How Amazon Controls The Book World

The Secret of “Closed Generic Strings” and the Magic of the Powerful Words They Hide in Their Vault

The most powerful word in the book world is “Book”. It is owned by Amazon. They also own “Author”, “Buy”, “Pay”, “Prime”.
“Song”, “Tunes”, “Wow”, and maybe “Read”.

A Journey into History and Magic by Paul Hunt

The used and antiquarian book business began to change by 2013, into something that looks a lot different today. The 1970’s -1990s were probably the golden years for booksellers in Southern California, for both new and used books. In the 1970s Hollywood Blvd. was packed with bookstores. Pickwick Book Shop anchored the western end of the Street and book stores, back-issue magazine stores, and newsstands spread east to around Argyle Ave. What happened?

A lot of factors went into the turbulent cultural change. Technology and the Internet certainly were, at the end of the millennium, the basic factors. There were others, like an escalating spiral of high rents, the crime wave that hit Hollywood when the Mayor and the big Donkeys decided to push through a “Redevelopment” scam that would work as a regional part of the Great Society’s Urban Renewal, or as the great Jack LeVan said, “Urban Ruin-all”. I was just getting into the used book business in the 1960s when LBJ’s program started to gut out the centers of many major cities across the country, which meant that thousands of older buildings were torn down and hundreds of bookstores were tanked in the process. The same thing happened in Los Angeles.

There were bookstores in downtown Los Angeles and many had spread west on 6th Street in the 1930s. Urban Renewal pushed the survivors westward. Dawson’s ended up on Larchmont, Zeitlin settled into a barn on La Cienega, a few like Caravan managed to hang on until recent times. Hollywood Blvd had book stores from the 1920s on up, and became the mecca of literature by the 1960s.

When high rents and high crime began to force book stores out of Hollywood, many went to Westwood and further to Santa Monica. Others moved to Burbank’s old Outdoor Mall. Unfortunately, the rents continued to climb and the internet experienced massive growth.

There is now little left of the once plentiful book and magazine stores. It was a wipe-out, a cultural destruction of enormous consequences, and continues until today. Society had opened up the floodgates of unlimited immigration which, with redevelopment, drove rents up, while the trillions in printing press money pounded the value of the dollar down. The culture, bookstores, art galleries, small theaters, newspapers, magazines, all buckled under the pressure and many collapsed.

From this wasteland of reality emerged a new world. It is a world that is in the ethos, somewhere in time and space, sometimes called “the cloud”, or generally, “the internet”. It it invisible until you get a device that will connect you to the ethereal realm and make it visible to you. Without a device, you cannot see or hear the new world. It is a new land, with domains instead of cities. It rules commerce and will soon rule the world with the introduction of “artificial intelligence”. And if something ever happens to shatter the connection, humanity will be stripped of everything.

In 1994 Jeff Bezos founded an on-line bookselling company called Cadabra
(you know, like Abracadabra, the old magic word). The usage of the word Abracadabra goes back to the late 1600s. It is said to have originated in the Balkins, and may be traced back to Gnostic teachings and a cabalistic name for Almighty God. It is used in magic and magik, a term meaning a transition, something that is happening, something magical: a rabbit is pulled out of a hat.

Bezos decided early on that just the word Cadabra sounded too much like “cadaver” so he came up with “amazon” named after a legendary race of warrior women living somewhere at the edge of the world. Bezos was into words of power and he soon devised a plan to control the mighty words so that nobody else could use them, in effect pulling them from use in the domains of the internet, the new territory of time and space, and by keeping them locked in his vault in the “cloud”, he would deprive any competitor from using them. If this sounds esoteric, it is.

Bezos is also a Wall Street guy, and worked at a hedge fund, so he had contacts to get financing, to launch an IPO, to sell corporate bonds, etc. He officially launched amazon.com on July 6, 1995. In 1997 he launched his IPO with 3 million shares of stock at $18 per share. The stock closed at $23.25, and Amazon made 54 million dollars in one day, much more than selling books. The stock is now over $174 per share. The market cap for Amazon is now $1.81 Trillion Dollars.  

The new Top Level Domains (TLD)

Around 2012 there began a heated discussion and competition among various companies and persons about the subject of TLDs and gTLDs, (Generic Top Level Domains). The public had been aware of .com, .org, .biz, etc., the original top level domains that most folks were using back in the turn of the century. Even today, .com is still the most popular domain designation. The problem for many folks is that all the “good” and powerful and valuable names have been taken. This has happened in the book business also. For instance, type in book.com. You can’t get this for your domain, because it is actually owned by Barnes and Noble, and book.com will resolve to barnesandnoble.com. The big guys have sucked up all the good .com names.

So the pressure was for the non-profits who run the internet, like ICANN, to make other top level domains, so that a person or company could, for instance have book.academy, or some other top level domain. Book.academy for example, may not be as good as book.com, but it is not bad, assuming someone does not already have it. A great website is TLD-list.com, where you can see an alphabetical list of all top level domains, and if they are active, a chart comparing prices from various registries. Pay particular attention to the “renewal” fee, because unlike .com which is very reasonable, some TLDs have low first year entrance fees but huge renewal fees for year two and so on. You will also notice that a fair amount of the listed TLDs are “not available”.

