Since the passing of HB29 in 2024, 19 books have been banned statewide in Utah public schools to protect students from “sensitive materials.” The most recent book, Thirteen Reasons Why was added in October, 2025. The result of these bans is that the books are removed from public school shelves and students are prohibited from bringing them to school.
But the other result? The banned books become all the more popular in Salt Lake City bookstores.
“There’s more interest in banned books. When a book gets banned, it has a second life,” says Calvin Asch, owner of Central Book Exchange in Sugar House. His store features a banned book section located just inside the entrance, which Calvin notes is one of the hottest sections of the whole bookstore. “The state of Utah has become our best marketing team.”
Ken Sanders, owner of the storied Ken Sanders Rare Books in downtown Salt Lake, agrees that banning a book only bolsters its popularity. “I’ve been in this trade since the 1970’s,” says Sanders, “and let me tell you, there’s nothing like it for sales as when some foolish idiot bans a book. It’s just great for sales, and it doesn’t matter what the book is.”
Apollo Frenzel, a worker at Weller Book Works in Trolley Square, notes that their banned books section sells quite well. Frenzel also remembers that Ellen Hopkins, whose titles Tricks, Tilt and Fallout are all banned books statewide, gained traction after her books were ousted from Utah public schools. “All of a sudden, it was like, it’s banned statewide. And then people were like, I’ve never heard of her, let’s read her books. Then people were buying her left and right.”
So why is it that banned books become more popular?
Because, as Siena Di Sera, a co-worker of Frenzel’s at Weller Book Works, says, “It’s like a dare, or like telling a teenager not to do something, that ends up getting kids to read. It makes reading cool again.”
Sanders agrees. He remembers when a librarian forbade him from reading Frankenstein or Dracula as a young boy. “You think I didn’t figure out a way to get my hands on those books? The minute the librarian says that, it becomes forbidden fruit, and now you have to read it. Banning books is really good for business.
While they admit that banned books may bolster their sales, the booksellers all adamantly agree that the practice of banning books has harmful ramifications for expression, learning, and free speech.
Courtney Stookey, owner of the Lovebound Library, sums it up nicely, “More people come in wanting to read the books after they are banned. It is one of the only positives that could come with this. But literature is a powerful took, and at the end of the day, if you’re taking away the possibility of reading, that is not good.”
“I think we’re all interconnected; as individuals as well as societies,” Kilpatrick notes. Her work showcases those connections exuberantly, and whatever scale she’s working on, you can bet that in terms of energy and spirit, she’s painting large.
Every so often, you meet an immigrant who came here with almost nothing and managed to build something exceptional.
Prakash Shah is the kind of man who has spent enough time around risk that he no longer treats it like an interruption.
Today, he works in business brokerage and advisory, helping owners sell companies, helping buyers decide whether they should step in, and, when the fit is right, helping connect those buyers with private equity. He works in a world of valuations, leverage, due diligence, and hard questions that most people would rather postpone. He also operates in Utah real estate and has built a career around seeing value before it is obvious to everyone else. That is who he is now. What makes him interesting is how early that instinct started to form, and how little his life resembles the way most Americans are raised to think about comfort, career, and security.
He grew up in Nepal in a boarding school system that would feel severe to many Americans. He was an only child, yet he saw his parents only twice a year for twelve straight years, until high school graduation. He lived inside routine. He shared space with boys from different social classes and different family circumstances. The school was structured enough that money did not buy you any special standing once you were inside. Everyone followed the same rules. Everyone was subject to the same discipline. In his case, it was an army school. Everything was measured. Everything was scheduled. In that kind of environment, you do not build your life around preference. You build it around adaptation.
That contrast matters.
A lot of American children are raised to search for what fits them. What are you passionate about? What do you enjoy? What feels right? Those are not bad questions, but they can create a habit of waiting for life to align itself before action begins. Prakash learned something else much earlier. He learned that life often does not align itself first. You enter the room as it is, you deal with the people in it, and you figure out how to function without making your comfort the center of every decision. He said that one of the biggest lessons from those years was tolerance, the ability to live with people from all walks of life and genuinely learn to get along with them. That is not a soft value. In business, it turns into resilience. In negotiation, it turns into patience. In career terms, it turns into range.
When he came to the United States over 25 years ago, he did not arrive with the kind of runway that allows for a prolonged identity search. He came with two suitcases and enough money for one semester. He went to Hunter College in New York City, then to NYIT near Central Park, studying media and then media and technology management. He also studied psychology. Those details matter because they show something about his mind. He was interested in people before he built a career around deals. Even then, what attracted him was not technical prestige. It was understanding motives, behavior, and how people reveal themselves.
But New York is merciless toward vague ambition. It demands payment in rent, transit, food, and time.
Prakash worked constantly. He took multiple jobs. He paid tuition, paid rent, and skipped most of what Americans imagine as college life. There were no romantic years of drifting from café to concert to self-discovery. He talked about not having the luxury of dates, travel, or finding himself. He was working. Even laundry was not a small detail. In New York, he pointed out, you do not just throw clothes in a machine at home. You haul them to the laundromat, count quarters, and measure what is necessary. He also described distraction in a way that most native-born Americans probably do not think about. For immigrants, distraction is not always pleasure. Sometimes distraction is the constant pressure of competing needs. Tuition or rent. Food or savings. A better coat or another month of making do. He was not romanticizing the struggle. He was describing the arithmetic of it.
That arithmetic did not make him cautious. If anything, it did the opposite.
While in college, he had the option of safer analytical work. Instead, he took a sales job with Time Warner Cable that sent him into the South Bronx from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. to knock on doors. He is not a physically imposing man. He knew exactly what kind of neighborhoods he was walking into. He described apartment buildings where people kept pit bulls, where tension was normal, where one mistake in tone or timing could end a conversation immediately. For most people, that kind of job would have been something to survive and forget. For him, it became a school in human behavior. “It’s not about talking… it’s about listening,” he said.
One story from that period says almost everything about how he operates. He knocked on a door one night around 8:45 and found himself facing a huge man with a gun on the table, pit bulls nearby, and a half-eaten pizza in front of him. It had all the ingredients of a very bad scene.
A Salt Lake City resident says he may have uncovered what he believes to be a buried structure beneath a well-known hill in Sugar House Park, raising questions that have drawn both curiosity and skepticism.
Utah families have more learning paths than ever and, increasingly, more ways to make those paths affordable. This spring, the Utah Fits All Scholarship opened for new family applications on April 1, and the application window stays open for one month. The program is a public K–12 scholarship that provides $4,000 to $8,000 per student,…
