The Future of Book Shops

What is the Future of American Book Shops?

by Paul Hunt

The dystopian end for literacy.  The very last stage of the retail book business will be Book Tents on sidewalks in the big cities as the huge skyscrapers become empty due to high rent and finally to the massive CME from the Sun.  With 300,000 mainly homeless, destitute, and uneducated people pouring over the border every month, does anybody actually believe that there’s going to be less people living on the streets?  When the internet goes down get ready to shop for books on the sidewalks.

It looks like American society has abandoned it’s own culture.  The demise of bookstores, art galleries and small theaters are sure signs of the decay. Here’s the report card for reading in California schools from CAreads.org:

Reading is the most fundamental skill children must learn to succeed in school and in life.  But today, half of California’s students do not read at grade level.  What’s worse, among low-income students of color, over 65% read below grade level.  Few ever catch up.

Sad news for anyone thinking about trying to sell a book in the future. The trend is also showing up at libraries.  I’ve noticed lately that most libraries have changed their mix, which is now maybe 40% books, 40% audio and video and 20% computers.

Let me know what YOU think.  I have a few ideas for solutions, but I’ll save them until Hollywood starts issuing the book tents with small solar panels to power lights inside.  And a fluffy pillow for an old guy to sit on.

The Book To Get For Holiday Reading

Noel Hart’s Book about Cosmopolitan Book Shop is a hit with book lovers!

And That Was Only The Front Cover

Noel Hart – And That Was Only the Front Counter: Working in the Used Book Business in Los Angeles.
Contains over 400 pages crammed with intensity from the trenches of the used book business in Los Angeles. This is a SIGNED LIMITED EDITION, which includes a piece of the bookshop tipped in! This is unique to each copy, a portion of a page printed in 1753, sourced from Cosmopolitan Bookshop in Hollywood. Each copy is SIGNED in full by Australian author Noel Hart in black ink on title page. Introductory note by Arnold M. Herr. Cover artwork by Rom Anthonis. This is a NON-FICTION book.
Rear cover blurb: “Melrose Avenue, Hollywood. Around the turn of the millennium. A classic secondhand bookshop, dusty and dirty, shabby with age and happenstance, packed tight with decades of stagnant accumulation. So messy it resembles the aftermath of a major earthquake. Bring a shovel, dig for treasures! Crackly radio jazz can be heard emanating from somewhere. Michael Jackson browses porn in one aisle; a homeless man sleeps on the floor in another; a transvestite hooker works the trade in a secluded corner behind a stack of boxes; a serious collector collates rare seventeenth-century antiquarian volumes near the front counter; a frenetic movie set decorator rents books throughout. All the while at the center of the maelstrom sits 80-year-old owner Eli Goodman, a ruminative, philosophical, New York-born Jew, intelligent and funny, an obsessive hoarder to the extreme, a caricature character who distinctly resembles Woody Allen dropped into a Marx Brothers movie, and who happens to live in a decrepit hovel at the back of the bookshop. For fifty years Eli has presided over the famous and infamous, the bibliophiles, researchers, collectors, decorators, actors, models, musicians, hipsters, the scholarly, shady, and insane, all congealed into a conglomerate crush at Cosmopolitan Bookshop. Longtime store manager Noel Hart, an Australian, captures it all, stuffs it into a mind-blender, then spills it out onto the page. NOTE: What began as a talk given to the Australian Book Collectors’ Society in 2018, then subsequently published verbatim in their journal in 2019, has now been expanded into a book-length narrative by Noel Hart, who managed Cosmopolitan Bookshop in Los Angeles for ten years.”
Printed in Australia. Published in 2023 by Bookwood Press, Melbourne.

Noel hard at work at Cosmopolitan Book Shop

To order a copy, Click Here.

Libraries in Gaza Bombed Into Rubble

The Story of A Book Found Under Ruins

The Edward Said Public Library

The following video, a talk by Mosab Abu Toha, is about how he founded the Edward Said Public Library.  With an introduction by Noam Chomsky.  Please watch this video first for background information.

If you saw the video above, you will then be disturbed to read the FB post I retrieved, that Mosab and his family, fleeing from the terrors of the massive bombings of Gaza, has been taken and possibly killed by the IDF.  The slaughter of civilians is so shocking it is beyond words.

So much for education and libraries in occupied areas of Israel.  After watching the video of Mosab describing the problems of even receiving books for his library, the situation in Gaza becomes more illuminated and certainly pathetic.  Previous bombings destroyed libraries, and no doubt the present massive destruction has wiped out all remaining libraries, along with the 20,000 civilians killed so far.  Here’s a few photos of past and present destruction.

I will publish further updates as I find them.  If anyone has any information about the present status of the libraries and book shops in Gaza please contact me.

Update:  The Islamic University in Gaza and its library, founded in 1978 is completely destroyed according to reports on Aljazeera.  The President of the University and his family were killed yesterday by their home being bombed in one of the refugee camps, according to another report.

L.A.’s Old Magazine Stores – A Lost Era

Part 1 – Some Old Magazine Stores and the Secret Magazine Warehouse.  By Paul Hunt

Back in the 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles still had a few scattered shops that sold old magazines, comics and pulps.  They were dusty, piled high with stacks of great colorful old magazines, and offered up pretty cheap entertainment.  I’ll list a few of these as I remember them, all of them now long gone.

ABC Book and Magazine Research.  7064 Hollywood Blvd.

All that I have left is a rubber stamp inside a paperback book.

When I was a teen ager I lived with my Grandparents a couple blocks west of La Brea on Hawthorne Ave.  I attended Hollywood High School, so I was very familiar with Hollywood Blvd., and all the great old book shops.  Week day evenings I sold the Examiner for 2 hours at the corner of La Brea and Hollywood.

I soon noticed that just east of Hollywood and La Brea, in an old store front, was a magazine store called ABC Book and Magazine Research.  I started going in there on Saturdays with my meagre newspaper sales money and to me the dusty old place was a wonderland.  The proprietor was classic, a thin, nervious man in his sixties with thick glasses.  He looked like an old scrooge and had about as bad a temperament as one could get.  He despised children and young folks, and never, ever, gave out a happy “hello” salutation.

I was always overly polite, because if old scrooge would have let me, I would have stayed there all day rooting through the piles and piles stacked everywhere.  All the important weekly magazines were there, Life, Look, Post and stacks of magazines going back into the 1930s.  The store was also jammed with paperback books, and at that time period that I was there most of the used paperbacks were from the late forties to the 1950s.  Let your imagination soar, Dell mapbacks, Avon Murder Mystery Monthlies, you name it.  He would stamp all the paperbacks with his sloppy rubber stamp, but notice that he was “renting” the books – bring one back and pay 8 cents and get another one to read.  Not bad, most paperbacks were 25 cents or 35 cents in those days, so if you wanted to read a batch of science fiction you could do so cheaply.  In 1960 a gallon of gas was about 25.99 cents, a pack of cigarettes 25 cents, a coke was usually a dime or 15 cents.  See how little your dollar is worth now?

I didn’t pay much attention to the comics at that time, I had already been through a comic book crisis in my earlier years.  I subscribed to the first “Mad” comics and was spending my hard earned money from paper routes and weed pulling on war comics and horror comics.  My parents went ballistic when they saw my collection of all those now rare comics and trashed them and forbid me to ever buy another one.  They even marched me into the local drug store and told the owner not to sell me any more comics.  I was devasted by this.  I didn’t really understand that I had done anything wrong.  I had worked for the money and spent it on something I loved to read, but there was a big propaganda campaign in the fifties telling parents that your kid’s mind would be warped forever because all the writers of the comics were communists.  So because of my earlier bad experience I shied away from the comics.  Now that I was in High School, my focus was on “serious” magazines like Life, Look, and Post.  I was also reading a lot of science fiction paperbacks.

