- Cherie Willis oversees the Special Collections at Salt Lake City Main Library.
- The collection includes rare Utah-related books like “Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley.”
- “The Birds of America” is the library’s most valuable book worth hundreds of thousands.
SALT LAKE CITY — It’s 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the library has just opened, and Cherie Willis is already having a good time.
Cherie is the gatekeeper for the Special Collections section of the Salt Lake City Main Library, a room chock full of treasured books, publications and other artifacts, some of them dating back well before the library’s beginnings in 1898.
For Cherie, who has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Utah and a master’s degree in library science from BYU, it’s clear that, to her, the old stuff never gets old. It’s like we just opened King Tut’s tomb…