If you’re curious what kind of person — in this day and age of online shopping, e-book reading, tablet watching and Amazon dominating that tend to render Gutenberg practically obsolete — would want to run an independent bookstore, a brick-and-mortar place that sells actual books printed on actual printing presses, well, let’s meet Anne Holman and Calvin Crosby.
Anne and Calvin are owners of The King’s English Bookshop, an east-side institution that has been in the same location — 1500 East and 1500 South — since its founding 48 years ago.
They’re not the original owners — Anne bought her share in 2014 and Calvin his in 2021 — which only reinforces the perception that these must be the kind of people who either like to run away from popular conventional trends, or at least ignore them.
Customers shop at The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
But as with so many things in life, the reality is so much different, and so much better. Sit down for 15 minutes with Anne and Calvin and you’re liable to start musing about owning a bookstore, too.
They’re not in it because they love being different (or broke). They’re in it because they love books.
It’s a love each can trace back to childhood.
Anne was in preschool when she first discovered how good it made her feel to hold a book in her hand.
Madison Miller and Madeline Miller browse books at The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
“In preschool they kicked me out because I wasn’t doing anything else, I was just reading,” she says, laughing. “I wasn’t interesting enough.”
Her father was in retail sales “and we moved all the time, all over the West, so for me it was always, move to a new house, find the library, have a book to read, because no matter what, a book is going to be your friend.”
Calvin grew up “below the poverty line” in Magna. His grandmother “would literally give me her last dime to buy a used book at D.I.” Learning to read, he says, “it changed me. It gave me a safe space.
“I discovered there’s so much more out there in the world, there are people I have things in common with that maybe I don’t have in common with in my neighborhood, I became a more curious person, I learned empathy in a way I wouldn’t have without reading.”
Pins are pictured at The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
Both Anne and Calvin were introduced to The King’s English long before they became owners.
Anne started working at the store in 2000 when she moved to Salt Lake City and her children reached school-age. At first she was a bookseller, then she managed special events, then she managed the store, and in 2014, when then co-owner Barbara Hoagland wanted to retire, she bought her share.
Calvin’s history with The King’s English goes back to when he got his driver’s license in 1986. By now an unabashed bookophile, for years he’d heard people talk about this amazing book store on the east side, but until he turned 16, he had no way of getting there.
“It was like walking into Narnia,” he reminisces. “I went through that small little door and the world opened up for me.”
Cole Utley reads at The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
It should come as no surprise that Calvin chose the book business for his career. After two-plus decades in the industry, he was executive director of the California Independent Booksellers Alliance in 2021 when he received a phone call from Betsy Burton, the woman who founded The King’s English with Ann Berman in 1978.
Betsy was ready to retire, she informed Calvin, and given his years of experience and his familiarity with The King’s English, wanted his advice on how to best proceed in selling her share of the store.
As Calvin remembers it, he hung up, thought about it for a second, then called Betsy back and said, “There’s just one piece of advice I’ll give you, sell it to me, because I can’t imagine anybody going in and messing up King’s English.”
He resigned his post in California, moved back to Utah, and has been running the bookshop with Anne ever since.
Alexis Powell, bookseller, shelves books in the children’s room at The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, July 22, 2025. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
The owners admit that it’s a new and ever-shifting business landscape they’ve inherited, one where social media rules the day and the importance of “influencers” cannot be overstated. Competing with Amazon and Instagram is a lot different than competing with big box stores like Borders back in the day.
But people keep coming through the door, many of them familiar faces that have been here before.
“The magic of the space calls to people,” says Calvin. “Turnover is not what it means in other places, we never let you go. A former bookseller said it best: ‘The King’s English is like Hotel California; you can check out but you can never leave.’”
Perhaps nothing helps describe the illusive “magic” behind The King’s English’s ability to meld the past with the present than when Anne talks about Charles Dickens.
“I want to keep at least five different Charles Dickens titles on the shelf,” she says, “and the only way I can pay for those is to sell a lot of candles, or a lot of gift cards, or extraordinary scarves, but it’s important I think to have good Dickens on the shelf, or E.L. Doctorow, or Toni Morrison.”
That’s the kind of place this is. And that’s the kind of people who own it.