Old scrooge would only let me stay in the shop for 20 or 30 minutes, and then demand that I buy something and leave.  I could always find a great paperback, and I never brought any back.  Screw the 8 cents, I wanted to keep the books forever.

ABC had to move sometime in the 1960s, and they moved to a smaller shop almost directly across the street on the north side of Hollywood.  I think they were gone by the 1970s.  I had discovered Pickwick Bookshop by then and was spending so much time there that I forgot about ABC Magazine and the old grouch who owned it.

Marlow’s Bookshop,    Hollywood Blvd. and Argyle.

Marlow’s at Argyle and Hollywood Blvd.

The following is from one of the Hollywood Boulevard Bookstore Follies articles.  I’m reprinting it here with some additional comments.

The first stop is right on the corner of Hollywood and Argyle,  MARLOW’S BOOKSHOP.  Owned by -you guessed it – a gentleman named Marlow, this store opened in the early 70s.   It has a general stock of used books, but specializes in back issue periodicals and in research (mainly for the film industry).  A graduate engineer before he got into the book business, Marlow said he recently got a call from the filmmakers of All The President’s Men.  They needed to duplicate the library of The Washington Post for some of the scenes, so  Marlow rented them an entire set-up of 10,000 books.  It was a rush job , he put it together overnight so the film company could start shooting the scene the next day!

Notice the 50% off sign in the window.  This came about when Marlow had stopped over to Hollywood Book City.  While chatting with Book City owner Alan Siegel, he complained that business was a little slow.  “Why don’t you have a sale?” said Alan, “It will bring in some new business.”  Marlow said he would try it, but didn’t know how to start.  Alan generously loaned Marlow a beautiful large banner that said “Anniversary Sale, 50% Off”.  Marlow borrowed the banner and put it up on his shop (not shown in the photo).  It worked so well that he kept the banner up there permanently, and refused to give it back to Alan. “That damned banner cost me over a $100,” said Siegel.  “No good deed goes unpunished on this street” he said sadly. To make matters worse, a couple of Marlow’s customers claim that he doubled the price on most items in order not to sell too cheaply.  I can only say that these are at the moment unsubstantiated and unproven claims, but certainly in the realm of bookstore lore.

I used to drop by Marlow’s from time to time, mainly looking for early bound periodicals.  Marlow was a stocky man in his 60’s and seemed to have a short fuse, especially when asked for a discount.  At some point in the 1980s he was forced to move out and eventually ended up on Lincoln Ave. in West Los Angeles.  Along the way he had rented a lot of storage units and jammed them full of periodicals.  Every so often one would turn up with unpaid rent and be sold to some book scout pretty cheap.

Marlow fell ill and hired a young African American guy to run the shop, and he kept it open after Marlow died.  He didn’t know much abut the book business, but he was a really nice young guy and was eager to learn.  He had some consignment deal with Marlow’s family and he tried to make a go of it.  I think the store closed in the 1990s.  Marlow always had a big selection of magazines and it was a great place to browse.

Garvin’s Hollywood Book Store and the Secret Magazine Warehouse.

Paul Hunt, Keith Burns and Bruce Cervon enter the Secret Magazine Warehouse

Jack Garvin, 1987

The story of the Secret Magazine Warehouse is a douzy.  I’ll start it here with reprinting the original article about Kovach, Mark Trout, and Jack Garvin.  Then I’ll add in some additional information that is part of the legend of Nick Kovach’s massive warehouse.

Walking on a few doors will bring you to HOLLYWOOD BOOK SHOP.  This store has been here about three years, although one of the owners has been in the book business in Hollywood about 10 years.  They carry a large general stock of used and out-of-print books. The partners, Jack Garvin and Ray Cantor are polar opposites, at times engaging in bitter quarrels.  Garvin, a stocky man who resembles Nikita Khrushchev, started as a book scout, operating out of a garage behind some storefronts on Adams Avenue, east of Western, a once rich area that has seen better days.  He is also into minerals and geology, and this specialty led him to buy equipment to cut geodes and polishing machinery to further enhance specimens that he buys.  Jack is a chain-smoking, gruff man to deal with, Ray the nicer of the two, but they have built up an excellent stock of books.  See my articles on Jack Garvin called “The Rock Man” elsewhere on this site.

Recently (1970s) they purchased a large warehouse stuffed with magazines and pamphlets.  The story behind this is an odd one.  There was a periodicals dealer down in the South Los Angeles area by the name of Nick Kovach, who was dealing in scholarly periodicals back in the 1950s.  When the Russians launched Sputnik, it was a big kick in the rear to the U.S. educational system, which all of a sudden woke up to the sad fact that this great country was falling behind in science and technology.  Kovach found himself to be center stage in the arena of scientific and mathematical periodicals, courted by libraries across the country who needed this material.  He bought and sold enormous quantities of paper goods and magazines, filling up many warehouses.  In later years he realized that the collections included a lot of non-scientific stuff that was of no use to the libraries at the great universities and corporations.  So Kovach started to dispose of tonnage of this stuff, which was mainly popular culture and mainstream magazines.

Along came a roving dealer named Mark Trout, who traveled around the country in a van, looking for this kind of material.  He “leased” the rights to an old, long closed-down bowling alley in South Los Angeles from Kovach  that was jam packed with just the right stuff that he wanted:  popular magazines, like Life, Time, Fortune, and the such.  Trout made a great amount of money over the years selling this at flea markets.  One time, at the Rose Bowl flea market, Trout showed up with a stack of over 50 Number 1 Life magazines in mint condition. The collectors went berserk.  After milking the contents of the bowling alley for a number of years, Trout offered to transfer the “lease” to Jack Garvin and his partner.  All the great popular magazines had been removed and sold by Trout, but the place was still jammed with pamphlets, ephemera and lesser-known periodicals.  Garvin pulled out van loads of great stuff, including a world-class collection of pamphlets and rare broadsides on the subject of American radicalism, which he is selling to libraries at big prices. Garvin and Canter go down to their bowling alley once a week and pack their old van full of paper goodies and rare ephemera.  “It’s like owning a gold mine,” Jack once told me.  “Every once in a while we hit a particularly good vein!”  And it is enough material for years to come.

When Jack’s partner Ray dropped dead after a 45 minute screaming match with Jack one night, Jack Garvin became the sole owner of Hollywood Book Shop, (after paying off Ray’s wife).  I talked Garvin into moving out to Burbank, which he did, but that meant he had to dump the Secret Magazine Warehouse on someone else.  Garvin found a young couple who took over the “lease” on the bowling alley.  In a funny incident, Garvin told me that he and Ray had to use flash lights because there was no electricity in the basement of the bowling alley.  When the new prospects came in, the pretty lady buyer, a school teacher, found the main power switch and boom – the whole place lit up in a blaze of lights!  Garvin said “I can’t believe we never thought of that…..all those years in the dark stumbling over stuff…”

The new owners moved a lot of the items into a storm cellar at the corner of Gardner and Sunset.  The old Pacific Electric ran in a diagonal through the intersection, and just NE next to an old building was a large storm cellar.  The couple began hauling magazines out to the Tuesday night antique show at the Great Western Exhibit Center.  They did a pretty good business there but eventually they split up and the man rented space in Burbank for a few years.  Eventually, he vanished, along with the remains of the popular magazines.

