How a Utah bookseller amassed millions of followers with his collection of rare books and film props

Every inch of Moon’s Rare Books in Provo, which calls itself “a bookstore disguised as a museum,” tells a story.

Start with the brick floor, which is from France and is 200 years old, which, the staff says, dates it from around the time of Marie Antoinette and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Ask the owner, curator and historian Reid Moon, about any of the rare books and treasures and he’ll be happy to share. Stepping inside the store is akin to traveling through thousands of years of literary history, all within an outdoor mall, The Shops at Riverwoods, in Provo.

“There’s about 5,000 items in the store,” said Moon, who has been in the rare-book business for over three decades. “Our speciality is printing press forward, so [the] past 500 [to] 600 years.”

Inside the store, it’s like Smaug the dragon’s coveted cave in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” full of historical treasures wherever one looks. It’s also built to resemble a quaint European village. There are shelves full of first edition books from such authors as Jane Austen.

There also are pop-culture movie props, most of which are the ones used on the screen, Moon said. There are robes that were worn by Tom Felton and Evanna Lynch in the “Harry Potter” films, a storyboard from the Draco and Harry duel scene from “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” and even some of the original wands actors used, according to Moon.

Moon also has the reaping bowl from “The Hunger Games,” Hugh Jackman’s “Wolverine” claws and Thor’s hammer from “Thor: Ragnarok.”

In the store’s front display cases of the store, which are updated often, there’s a pamphlet signed by former President John F. Kennedy, a pipe owned by “Sherlock Holmes” creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a first edition copy of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” and a pair of Harry Houdini’s handcuffs.

There’s also a 14-pound chunk of the Berlin Wall tucked away in the corner, which Moon said they had to get an special export permit from Germany to bring back to the states. On the opposite side, the children’s room contains Charles Dickens’ original writing desk, where, Moon said, the author wrote “A Tale of Two Cities.”

In the three-and-a-half decades since Moon started acquiring rare books, he’s also spread the word of his vast collection. He shares videos on specific items in his collection and the history behind them.

“Two years ago, I got the idea [to] do TikTok [and] Instagram,” he said. Now, he has 1 million followers on Instagram and 2.3 million on TikTok. He also has 67,000 followers on Youtube.

Moon said those platforms help him reach younger people, who “aren’t collecting books like previous generations, because everything’s digital.”

Staying successful as a rare-book store in the age of instant deliveries through Amazon, Moon said, all comes back to one truth.

“People love a story. People are fascinated with stories. People will sit down and listen to a good story all day long. A good story beats anything you can see on TV,” he said. “That’s kind of in my byline — it’s Reid Moon: storyteller … I tell the history of the world through books.”

‘This is what I want to do’

Owning a bookstore is a family business, Moon said. He grew up in Texas and Oklahoma, and his family had a small community bookstore in Dallas, along with an insurance agency. After college, he got involved in the insurance business.

“But I jumped at the chance to talk to people who came in about books,” he said. At that time, pre-internet, Moon said he would write down on index cards the types of books people were looking for, and would go to find them at other bookstores.

“After a year, I told my dad, ‘This is what I want to do.’ He goes, ‘You’d never make a living selling books. We’ve had this bookstore for 10 years, it can’t even pay the bills,’” Moon recalled. Still, he stuck with the bookstore for the next year, and added on the used books aspect.

Eventually, Moon ended up opening a store in Dallas and one in Los Angeles.

“Twenty years ago, I remember Amazon, Kindle, ebooks — it was just destroying independent bookstores. I wasn’t going to fight that, so I transitioned to used and rare,” Moon said.

While based in Dallas, Moon said he found himself passing through Utah at least twice a month to buy and sell.

Ten years ago, he moved to Utah, and opened his store in Provo. Moon said he wanted to give people a reason to come into the store, and became dedicated to making it a destination.

The small European village has different rooms, each with a specific theme: A bible room, an early Mormon history room, a movie prop room. Each room has a “Where’s Waldo”-type guide for people to spot specific items.

Moon said he finds his top customers are in their 30s and 40s and come from all over the world. They’ve had visitors from all 50 states. Half of his job is traveling, though, to find rare books and artifacts.

“The best books are all found through connections that never go to auction,” he said. At the end of July, Moon was headed on a two-week buying trip in Europe.

Show and tell in the back room

One of the crowning jewels of the store is the back room. It’s full of bookshelves, of course, as well as three humidity-controlled time vaults.

“When people come into this back room, we tell them, name any person, place, event, anything that’s happened in the history of the world since the printing press, and we have something that ties to it with no more than one degree of separation,” Moon said. “Every book, to be in the back room, it has to have a story.”

The store now hosts a back room show and tells, for which people can purchase tickets. It’s an hourlong session of Moon sharing his private collection with visitors. Capacity is limited to 25 people, and the proceeds are donated to Generations Humanitarian, a nonprofit that aids street children in such countries as Venezuela.

Moon pulls out items from the vaults and the shelves, listing off facts about each of them. The first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” from a magazine, in which Poe used a pseudonym. A copy of the physics magazine in which Albert Einstein first published his theory of special relativity in 1906.

Elsewhere, Moon has more gems: a handwritten copy of a Qur’an, another of the Bible on vellum, two centuries before the printing press; and a law ledger from Alexander Hamiltion that covers the years of 1795-1804, abruptly stopping the year Aaron Burr killed Hamiltion in a duel.

