INDIE BOOKSTORES
By The Book
by Georgia I. Hesse
When, in 1917, 30-year-old Sylvia Beach abandoned forever the niceties of New Jersey for the pleasures of Paris, France was writing finis to the era of Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin, and American Alan Seeger, dying too young and in battle at age 28: “I have a rendezvous with Death… .” The demise of Dada was to sweep in surrealism.
In May of 1921, Sylvia’s Shakespeare & Company bookshop opened its doors at 12, rue de l’Odéon to bibliophiles soon bewitched by the presences of James Joyce, Malcolm Cowley, Thornton Wilder, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Stephen Vincent Benét, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; all that crowd. Shakespeare was on its way to becoming the most beloved English-language bookshop in the world.
Would Sylvia be pleased that her friend George Whitman’s version of Shakespeare & Co. continues at 37, rue de la Bûcherie? (At this writing, Whitman continues, too, at age 95, although the shop is run by his daughter Sylvia; who else?). Surely Sylvia Beach would smile at the existence of a Shakespeare & Co. in Missoula, Montana.)
Bookshops are not as other stores are. They’re not dread “outlets.” (Perhaps “inlets” would be better?) They’re not one-stop shopping centers. They are not emporia. The best ones are independent destinations: hangouts, dens, even (as the Brits would style it) locals.
Two years after Shakespeare’s debut, poet-painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, late of Paris and the Sorbonne, opened his “literary flophouse,” City Lights, in San Francisco, naming it for a magazine named for the Charlie Chaplin movie. (Ferlinghetti’s too-often overlooked partner in book biz was Peter D. Martin.) This was the first all-paperback bookshop in the country. (Hardcovers now are permitted.)
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| Lawrence Ferlinghetti/ City Light Books |
Hip San Francisco likes to think it gave birth to the Beats in the mid-1950s, but in reality at first there were only four politically-conscious lads out from Manhattan, too few to launch a Generation. They were writers Jack Kerouac (On the Road, 1957), Allen Ginsberg (whose 1956 Howl caused an obscenity trial), William S. Burrows (Naked Lunch, 1959) and Neal Cassady (who appeared as a player in several of his comrades’ works).
Kerouac popularized the word “Beat” in 1952 while talking with a writer for the New York Times Magazine, and later liked to claim it meant not “beaten down” (or “beaten up”) but “upbeat,” “on the beat,” or even “beatific.” That kind of soul spelled success in San Francisco (although locally most credit Herb Caen as originally coining the term in 1958).
It has been more than five decades since tour buses bursting with “culture vultures” snorted along Columbus Avenue eager to spot the new fauna called Beatniks, still, stepping inside City Lights takes one slipping back in time…. Signs of former times remain on City Lights’ walls, where a poster proclaims: “The red light district of Belmont is closed so the girls can attend the policemen’s ball.”
City Lights is a friendly warren, a comfortable Aladdin’s cave crammed with charms. “It is,” Ferlinghetti says, “as if the public were being invited, in person and in books, to participate in that ‘great conversation’ between authors of all ages, ancient and modern.”
If City Lights is San Francisco nostalgia, Book Passage in Corte Madera is Marin County cool. Sitting at a table on the piazza, a coffee or a Sierra Nevada brew or a glass of Zinfandel close at hand, the reader may glance up and away from the pages of Basic Brown, the pertinent and impertinent memoirs of former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Jr., or San Raphaelite Isabel Allende’s The Sum of Our Days, and settle on the immediate horizon, just out the window, where bulks the green peak of Tamalpais.
This is not the staid bookstore of yesteryear. It’s a gathering place; between 180–200 reading groups call this place home, some meeting here, some seeking instruction to get started, others receiving advice on what to read, by whom. Here come the children, to ponder the old tale of Peter Rabbit, or to while away a happy hour with Dragon Slippers.
Here writers hone their skills at the Travel Writers & Photographers (Aug. 14-17 this year) and Mystery Writers Conferences (June 26-29). Here one studies languages, marketing, writing children’s books, and developing publishing savvy.