This was only the story of the bowling alley.  The main warehouse that Nick Kovach owned was an old supermarket, plus three or more storefronts on Florence Avenue.  The places were packed with periodicals, millions of them.  Maybe billions.  After Kovach died an antique dealer Jerry Aboud and his partner Robert Mann contacted Kovach’s son and made a deal to “Lease” the billions of magazines.  Actually, the most valuable things in the warehouse were a set of microfilms that Kovach had made of the early copies of the Panama Star, one of the first newspapers in the Americas.  Kovach somehow found the originals in some archive and donated them to the country of Panama.  He kept the microfilm masters that he sold to university libraries around the world.  The Panamanians loved Kovach, and he was feted on many trips to the country, where he was guest of honor at State  dinners.  He had given them status as a civilized country. However, when it came to beauty, Mr. Kovach was a failure to the Panamanian men.

Success at magazines, failure as a judge of beauty.

Mr. Kovach was a judge in the July 1964 Miss Panama contest that was held at the Panama Hilton Hotel in Panama.  He and the other judges had voted for a dark beauty, Gloria Navarete.  According to Kovach, the audience was rooting for another girl, who he claimed had “spindly bow legs”.  When the result was announced the audience started screaming at Kovach and the other Judges, and attacked the stage.  Kovach and the others ran for their lives out the back door of the Panama Hilton, with a mob after them.  They threw rocks and bottles and even tried to ram Kovach’s car as he raced away.  Beauty in Panama is not what the old gringo sees, it is what the macho men of Panama says it is.  It took Kovach a while to recoup his honor with the men of Panama.

Bob Mann and Jerry Aboud kept working the Kovach warehouse for about a year.  The place was packed to the ceiling, with huge crates stacked full of periodicals.  They eventually turned the warehouse over to Jimmy Brucker, who had become half owner of the Burbank Book Castle, and also half owner of the building itself, with its 10,000 sq foot basement.  The problem with the Kovach warehouse was that at the time it was located in a gang area near Crenshaw and Florence. It was an old supermarket at 4801 Second Ave., with apartments on the second floor.  The building is still there, but now remodeled.  It was best to go there early in the morning and be gone by about 3pm.  Weekends were especially bad, as the drug dealers were on every corner in the surrounding area, and gunfire was frequent as darkness approached.

Jimmy spent many months in the warehouse, looking through things.  Most of the popular titles had long ago been moved to the bowling alley that Mark Trout had gotten early on.  A huge quantity of periodicals were things that had no reason to exist, like thousands of copies of the Los Angeles Board of Education news.  But there were gems.  A storefront next to the supermarket was full of bound periodicals, many great titles in beautiful and sturdy library bindings.  Jimmy gave me the keys and told me to start pulling things for the shop.  So for over 1 year I went down to the warehouse once a week with Keith Burns and our friend Bruce Cervon, a famous Magician and expert on old magazines.  We hauled van loads over to the Book Castle in Burbank, stopping only to fuel up at a fantastic all you could eat Chinese restaurant on Crenshaw.

We found many gems and brought over thousands of periodicals.  It was like being in magazine heaven, although it was not easy working with the old wood crates, which had rusty nails sticking out everywhere.  In addition, I was also nervous about making too much of a ruckus with the crates, I didn’t want to be swarmed by the millions of plump silverfish that were hiding inside some of the magazines.

 

After a year or so, Jimmy wanted to move it all into the basement of the Book Castle.  We had some long discussions and finally he let me go through the warehouse and mark the crates that were good enough to maybe sell some day.  Jimmy’s truck driver, a genial pot-bellied guy named “Big Bob”, would get a local crew and load a semi- truck and haul it out to Burbank, where I would hire another crew to help unload the thousands of magazines pouring in.  In the end we brought in thirteen semi-trucks of magazines, completely filling the entire basement of the Book Castle with a billion magazines.  It was hard, dirty work, the crates of magazines had layers of dust an inch thick.  But the first truck they brought over was the hardest and almost killed us.

Here’s the thing about semi-trucks.  They look really solid, like there is no chance of tipping it over.  Wrong.  The crew at the Kovach warehouse had grossly over-loaded the trucks, like to the ceiling.  Thus we learned our first lesson on how to unload a truck that is 20 tons over weight.  We started just unloading from the back door of the truck, crate after crate.  We should have gone down the center of the truck, leaving the crates on the edges, and then worked our way back.  That was the lesson we learned.

Since the first truck was so full, several of us were working inside, and when we reached 1 magazine over the half-way mark, the truck flipped up, the back end with the wheels went flying upward, crashing us inside to the front (where the stilts were) and slamming us with 60 pound wood crates full of dusty magazines.   It was a miracle nobody was killed.  Once the dust cleared and we crawled out of the back of the truck we could not believe what had happened.  The back wheels were sticking up in the air.  There was no tractor attached, it was down at Kovach’s getting another load.  Dust and smoke swirled out of the back opening.  Birds were landing on top of the trailer.  A crowd was gathering.  We shouted to the outside crew to bring us a ladder so we could climb down. One of our crew announced that he needed a beer, and he went off to the local bar.  We didn’t see him for a week.

Summers in Burbank are hot, and this late afternoon it was near 100 degrees.  We were drenched in sweat and magazine dust.  We started trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do.  About 100 people had gathered around.  Mostly they wanted to know how in heck we had accomplished that feat, something nobody had ever seen before.  The problem was how were we to get the damn wheels back on the ground.

My friend Stan remembered his high school geometry class.  It’s simple he said.  We go back into the trailer and carefully start shifting the magazines forward toward the back door.  “It’s just like a teeter-totter” he said.  When we get the load balanced the wheels will just come easily down to where they were.  We just have to be careful.

We got on the ladder and climbed back into the trailer.  The dust had settled a little, but with the heat it was still like being in an oven.  We formed a chain and gingerly started passing crates one at a time to the back and out to guys on ladders.  After this had gone on a while I got nervous and told the guys to take the ladders away and stand back.  We now had enough room to slide crates toward the back, trying to judge when the tipping point would come, and the gentle trailer wheels would shift down.  We finally reached that point.

Wham! The back of the trailer slammed down without warning.  The door of the trailer came down like a guillotine, then back up, then down, then up, crashing along its tracks.  Crates tumbled over, we went flying around the inside of the trailer like loose rag dolls.  Everything became quiet.  Then someone on the outside started to clap and pretty soon a large cheer went up from the crowd of neighbors watching this clown show.  “You did it” someone yelled.

We called it a night, lucky to be alive.  We all needed a few beers.  But we now knew how to unload the next 12 semi-trailers that came in over the summer.  We never pulled a stunt like that again!

Coming Part 2:  Last Days of the old Magazine shops of Los Angeles.

 

 

 

Beatology New Bookstore Opens in Downtown Los Angeles

Broadway Goes Beat and Pop Culture

by John Aes-Nihil

Broadway’s New Books Shop

Beatology Vintage/Aes-Nihil Productions Super Store 737 S. Broadway Los
Angles open daily from 10AM to 7PM.  Featuring huge collection of Books,
Records, Tapes, Videos, Hi Fashion, Low Fashion the Photography of
Aes-Nihil-Sun Ra, Stooges, VU, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg,
John Waters, NYC Punk Bands,  and the Aes-Nihil Collection of Sharon
Tate photos from original transparencies & slides.   The only truly
glamorous store left in Los Angeles, amidst the Ultimate Collection of
Remaining Movie Palaces.

