Rick Grunder has worked with books and old paper continuously since 1975. He served as the first Chairman of the Brigham Young University Library Bibliographic Department until starting Rick Grunder - Books, now in its forty-third year. He has issued more than a hundred detailed catalogs of rare material for sale.
In the 1980s, he knew Mark W. Hofmann, who turned out to be a forger and pipe-bomb murderer (the subject of numerous true-crime books and documentaries for which Grunder was interviewed).
During calmer times, he has written the five-volume historical reference work, Mormon Parallels: A Bibliographic Source (2008; 2014; 2018). On a good day he can be found at home in the woods feeding wild birds from his hand, an hour from Palmyra, New York and Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania - places where Mormonism began. In such a setting, amazing things can happen.