Closed Generic Strings

There was a private auction in November of 2014 by ICANN of their new generic top level domains (gTLDs). Amazon was a big winner at this auction, bidding through a shadowy branch of theirs in Luxembourg, with an international domain consultant company, and of course, a suitcase full of money to put up the millions of dollars it would need to put the Bezos plan of action into reality. For some time before the auction, there was a lot of debate, because Amazon was accused of planning to buy up certain gTLDs and then keep them in a vault and not release them for use. This is called holding Closed Generic Strings, a technical term. This was exactly the plan that Bezos had, because the words are powerful, and it was worth untold millions to snag them and keep them from use by competitors.

Here’s a few of the great gTLDs that Amazon owns: .book, .buy, .author, .now, .pay, .prime, .song, .tunes, .wow, and possibly .read. It is hard to track these down, but there’s a partial list. The most important to our book world discussion are .book, .author, and .read. These powerful words are in Amazon’s vault, and have been for years. Despite these having an original rule that whoever buys them can only have them for 10 years, Amazon seems to have figured out how to keep these forever. It’s like when Disney managed to bludgeon the copyright laws of the United States so they could keep Mickey Mouse for additional years. Money, power, and Wall Street talk the big talk.

By using a generic name, like book, we could have potentially thousands of booksellers getting together and registering their names like PickwickBookShop.book, or Antiquarian.book. If the renewal rate was reasonable, a lot of book folks, publishers, writers, and booksellers would be using .book as their domain. But Bezos does not want the competition.

The same is true of .author, another generic name that Amazon has locked up. Many authors and writers would love to have their name and use the gTLD of .author. Example johnsmith.author. The same would be true of .read, but this would appeal to an even broader audience.

It is not enough for Amazon to control the new book market. They also control a huge part of the used book market. And although they have large numbers of independent sellers, they also have ways of putting their own used books first. They also own Abebooks.com, the largest formerly independent platform for used books. Abebooks owns bookfinder, a large site to search for books. Amazon also owns Goodreads.com, a huge site that does book reviews; IMDB.com which houses all the information about films; Twitch.com, a huge gaming site, and through other entities such web sites as Wag.com (pet supplies), Soap.com (household needs), Diapers.com (baby supplies), and BeautyBar.com (cosmetics) and a whole lot more. Amazon has been known to buy up smaller competitor’s sites and then close them.

Before ICANN handed over these powerful names to Amazon, there were a lot of negative comments and warnings from other competitors and community watchdog groups, all ignored, but here is a sampling below:

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Heather Dryden, an Australian consumer advocate: the applicant is “seeking exclusive access to a common generic string .. that relates to a broad market sector,” which Ms. Dryden notes could have unintended consequences and a negative impact on competition. Amazon was subject to a large amount of identical warnings.

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Barnes and Noble sent a scathing letter:

Barnes & Noble, Inc. submits this letter to urge ICANN to deny Amazon.com’s application to purchase several top level domains (TLDs), most notably .book, .read and .author (collectively the “Book TLDs”). Amazon, the dominant player in the book industry, should not be allowed to control the Book TLDs, which would enable them to control generic industry terms in a closed fashion with disastrous consequences not only for bookselling but for the American public. If Amazon, which controls approximately 60% of the market for eBooks and 25% of the physical book market, were granted the exclusive use of .book, .read and .author, Amazon would use the control of these TLDs to stifle competition in the bookselling and publishing industries, which are critical to the future of copyrighted expression in the United States.

Amazon’s ownership would also threaten the openness and freedom of the internet and would have harmful consequences for internet users worldwide. When ICANN announced its plan to increase the number of TLDs available on the Domain Name System, one of its stated goals was to enhance competition and consumer choice. However, if the Book TLDs applications are granted to Amazon, no bookseller or publisher other than Amazon will be able to register second-level domain names in .book, .read and .author without Amazon’s approval, leaving Amazon free to exclude competitors and exploit the generic Book TLDs for its sole benefit

(It must be noted that although I agree with Barnes and Noble’s argument, they themselves have a lock on book.com.)

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The Booksellers Association of Switzerland:

In the case of a closed generic TLD like .books, the exclusivity granted to the winning applicant would de facto strengthen the position of a single big operator in the book industry and would be detrimental to the industry as a whole

There were many more comments against Amazon, including a lot of competitors who applied for the powerful generic names. They were all rejected.

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And so Jeff Bezos said “abacadabra” and now out of the ethereal universe comes to his vault .book, .author, .pay, .now, .prime, .buy, .song, .tunes, and more. It’s magic, folks, and for these powerful words that cannot be touched or used by the unwashed masses, he traded paper tokens produced with more magic by the Federal Reserve. There is a veil over our heads, and it’s hard to peep through the fabric to see the unseen universe and the magik, magic, mystery, prestidigitation, wizardry, sorcery and incantation involved.

Hey, what about .page? Oh, that’s owned by google.com. The good news is that it is available and very reasonable to renew. So kudos to google, and hope this helps some folks travel down their path to finding their very own domain. Just remember, you can trade your tokens to rent it, but you can never actually “own” it. It is only “real” in the alternate universe of the “internet”, and controlled by an entity that used to be referred to as the “I Am” in this world, now called the “I Can” or ICANN in the world of the magical universe.

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.