Books, collectible and scarce. This Beat’s for you.

UPDATE April 2024 – Sorry to say Book Store Closed Forever!

An Australian Bookman in Hollywood

Noel Hart Came All The Way From The Land Down Under to Spend Years Working for the Most Eccentric Bookseller Since the Founding of Ancient Rome:  Eli Goodman of Cosmopolitan Book Shop, a Rabbit Hole of Chaos that Even Alice Would Not Dare Go Down.

by Paul Hunt

Cosmopolitan Book Shop

I admit it, I was wrong.  When Arnold Herr wrote his epic book The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookseller, I said that it would be the last book ever written about Cosmopolitan Bookshop.  Arnold Herr’s book is now out of print, and copies are selling for around $100 if you can find one.  But just in time, Noel Hart, another poor soul who suffered for years as an employee and then manager at the book shop, has written a large tome chronicling his years of Melrose madness.  The only catch is that the book is not published in the U.S. and is only available through the author in Australia.

I thought that most of the old time employees were gone to the bookseller’s party in the land of fluffy clouds and ladies playing harps.  I had forgotten about Noel Hart, who had fled Los Angeles and returned to Australia to regain his sanity and sainthood.  Although I had known Eli Goodman for some 20 years, I only had the honor of working at the shop for the last couple years of it’s existence, along with a dear friend by the name of “Five”, and of course, an energetic Arnold Herr who stayed until the end as Store Manager.  Folks in Los Angeles will remember Five during the years that he worked at Bodhi Tree Books in West Hollywood.  He was a writer, a podcaster host of a fun show called Token and Talkin’, an actor, comedian, and great guy.  He has since sadly passed, but I’ll put in a few links to some of his work at the end of this screed.

So, was I surprised to hear that Noel had written a book of over 400 pages about Eli Goodman and Cosmopolitan?  Yeah, shocked that someone was even loonier than me or Arnold Herr, and not only had worked at the shop for 10 years but then spent another number of years mulling it over and actually daring to reveal his experiences to a lethargic public, most of whom have never set foot in a book shop in their entire miserable lives.

I remember once when Arnold Herr and I were having lunch at a landmark coffee shop in Burbank when the waitress asked us what we did for a living.  My first thought was that she was trying to assess just how much service she was going to waste her time on us, or whether her two diners, bearded and shabbily dressed, with books and papers piled on her table, were so suspicious looking that she might dial 9-11 before even giving us a menu.  I piped up that we were booksellers.

“What does that mean, “bookseller”? she said.

“We work in a book shop,” said Arnold.

She smiled and proudly announced that since graduating from high school, she had never read even one book, and I noticed that she was pushing late 50s.  I was trying to calculate roughly how many years that was, between the High School graduation and the current year, how many decades of not reading a book.  My mind locked up at that moment, the silence broken by Arnold.

“That’s OK honey, we won’t hold it against you.  You have that whole stack of menus to read every day.  That’s an ordeal enough for anyone.”

My thought is that all those think tanks pondering the great decline of American education, all the books published trying to determine why our country is behind Peru in reading and Samoa in mathematics.  All the chatter about the declining levels.  My message to all those eggheads is stop gnashing your teeth about it.  Just join Arnold and me for lunch once and you will understand the situation entirely.

And yeah, we still left the old gal a tip.  It wasn’t her fault.  It’s the system. And what difference does it make?  There’s hardly any used book stores left in any big city in America.  And there’s hardly anyone left alive who’s actually worked in one.  Which takes us back to the subject at hand, Noel Hart’s new book.  I’m waiting for my copy to arrive, at which time I’ll have a few more words to say.  A picture of the back cover and the lengthy blurb gives us a preview.  And Noel said he is working on volume 2, which will include a lot of photos.

The back cover.

Contains over 400 pages crammed with intensity from the trenches of the used book business in Los Angeles. SIGNEDLIMITED EDITION, which includes a piece of the bookshop tipped in! This is unique to each copy, a portion of a page printed in 1753, sourced from Cosmopolitan Bookshop in Hollywood (see photographs). SIGNED in full by Australian author Noel Hart in black ink on title page. Introductory note by Arnold M. Herr. Cover artwork by Rom Anthonis. This is a NON-FICTION book. Rear cover blurb: “Melrose Avenue, Hollywood. Around the turn of the millennium. A classic secondhand bookshop, dusty and dirty, shabby with age and happenstance, packed tight with decades of stagnant accumulation. So messy it resembles the aftermath of a major earthquake. Bring a shovel, dig for treasures! Crackly radio jazz can be heard emanating from somewhere. Michael Jackson browses porn in one aisle; a homeless man sleeps on the floor in another; a transvestite hooker works the trade in a secluded corner behind a stack of boxes; a serious collector collates rare seventeenth-century antiquarian volumes near the front counter; a frenetic movie set decorator rents books throughout. All the while at the center of the maelstrom sits 80-year-old owner Eli Goodman, a ruminative, philosophical, New York-born Jew, intelligent and funny, an obsessive hoarder to the extreme, a caricature character who distinctly resembles Woody Allen dropped into a Marx Brothers movie, and who happens to live in a decrepit hovel at the back of the bookshop. For fifty years Eli has presided over the famous and infamous, the bibliophiles, researchers, collectors, decorators, actors, models, musicians, hipsters, the scholarly, shady, and insane, all congealed into a conglomerate crush at Cosmopolitan Bookshop. Longtime store manager Noel Hart, an Australian, captures it all, stuff s it into a mind-blender, then spills it out onto the page. NOTE: What began as a talk given to the Australian Book Collectors’ Society in 2018, then subsequently published verbatim in their journal in 2019, has now been expanded into a book-length narrative by Noel Hart, who managed Cosmopolitan Bookshop in Los Angeles for ten years.” Printed in Australia. Published in 2023 by Bookwood Press, Melbourne. A Blurb Production. Bound in publisher’s original pictorial wraps. A LIKE NEW very nice clean tight solid softcover copy. Uncommon Signed Limited Edition.

Click here to see the actual website of Cosmopolitan Book Shop.

Click Here to see the video I shot during the final days of Cosmopolitan, featuring Captain Jack LeVan and Julie Webster.

Click Here to read RIP Eli Goodman by Paul Hunt and Arnold Herr.

Click Here to read Eli Goodman laid to rest, with photos of Eli, by Paul Hunt.

“Five” catching up on his reading at Book Soup.

Click Here to read “Swami Anaconda Bananarama Answers the Question Who Are We?” (Written by Five, in full costume). Thanks to CartoonBazooka.com.

Click Here to watch the video Swami Anaconda Bananarama Meditation in Griffith Park.

Click Here to read We The Sheeple by Five.  Thanks to CartoonBazooka.

Click Here to read Breakfast With Jesus Freaks.  Thanks CartoonBazooka.

AND FINALLY  Click Here to order the book And That Was Only The Front Counter on Abebooks.com

 

 

Whatever Happened to Frugalius Maximus?

