, did Tony tell Lila she couldn’t come into the store because of the health risk.
“Oh, she’s hating staying home — she’s just bored,” Lila’s daughter-in-law, Catherine Weller, who runs the store with Tony, told The Tribune last July. “Coming to the store was an important part of her day. She loved pitching in, and it helped keep her active. … But we can’t take that risk. She can’t take that risk.”
Lila Nelson — born Oct. 25, 1915 — left a job at the Deseret News to work at Zion Bookstore in 1950, a year after meeting its proprietor, Sam Weller. Sam had taken over the business from his father, Gus, after returning home from service in World War II. (Gus, who founded Zion Bookbtore in 1929, put the store in Sam’s name during the war, because service members’ businesses could not be foreclosed on.)
Lila Nelson married Sam Weller in 1953. The store was renamed Sam Weller’s Books in the 1960s — Lila’s idea — and again in 2012 to Weller Book Works, as Tony and Catherine moved the business from its beloved Main Street location into a former movie theater in Trolley Square. Except for a stretch when she stayed home to care for an ailing Sam (who died in 2009), Lila was a constant at the store.
Lila’s bookkeeping skills helped alleviate the deep debt Sam found the store in after the war.
“Let’s say I was tight,” Lila told The Tribune. “Sam was a people person, instead of a book person. Sam loved people, and if he didn’t know anything about you, he would corner you and talk to you for an hour to find out. Then, when you came in, you were an old friend, and he’d usher you right to the books he liked.”
Sales representatives were impressed with Lila’s ability to track inventory, Catherine Weller said in 2019. Lila devised her own system, a card file that the store used from the 1950s until around 1990, when the store shifted to a computerized system.
“If a person called and said, ‘Do you have this book?’ it’s easier to look in the file than run out to the shelf and hunt for it,” Lila said.
Each book was given a little slip of paper, which clerks used to track inventory. The system wasn’t foolproof, though; Lila recalled a 3-year-old girl once became “entranced by those yellow slips. By the time we caught her, she had a whole handful.”
Lila, according to the store’s post, “was always ready with vitamin C and Tylenol when an employee felt a cold coming on, and advice when Sam yelled about something. And she grounded Sam when he needed it.”
Lila helped her family’s store survive through a fire in 1972, a downtown beautification effort in 1976 that drove out other businesses, the mall boom of the 1980s, the proliferation of big-box chain bookstores and the growth of the internet behemoth Amazon.
Besides her love of books — “she was an insightful and discriminating reader in her own right,” the store’s post said — she had hidden talents. She was “a secret astrologer,” could read palms, and could, when asked, speak the “carny” language she learned as a young woman.
Though she was sometimes called the world’s oldest working bookseller, Lila didn’t think a lot about living past the century mark. “All I ever did was not die,” she told people, according to the store.
Lila Weller is survived by her son Tony, her daughter-in-law Catherine, and her granddaughter, Lila Ann, a 2019 Westminster College graduate who also works at the store.
A celebration of life will be held, the store said, “when it is safe to gather.”
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