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| Elaine & Bill Petrocelli / Book Passage |
Habitués breakfast, lunch, or sup and sip at the Book Passage Café, and shop for jewelry, luggage, hats, gifts and T-shirts. The list of lectures, classes, readings and other happenings is longer than the calendar days in a year; sometimes there are three or four events held simultaneously. Several are staged elsewhere in the area: Book Passage works with the Institute for Leadership Studies at Dominican University in San Rafael, for example, presenting a series of talks by luminaries such as Madeleine Albright, Germaine Greer and Amy Tan. All are open to the public at no charge.
April 14–24, 2008, one may even learn travel writing by traveling: to Albisano, Italy, for a 10-day workshop led by Don George, former travel editor of the SF Examiner-Chronicle, now host of the website donsplace.adventurecollection.com.
In 2003, a second Book Passage store opened in the Embarcadero Ferry Building, the choice waterfront promenade, and a stage for cafés, food products and culinary shops, garden and cooking wares stores. Author events are presented in the bookstore or nearby.
“There’s no more elegant tool than the book for doing the job for which it was created,” says Elaine Petrocelli, owner of Book Passage. As everybody’s favorite bibliopole, she’ll be enshrined in the Marin Women’s Hall of Fame March 27.
The young, indigent bibliophage, the donnish and be-sweatered professor, and San Franciscans who just like mucking around with books have found their ways for more than 40 years to Green Apple Books on Clement Street. There they huddle on the sidewalk, poking among the discounted used and free books as if they were exotic vegetables in Chinatown.
Inside, books stand in seemingly higgledy-piggledy stacks and rows competing for your custom. This is a place for serious rummagers who decide on a whim they must have a new Vermeer’s Hat or The Landmark Herodotus or a used The Nightmare Before Christmas or a VG copy of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Here and there a shelf announces its wares with whimsy: Straight Outta Brooklyn, for instance.
Above it all a frieze of intricate masks stares pitilessly down, as if observing the absurdity of human curiosity. Green Apple and its Annex also buy good used books, music on LPs and CDs as well as DVDs; quality rules.
For about 50 years, Kepler’s in Menlo Park served as the community source for bookish pleasures. Then in September of 2005 his economic situation caused Clark Kepler, son of the original owner, to close his family’s long-time enterprise. His rent was too high; the slump after 9/ll in Silicon Valley lowered his income, more young and middle-aged customers joined the rush to the digital world. So one day he called his employers together, asked them to pick up their paychecks, closed his doors, and wondered what to do next.
Within 24 hours, the community rode to the rescue.
As the shocked employees gathered on the Café Borrone’s outdoor terrace that elbows the shop, they roused the curiosity of its patrons, many of whom also had been Kepler’s clients. A local newspaper, the Almanac, joined the defensive team.
During one week, Kepler found himself simultaneously selling and saving his business. “It was very humbling,” he says. “People value the community, the small town involvement.” The reborn Kepler’s keeps relationships with no fewer than 53 Community Partners who shop at the store and receive a quarterly donation in return. Such partners range from the African Library Project and All Saints’ Episcopal Church to Thomas Merton Center of Palo Alto and Trees for Menlo Park. Many local schools participate in the Partner Education Program.
What pleases Kepler most about selling books involves his philosophy that a small business role serves the larger end of democracy. “Every day is a gift. We serve (mind) candy that’s good for you.”
Two Northern California “superstores” that nonetheless claim independent rather than chain status are Stacy’s of San Francisco, which opened in 1923 to serve the medical book needs for Western doctors, and Books Inc., which opened in Shasta City when one Anton Roman struck it rich in the Gold Rush days of 1851. The latter now operates five stores in San Francisco and six others elsewhere in the state.
Bookworms who prefer crowded, cozy, easy-going, even eccentric, atmospheres will gather at William Stout Architectural Books (founded over 30 years ago by architect Bill Stout) in North Beach to peruse volumes on — in addition to architecture — decorative arts, design, fine arts, interiors, landscape and urban planning.
Reading is an essence of la dolce vita asenvisioned by Scottish poet James Thomson:
An elegant sufficiency, content,
Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books.
Georgia I. Hesse was the founding travel editor of the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, a job she enjoyed for many years. She is now freelancing.
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