Hollywood Boulevard Bookstore Follies Part 5

More Legends and Lore

by Paul Hunt

Jim Hubler is quite a character.  He owned Partridge Book Store in Hollywood for years. This was right next door east of the big Pickwick Book Shop, which was probably world famous at that time, 1970’s through the early 1980s.  Jim had a simple strategy for success: his shop was next door to Pickwick, and he existed by a parasitic relationship, he being the parasite.  As I remember, Jim worked in the store as a young man, and when the owner passed, his widow sold the store to Jim, who made payments on it until he owned it. Jim told me that Mr. Partridge, a graduate of UCLA, made a lot of money in the parking lot business in San Francisco, before he got into the book business.

The shop was unusual in many ways.  First were the hours of operation.  No 9 to 5 here, he adjusted his hours to take full advantage of his colossal neighbor, and would usually show up around 4pm, to the cheers of a waiting group of book scouts and customers.  The trick was that he stayed open really late, usually until past midnight, often until 1am.  When Pickwick closed at 10pm a big mob of customers flooded right into Jim’s place.  It was amazing to see this, but that makes perfect sense, since many book lovers are night owls, and where else, even in old Hollywood, could you go to a bookstore that was open that late.  Partridge became a meeting place for all kinds of characters and Jim raked in the cash, making most of his money from 10pm to 1am, when all the other book dealers were sleeping.

A Strange Way to Organize a Bookshop

Another weird thing about Partridge was the way the books were organized, something that I have never seen anywhere else. Jim organized the books by Publisher!  Although he did have used books and a lot of remainders, most of his stock was new.  By organizing by Publisher it was really easy for Jim to check on stock for reorder.  This was long before computers, and Partridge was a one-man act, and he had quite an array of fascinating old shelves and racks.  I still remember the Modern Library rack, packed with all those wonderful little books that are now considered worthy of collecting.  Jim had a great knowledge base in his head and anyone asking for a book would be pointed to the correct publisher’s shelf.  I was reading a lot of science fiction back then, and the Ballentine paperback rack was one of my favorites.  Ballentine also published a great series on World War 2, with a lot of “original” first editions that are still collected today, some 50 years later. It was also the time that Ballentine was publishing the now legendary “Unicorn” fantasy series. The Publishers, by the  way, loved this system, it was an immense ego boost for them to have their own rack in the middle of Hollywood, sort of a showcase for them.

Jim stocked a lot of remainders in order to cater to the Pickwick crowd.  As anyone who ever went into that great store would remember that the ground floor was new books, the small mezzanine  had something or other that I can’t remember, but the top floor was packed with remainders, many from England.  It was overwhelming and so tempting to just spend  your entire paycheck on them.  Jim realized what a big draw Pickwick’s top floor was, so he created a mini-remainder area in his shop.

Another funny thing about Jim, but not so funny for the frustrated publishers, was how he turned book club editions into cash.  He would buy massive quantities of clean Book-of-the-month club editions from book scouts.  As long as they were clean, with nice dust jackets, Jim would pay 50 cents or $1.00 for them.  At first I was puzzled about this, but I was just starting out as a book scout, and I was trained not to pick up book club editions because collectors wanted the first editions.  Sometimes it was hard to tell, because used bookstore owners would “clip” the corner of the dust jacket so it looked like it once had a price on it, so you spent a lot of time flipping over the back of the dust jacket to look for the little dot on the back of the binding which would indicate a Book of the Month edition.

Introducing “R.E.Turner”

Jim’s nick-name was “R.E. Turner”.  He got this because when he sent back returns to the publishers he would include mounds of Book of the Month editions.  I was in the shop once when one of the angry publisher’s rep was trying to lecture Jim that this was not acceptable to the publisher, and they weren’t going to give him credit for the book clubs. Jim told him that they had better give him credit or else.  The rep didn’t want to lose this good account and was pleading with Jim that in some cases he was actually returning more copies than he originally ordered.  “Stop crying about it to me,” Jim said, “you guys make tons of money, just send them out as remainders to someone else.”  Mr. R.E. Turner had spoken.

The Saga of Louis Epstein

Jim had a long run at Partridge, until fate smiled at him, and boy, did he smile back.  Here’s what happened to the best of my recollection:  Old man Louis Epstein was the owner of the mighty Pickwick Book Shop, the central fixture in the galaxy of book stores that were in Hollywood at that time.  Epstein had started out in downtown Los Angeles in the really old days of the 1930’s, in a little shop near the original Dawson;s Book Shop, around Wilshire and Figuroa.  He bought the shop from another old bookseller, who gave him a piece of advice:  “Never pay more than 10 cents for any used book and you will make a profit.”  That wasn’t much money in the 1930s, but things have gotten worse now, with amazon.com selling books for a penny. Who would have known?  But the formula worked for years, both for Louie and his brother, who worked at another used book shop called Bennett and Marshall.  As a side note, when Louie’s brother was in his 80s, he was still scouting for rare books.  He was a tall, stately man, and I remember seeing him at estate sales in the 1980s.  He would charge into the sale waving his stout wooden cane around and bellowing at the top of his voice “Clear the way, Bennett and Marshall coming through for the books.”  Bennett and Marshall, once eminent rare book dealers, had pretty much faded by the 1980s, and were under new ownership for a while, and then disappeared entirely from their retail store in West Hollywood.  But hey, the bellowing and the wooden cane searing through the air were enough to clear the way for Louie’s brother and scare off the competition. By that time, nobody knew who the hell Bennett and Marshall were, but it was a good idea not to rile the tall old man, whoever he was.

Epstein dealt in literature and poetry, but was having a hard time of it, all the while seeing his neighbor Ernest Dawson doing a pretty good business with a lot of the L.A. trade passing through his doors.  Then fortune smiled on Louie.  A movie studio came in and wanted to rent 5,000 books.  When pressed for a rental amount, he blurted out 5 cents a day per book.  The studio folks were happy with that, and Epstein wrote up a rental document, which was to last for 30 days.  Time passed, and the books never returned. Epstein called a few times but was given the run-around.  About a year later a truck pulled up in front of his shop and dropped off the 5,000 books that had been used by the studio as set props. The studio sent him a check for the rental for 30 days.  After some phone calls, protesting that they owed him $250. per day for 365 days, the studios said “no way, we only needed them for 30 days.  Sorry that we forgot to send them back on time, go pound sand.”  Louie phoned his lawyer instead.  The attorney extracted the full amount from the Studio, a very substantial figure. Their lax business practice cost them nearly $100,000, big money in the 1940s.  When Louie called his attorney to collect the money, his lawyer refused to give it to him.  “If I give you this money, you’ll just spend it foolishly buying more books and having a good time.  So here’s the deal:  you go find a building to buy and I will release the money into escrow, that way at least you will have your own store.”  And that is how Louis Epstein ended up owning the building on Hollywood Blvd. that became the mighty Pickwick Bookshop.

Artisan’s Patio today

Epstein expanded Pickwick and in the 1970s opened shops in malls around Southern California.  He also bought the Artisan’s Patio for one of his sons to run.  This was a long, quaint alleyway to the east of Partridge, which is still in operation, filled with small business and craft shops. In the early 1970s it was the home to bookseller Fred Dorsett.  Pickwick’s expansion attracted the attention of B. Dalton, who was moving into the area, and wanted to add Pickwick to their chain.  Around the time B. Dalton took over Pickwick they decided to buy the property next door, which included the shop that Jim was operating out of.  When Jim got word that the building was for sale he went right to the landlord and bought it.  This was a master-stroke of business acumen, and in a short time, I believe it was only a couple years, he flipped it for a nice profit.  Jim closed his shop around 1976, actually selling the book shop to a guy who ran it into the ground in short order.  He then sold the building and retired. He was 42, and he began a new life of travel and uber frugality and “dumpster dipping” as he calls it.