Moon said the ledger was originally donated to the New York Law Institute by Hamilton’s son and kept there for 150 years, and has been digitized by other institutions for reference in studies.

“But a lot of these institutions run into financing trouble and may have to do upkeep and do what’s called deaccession,” Moon said. “The physical artifact they could no longer afford to keep, so I got wind of it, hopped on a plane, went to New York and acquired this.”

The back room also has literary history, including a first edition copy of “A Tale of Two Cities.” And not just any first edition — but Dickens’ own copy. Moon even has a copy of one of the oldest books on magic, “Natural Magic” and is translated from Italian. The copy Moon owns, he said, was Houdini’s personal copy.

“No matter who comes here, we have something that will boggle your mind,” Moon said. “I tell people today my favorite item is this. But I never say ‘This is my all-time favorite.’”

Moon has also acquired a fair amount of religious text, like 301 first edition copies of the Book of Mormon. He said he’s averaged getting one a month for the past 20 years.

“The most recent copy at auction sold for $185,000 — I know because I bought it,” Moon said. “It immediately sold, I literally have a waiting list of people who want first edition copies of the Book of Mormon. Of my experience of all religions, members of the Mormon church collect their history.”

But, Moon said, he does hold onto some special copies of the religious text.

“I do have two of the most important in church history, because I have two of the Smith brothers’ copies,” Moon said, referring to the brothers of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One belonged to Hyrum Smith, the other to Samuel Smith, who Moon said was known as the “first missionary.”

Moon said he has had people tell him those copies should go to the church, but he disagrees.

“I personally think Hyrum Smith would rather have his book shown than put in some vault never to be seen,” Moon said. He also said he lets Latter-day Saint missionaries come in on the last day of their mission, and does a one-hour show where he lets them hold the copy and get their photo taken with it — something that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

An unexpected story

Moon also has his own unique stories from acquiring books and props.

When his daughter, Emma, was in the sixth grade, Moon said she came home and told him she signed him up for career day. She told her teacher that her father was “a treasure hunter.” The teacher, Moon’s daughter told him, expressed disbelief.

When career day came around, Moon said, “the teacher kind of mockingly introduced me, saying, ‘This is Emma’s dad. She calls him a treasure hunter, says he’s like Nicolas Cage.’ … So the first thing I show [is] the treasure map from ‘National Treasure: Book of Secrets.’”

The teacher loved Moon’s talk so much, he said, that she called in the principal, and then Moon ended up staying six hours and giving the same talk to all the different grades.

One can tell Moon is a practiced storyteller as he pulls out what he calls “the ugliest book in his collection” — a beat-up green copy of the New Testament.

Moon acquired this book 11 years ago — on a Saturday. He remembers it perfectly.

“I’m getting ready to go to the farmers market with my daughter, and I get a phone call and I look at it. And I can see the plus sign. I know it’s international,” he said.

Moon answered the phone from someone in Belgium, whom he met at a Paris Book Fair two years prior. Moon had given this man a business card, with the word “bibles” on the back. The man tells him he has a Bible for Moon — from 1947.

At first, Moon said he told the man he wasn’t interested, but then the man said, “I thought you said important Bibles.” He then told Moon who the Bible belonged to originally.

“Only three people would make me stop, [and] he said one of those three names,” Moon said. (The other two names, he said, were Einstein and Mother Teresa.)

From there, Moon talked more about the book. He asked for a picture, reviewed it, and decided he wanted to buy it.

The Belgian man calling asked for a finder’s fee, because he had told another man about the book before calling Moon. The Bible, it turned out, wasn’t in Belgium, but in Kansas.

Moon then called the Kansas owner, who told him that a guy in New York is also interested, and the first person to show up with the money gets it. Moon asked him which airport was the closest, and it was Wichita.

“There’s only one flight and it’s leaving in 30 minutes, which means they’re boarding right now,” Moon recalled. He found out that the potential New York buyer was going to wire the money on Monday, and made the seller another offer.

“I said, ‘I’ll pay for it today,’ [and] I have my Jason Bourne go bag. I’m walking out the door and then I hear one of my kids go, ‘Dad, what’s for lunch?”

So, Moon said, he had the kids — four of them, ages 5, 7, 10 and 12 — put their shoes on and get in the car.

“They think we’re going to the mall. We turn left, we’re going north,” he said. Eventually, they asked him where they were going, and he told them he had to pick up a book. He drove them all the way to Kansas to acquire the book.

Moon tells this story leaving one guessing whose Bible it could be, and feeds off the joy and anticipation from listeners.

“I could see that there were annotations made, where this person was actually correcting the Greek, like saying this would have been a better translation, comparing it to different versions,” Moon said of when he first opened the book. “I looked in the front, saw the name and then [said] we’ve got to deal. Whose book is it? Any guesses?”

Moon then opens the cover, to reveal the signature: J.R.R. Tolkien.

Moon says if he had one message to share with people, it’s that “it’s not too late to start reading again.”

“People are just so used to sitting in front of a screen and being entertained. But your own imagination and what you visualize when you read surpasses anything that you can see online,” he said. “I hope I’m still doing this in 20 years, because I’m not retiring.”