B. Dalton’s Colossal Mistake

B.Dalton then made another colossal mistake.  They started changing Pickwick, in fact they ruined it, driving away most of the customers.  It was crazy, they took out the entire second floor of remainders and converted it to office space. In contrast, Epstein’s entire office was a desk in the middle of the first floor.  They also did not carry the eclectic mix that Epstein had so painstakingly built up over the years: books from small publishers, beautiful remainders from England, odd stuff that no one else had.  Epstein was a master bookseller.  He came up the hard way, and knew more in his little finger than B. Dalton’s entire army of executives.  They quickly ran his empire into the ground.  Old Epstein made a huge pile of money from the sale, enough to carry him and family for the rest of eternity if need be.

Frugalius Maximus Knew How To Cut Expenses

Jim was a clever investor, and made enough income to live, although he was frugal to the bone.  In all the years in his shop, he never had the usual “letterheads”, “invoices”, etc.  Business cards maybe, although I don’t have one in my possession. He would start screaming at the very idea of spending any money on such nonsense as office stationary.  A rubber stamp and some old envelopes, using the back side for notes and correspondence to the publishers.  “There’s plenty of paper around, just look through the dumpsters and you’ll find huge amounts you can use,” was his advice to aspiring book-sellers.

“Captain” Jack LeVan

It was “Captain” Jack LeVan who gave Jim the nick-name “Frugalius Maximus“.  Jack Levan (died Jan 1, 2020) owned a book shop in Inglewood, Vajra Bookshop, that he kept open for some unknown reason, certainly not for that of income accumulation, as book buyers are scarce in that corner of Los Angeles. Additionally, his partner was a Tibetan silversmith, another odd twist, as the Tibetan book pricing system was something that startled many residents of the Inglewood area.  Nonetheless, Jack was the man who knew some of the truly world-class Jim Hubler frugality stories, like the Big Potato Heist.

The Big Potato Heist

Jim, for years living in a little cottage-like apartment in Santa Monica, which is actually the remaining half of an old motel wedged in between the modern condo behemoths that line the street,  had a daily routine.  Every morning he went for a walk and used the exercise to root through the hundreds of bins lining the alleys. Once in a while, carefully sifting some ephemera, he would hit a little jackpot.  One day, he found a nice coupon in the dumpster.  It was for 10 pounds of potatoes for 99 cents.  A good start anyway.  The coupon was good at a local independent market not far from Jim’s cruising range, so he dropped in during the busiest time of day.  This particular store was trying to lure in new customers by claiming a short wait time in the checkout line.  A sign was posted that if you waited in line more than three minutes they would give you a dollar.  Jim smiled his wicked smile.  This was like taking candy from a baby.  He grabbed the bag of potatoes and got in line, and then kept slithering backwards to the end of the line, until around three minutes had passed, some amount of time, but who was really keeping track anyway?

He then stormed up to the manager and said he had waited in line over three minutes and demanded the dollar.  The manager gave him a chit for the buck, and when he got to the checkout, he handed the chit to the cashier, along with the coupon for the 10 pounds of potatoes for 99 cents, and waited patiently while the clerk figured it all out, and handed him back a penny change, which Jim gratefully accepted.  Hah!  There were enough potatoes in the bag to last almost a month, and he gleefully recounted that the store had paid him a penny to take away 10 pounds of the big bombers.  There were about 20 potatoes in the bag, which meant that each one that he baked and ate cost him .0005 of a cent.  Now that’s frugal!

The Ex-Lax Bonanza

On another alley cruising day, Jim hit an unusual bonanza.  A bin with several packages of Ex-Lax laxative.  One of the packages was opened, but the others were sealed.  In with the packages was the receipt.  Someone, nobody knows who, was so constipated that he or she had grabbed a half-year’s supply of those yummy little chocolates.  Jim quickly realized that this could be quite a business opportunity for him.  He had no personal need for the laxative, he is mainly a vegetarian, thin as a rail, the only thing protruding is a thick walrus mustache.  Jim did his due diligence and research before making his move. He noticed that the package had a “money back” guarantee printed on it, promising a full refund “if not satisfied”.  Something like “no go….no pay.”

Jim checked all the local drug stores, and came across a price disparity.  The price that was printed on the receipt was a lower price than what some of the other stores in the same chain had on the product.  Jim quickly realized the arbitrage potential.  He carefully took one packet at a time back to one of the high priced drug emporiums, and received a full refund.  This became a big bonanza for Jim, because not only did he sell back the packets of Ex-Lax that he had found in the dumpster, but he began buying more packets at the low-priced store and selling them for refunds at the higher priced stores, the arbitrage being over a dollar a packet.  This went on for weeks until  the drug chain stabilized the prices.  They were also getting suspicious of this lanky old guy who would come in once or twice a week to return an Ex-Lax packet. “Why does this stupid old man keep buying Ex-Lax if the stuff doesn’t work?” they thought. Never in a thousand years did they ever dream they were being sharked by a brilliant business entrepreneur, one with too much time on his hands, but eager for even a small victory over one of the world’s largest drug pushers.

Don’t Bother With The Door Bell

Captain Jack and I would stop over to see Jim once in a while. The front of his cottage is packed with hundreds of small pots of cactus he has accumulated.  Jim was living cheap, for years he didn’t even have a phone.  Or a working doorbell.  No problem.  Jack explained that if one went to the door and knocked, Jim would not answer, suspicious of anyone who would approach after dark.  Jack knew Jim better than anyone on earth.  He had a simple way of attracting Jim’s attention.  Jack went to the front porch, took a quarter out of his pocket, and dropped it on the porch.  The sound of the 25 cent piece hitting the cement brought an immediate response, and Jim peered through the curtains to see who was dropping coin on his porch.  Jack told me later that in past times he  used a dime, but Jim’s hearing was not as good as it used to be, so Jack had to upgrade to a quarter, which made a louder noise as it hit the pavement.

The Second Refrigerator

Our pleasant conversations with Jim, who is opinionated to the max about everything, are certainly entertaining.  Recently we stopped by to see how he was doing. He is hobbling around with a walker due to a hip operation.  The big change is in the living room, where Jim has wedged in a second refrigerator that he got from someone who was evicted from one of the nearby units. Who says refrigerators have to be in the kitchen?  They can be anywhere you need them.  Having a second refrigerator can be a big plus in a small apartment, somewhere to stash a lot of odds and ends that somehow pop out of nowhere. Things you don’t really need, but are worth saving in case you might need them someday, so it’s nice to have a catch-all to keep them in, plus the flat top is great for pilling boxes and old copies of the L.A. Times.  Looking inside revealed some interesting items.  It’s packed with stuff, so upon opening the door a couple things fell out, one being an old tin sign that was advertising a restaurant – gas station off the old Highway 99.  It said something like “Eat Here and Get Gas.”

Peering in, I was fascinated to see two interesting looking mousetraps, a bag of hot chocolate mix, another bag containing some vintage rice, various cans of cleaners like End Dust, and a big old jar of “Flower of Sulpher”.  “That came from a guy who was an old pharmacist”, Jim cheerfully explained.  Jim abruptly shut the refer door on me, “OK, show’s over, I’m going to sleep.”  It was after 2 a.m.  We had been talking for over 3 hours.

As I drove Captain Jack back to his place in Inglewood, we reviewed the night’s conversation.  It was a challenge to follow Jim sometimes, because he goes off on so many tangents.  He might be talking about old Hollywood booksellers one minute, then all of a sudden he’s telling you about his trip to Africa, sleeping in his car off-road to save money, instead of staying in ritzy hotels.  It’s cool to be frugal.  But after having lived in a van for several years, a high-priced luxury hotel with a big screen TV and a hot shower sounds pretty good to me.

Paul Hunt & Captain Jack Levan (2016)

Photo by Julie Webster

 

Hollywood Bookstore History

 Article on Stanley Rose Sheds Light on Early Hollywood Literary Scene

by Paul Hunt

The website LAist, run by Southern California Public Radio (KPPC) published an interesting article on the history of  Stanley Rose and his influence on the Los Angeles literary scene in the 1930s.   Click Here to read the article by Hadley Meares and view some rare photos that picture Rose and some of his literary friends.

To fill in a few tidbits not in the article, some old memories and stories about the era will add to the flavor of the times.  Rose opened a bookstore on Vine Street called Satyr Books, next to the famous Brown Derby. He was partners with a man named N.M. “Mac” Gordon, who was evidently manager of a downtown Los Angeles Bookstore.  He later moved to Hollywood Blvd. and located next door to Musso and Franks, the famous restaurant which is still there today. There was an old timer who worked for me at my book shop in Burbank, Atlantis Books, named Bill Chase.  He was in his late 60s when I hired him, he had retired but didn’t want to hang around the house and get in his wife’s hair, and needed a part time job.  He was one of the most knowledgeable booksellers I have ever met.  He was a treasure to have him at the shop, and his memory was sharp, with excellent recall of book titles and authors. Within a couple of weeks at my shop he know the entire stock better than all the rest of us combined.

Bill Chase, Manager of Gilbert’s Book Shop.

William Grover Chase, born in New Jersey on November 13, in 1918 who died in Burbank, CA on June 11, 1992. He is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) and the marker says:
“Beloved Husband and Father. Your humor will be missed”.  Thanks to Valerie Burroughs for the above information.  PH

 

Bill had been the manager of Gilbert’s Bookshop on Hollywood Blvd just east of Vine.  The store was owned by Ed Gilbert, who was married to one of the daughters of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  According to Bill Chase, Ed started in the book business by taking over the Satyr Bookshop on Vine.  I am assuming that it occured when Stanley Rose moved to Hollywood Blvd.  Possibly Rose split with his partner Gordon,  I don’t know this for sure.  The details of the transaction are unknown, but later Gilbert moved around the corner on to Hollywood Blvd., where he stayed for over 40 years.  Bill Chase was manager for most of that time.

Photo by Wayne Braby

A really colorful character, not mentioned in the LAist piece, was a guy named Larry Edmunds..  He was evidently a partner of Stanley Rose.  In the 1930s he developed a talent,  possibly learned from Rose, to peddle books to the movie studio executives.  The rumor that I picked up over the  years was that the books that Edmunds flogged to the studios were, let’s say, of the more prurient type, not available in any bookstore.  Edmunds was known eventually as “The  Lothario of Hollywood Blvd.”, and a detailed piece about him was once published in an old issue of Los Angeles Magazine.

The LAist article mentions the heavy drinking that went on around Rose’s Hollywood Blvd. store.  Larry Edmunds, a young man at the time, was also a big boozer, which led to his horrible demise.  He was also described as a good looking young man who was really popular with the many movie studio secretaries who he met while visiting the studios.  The rumors were that he also had flings with some of the wives of  the studio executives.   At some point Edmunds had a falling out with Rose,  or was cast loose when Rose  closed his store.   Edmunds was on his own, and opened his own shop on Cahuenga Blvd., just south of Hollywood Blvd.  I think the whole building he  was in was torn down or remodled and like many of the landmarks of old Hollywood, is now gone forever.

Someday, if  there is any interest, I’ll write down what I know about that colorful guy Larry Edmunds, and trace the history of his shop  which is still operating today on Hollywood Blvd.,  although it has gone through other owners and is now the only surviving book store left on Hollywood Blvd., specializing in the memorabilia of  Hollywood..

Stanley Rose was actually a great promoter of authors, and as told by the good LAist article, helped some of our home-grown authors get published.  He was one  of a  kind, and despite the heavy  boozing, ran a very unique book store which was a watering hole for many of our best authors. It was a good place to hang out.  We have nothing like this today.  Even in the heyday of Hollywood bookstores, 1970s-1980s, I can’t recall any place like it.  In fact, many of the book stores discouraged people to just hang around..  Even Barnes and Noble removed most of  their chairs and couches after experimenting with the idea of creating a welcome  space.  Too many homeless folks would  just park themselves in the store all day.

NOHO Farenheit 451

Arsonists Set Fire at Iliad Book Shop in NOHO

by Paul Hunt

Book Shop is open but still blowing out the smoke.

A fire was set at the entrance of Iliad Book Shop in North Hollywood, CA. on late Thursday night November 3, 2022.  This was a deliberate act of arson, as not only were books piled up against the entry doors and set alight, but threatening fliers were posted on several walls of the shop.

Luckily a passerby spotted the fire and was able to flag down an L.A. Fire Department truck that was driving by.  Quick action by the Firemen extinguished the blaze, but the store filled with smoke, damaging many books.  The two bookstore cats, loved by the customers as well as the owner, were rescued.

Most of the smoke has been cleared, but remaining damage has to be taken care of.  If the flames had spread inside it would have been a much worse situation, as the smoke can ruin books and then water pouring on them will, of course, ruin the books totally. 

 

Owner Dan Weinstein

Dan Weinstein, owner of Iliad Books is grateful for the quick action of the LAFD, but also that his two beloved cats, Apollo and Zeus were saved.  You can see a photo of Apollo sleeping on a ladder at the home page of Bookstore Memories. Sometimes when I was sitting on the floor in the Iliad browsing through books, Apollo would come over and closely inspect my choices, letting me know which books I should buy.  A very literary cat!  Zeus, the other feline, seemed to like the warm basket on the counter, accepting adoration from the customers.  Dan certainly has two of the best managers a bookstore could ever ask for.

We will be reporting further on this attack.  The questions of who set the fire and why, and the incredible series of recent arson fires in NOHO.  Meanwhile, please go to the Iliad Book Shop website.  They have a Go Fund Me page if readers can donate to help them replace the doors and install security cameras.

 IliadBooks.com

Hollywood’s Lost Book World East of Vine

From Bookstore Memories Time Capsule Archives: 

Universal Books, Hot Dogs, Nazi Bikers, Texas Rangers, and the Hollywood Bookseller’s Baseball League Starring Icky Icky Icky as a Fastball

Mark Sailor’s Nostalgic Memories of his Early Days in the Long-

Vanished Hollywood Book Trade East of Vine Street

Universal Book Store
Photo by Wayne Braby

Editors note:  Mark sailor wrote this about his early adventures in the Hollywood book trade.  The manuscript is undated, and I found it in Frank Mosher’s storage unit many years ago when I helped him move an enormous bunch of books and shelves.  I worked with dear friend Mark during the last couple of years of Cliff’s Books. We had known each other since the early 1970s.  He  died about a year before Cliff’s closed down.  Hope you enjoy this travel back to the days when Hollywood was lined with book stores, the golden age of the late 1960s and the 1970s.

Story by Mark Sailor

The south side of Hollywood Boulevard at Argyle was a squalid corner in the early seventies.  Universal Books existed only because of the times in which we lived:  a group of tiny shops jumbo packed between the Dog House and Marlow’s Magazines on the corner.  Serenaded by an endless rendition of Dueling Banjos through the paper thin walls that separated Universal Books from the cowboy bar just next door, we hosted Nazi biker gangs curbside on Friday Nights.

Marlows Book Shop
Photo by Wayne Braby

Our regular clientele included Don Morphis, “Head Reverend of the Church of Satan of Hollywood”, and Frank Braun, ex-Texas Ranger, a sometimes unwelcome frequent flier.  Frank had 19 packages of books on the hold shelf above the front counter of the book shop.

We lived in a time of the world of dreams as large as the Bingo Mansions and the Hollyberries who instantly occupied their immediate celebrity west of the Sunset Strip.  But we lived in a real-world east of Vine Street where rents diminished the farther one traveled into the habitat of ex-Nixonista refugees from Asia and the lands of the troubled Middle East.  Like living on Pluto at the edge of the Solar System,  we were at the edge of the Hollywood book world, east of Vine, in the shadow of the fading glamour of the Brown Derby and The Broadway Department Store.  In fact, just west of Argyle was the last outpost of the Hollywood Dream, the beautiful Pantages Theater.  The bulk of the bookshops were sprinkled west of Vine all the way to Highland Avenue.

I was a student at Occidental College.  My scholarship did not include meals.  I worked at Universal Books at night.  I learned to “slap jackets” there and my mentor Larry Mullen taught me cataloging.  It was my job to catalog the Black Americana collection started by Jerry Weinstein, a book maven and previous owner.  Jules Manasseh was the co-owner and had entered the book world as an auto insurance salesperson.  Jules’ manic presence as banker and novice bookseller provided a fertile backdrop of excitement and angst.  We were always broke.  Mrs. Manasseh’s matzoh ball soup on weekend nights was a blessing unexpected and usually happened following a big sale.

Universal Books was a small shop of 1000 square feet divided into two rooms; a main browsing parlor on Hollywood Boulevard and a backroom where books were processed by myself and fellow future bookseller Melvin Gupton.  Melvin was a student at Ambassador College.  He worked nights as I did.  Later, Melvin moved to Valley Book City on Lankershim Blvd. in North Hollywood.  In the eighties Melvin opened Modern Times Bookshop in Pasadena and specialized in art and first editions.  His brilliance was as unexcelled as his petulance toward everyday duties like making coffee and bathroom cleaning.  His early death some years later was a loss to the world of knowledgeable and seasoned booksellers.

It was because of the shortage of money that I was chosen to call Frank Braun, ex-Texas Ranger so he could pay for one or more of the nineteen packages on hold.

“You wanna get paid, huh?”  Frank Braun was terse.  “You bring packages #2 and #19 to the Dog House in twenty minutes.”

“How will I know you?”

“Don’t worry about me – I’ll know you,” he quipped.

I turned to Larry.  He was already getting the packages down off the shelf.

“You gonna tell him Frank Braun’s got a gun?” Jules pealed.

“Don’t worry.  He won’t use it.” Larry answered.  His voice was flat as a pancake.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Cause he’s a nut,” Jules answered, “and an anti-Semitic bastard.”

“You gotta go” Larry told me.  “We need the money.”

The Dog House was a little Cinderella-style building 40 feet long and about as high as two trailers stacked sandwich style on top of one another.  The dogs were as good and cheap as the clientele.  Expatriates of the cowboy bar mingled with horse racing cappers.  Hollyweirders abounded.  Sometimes the lines into the Dog House exceeded the benches waiting for diners.  It was a jumpin’ joint.

An arm in a trench coat yanked me.  “You Mark?” the voice demanded.

I nearly dropped the book packages.  It was Frank Braun.

“Guess you wanna get paid?” Frank peeled open his Bogart-like coat, revealing a 45 and a checkbook.  I was so scared I almost washed my pants.

“You seen Larry lately?  He’s a hang dog and lost his spirit.  You tell Jules ‘the Jew’ Manasseh that Frank Braun’s ready to meet him anytime.”

I got Frank’s check and hurried back to the bookshop.  Sans hot dogs, sans kraut.

Universal Books existed as a bookshop because of the high esteem in which books were held.  No electronic device could replace Uncle Tom’s Cabin with the telltale “Stereotyped by Hobart and Robbins” and the 1851 moniker in two blind stamped brown cloth volumes which made it an exceptional and rare work.  No computer could duplicate signed copies of W.E.B. Dubois “The Souls of Black Folk” or Jean Toomer’s “CANE”.  The electronic equivalency and/or convenience of the Kindle iron lung dependent on a battery or a cord mirage existence, now you see it, now you don’t, just didn’t exist.

Book scouts, legendary and famous, were always coming into Universal Books.  Maybe they wanted money from the previous book buy, maybe they didn’t.  I got to know Jack Crandall, who later discovered a collection of incunabula in Kansas and bought an honest to God mesa in Arizona, complete with Indian bones and the remains of failed Conquistadors.  Jack was great; he found the exceptional book and we sold it.

‘Doc’ Burroughs, a gruff and talented book scout, provided occult and mystical books.  His presence was often joined by another great bookseller, Paul Hunt.  Paul’s star as a bookseller traveled and ascended into several great shops in Burbank, including Book Castle, and a store called Atlantis Book Shop, specializing in the paranormal and UFOs.  An encouraging friend, Paul also helped create the California Book Fair, a convention of booksellers gathered annually at the Glendale Civic Auditorium or the Burbank Hilton.  It was there such luminaries as Jay Leno and Kevin Tighe began their book collecting careers.

Doc, Larry and Jules provided the final boot to the Nazi Bikers.  On Friday nights “Icky Icky Icky” the biker leader would come in, pick a Bible from the shelf, tear it up and goose-step out of Universal Books with his arm and middle finger doing a HEIL HITLER.  After some weeks of this grandstanding, the boys (Jules and Larry) called Doc for help.   At about 8:15 that night, Icky Icky Icky met a baseball bat invitation from the “Hollywood Booksellers Baseball League”. His head was to be the fastball.  He was escorted out of the store.  It took a lot to subdue Doc Burroughs, who really wanted some batting practice.

The answer to our troubles was a bullet through the front window some weeks later.  Ironically it was from Frank Braun, whose gall overcame his pall of resentment about Jules.  I found out later Frank had commissioned Igor (Hollywood’s carpenter who built bookshelves) to build 20 bookcases on wheels with doors, so to move from his Beachwood address in the event of attack or invasion by the communists.  Some kids dumped boulders on Frank’s roof and Frank released the 20 cases down Beachwood Drive.  I never heard from him again.

Larry Mullen moved to Mexico.  Jules Manasseh moved his store up to the middle of Hollywood Boulevard some years later.  Doc Burroughs and Paul Hunt opened the Atlantis Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard and after Doc’s death Paul moved to Burbank and re-opened the shop on the old Golden Mall where it flourished for many years.

The high shelves at the Universal Bookshop and its depth of stock was a delight to many a book reader.  Its passing was unmentioned like a Blanche DuBois typescript unremembered for want of a cast of characters.  In its Streetcar Named Desire was the beginning of a long journey into the book world of rarity and wonderment.  It was a fine community of Hollywood bookstores.  Those book stores now exist only on bookshelves in readers homes throughout the City.  Perhaps you have some copies in your home too, books from Hollywood’s lost book world, east of Vine.