Tag Archives: Bookstores

The Book Stalls of Al-Mutunabbi Street

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Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here: Marking the Anniversary of a Disaster in Iraq
For my part, I think it’s important to try to remember all of it, to remember as much as we can reasonably hold in our hearts and minds.
by
Claudia Lefko

A car bomb exploded on Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad on March 5, 2007. Thirty people were killed and an estimated one hundred others were wounded. Car bombings were common in Iraq in those terrible an terrifying years. So many bombings over so many years, they barely made the news here in the US.

But the bombing on Al-Mutanabbi Street got the public’s attention. The street is a cultural, literary and intellectual hub famous for its print shops, book stores, book stalls and cafes. The bomb destroyed the famous Al-Shabandar Cafe, killing four sons and a grandson of the owner, Mohammed Al-Khashali, the cafe’s owner, the great-great-great-grandson of the original 1917 owner. The dead and injured might respectfully be considered as collateral damage here, because the target—what was targeted for destruction—was ideas, culture, words and books, freedom of expression. This struck a nerve. People, maybe especially activists, artists, poets and writers, took notice, San Francisco poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil responded by organizing Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, an ongoing project calling on writers and artists around the country and the world to respond on the anniversary of the bombing each year. This year, the eleventh year of the project, there will be some thirty readings and exhibits in cities around the country and around the world: in New York and San Francisco, in Baghdad, Paris, London and Dublin; in New Delhi, India and Craigieburn, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia to name a few.

“Why remember? Why commemorate this particular event when there has been so much mayhem, death and destruction in Iraq over the last three decades.”

I’ve heard people wonder about this project. Why remember? Why commemorate this particular event when there has been so much mayhem, death and destruction in Iraq over the last three decades. After affirming the value of life , the significance of so many lives lost and altered, someone in the audience will inevitably and rightfully suggest that an act of destruction targeting a community or a country’s history, culture and ideas is more worrisome. Such an act, poses an existential threat. Yes, fair enough.

For my part, I think it’s important to try to remember all of it, to remember as much as we can reasonably hold in our hearts and minds. Understanding what has happened to Iraq and Iraqis over the last thirty years helps to understand Iraq as it is today, and Iraqis. It’s easy to forget, and many people have forgotten, their minds and hearts filled with concerns about other—new and ongoing—wars.

George Bush the senior launched the First Gulf War on January 19, 1991; four days later the US and allied forces announced they had flown more than 12,000 bombing missions. That massive bombing campaign essentially destroyed the country. In his report some weeks after the war “ended” UN Under-Secretary-General Martti Ahtisaari wrote: “Nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which had befallen the country… Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensives use of energy and technology.”

On February 13, 1991—on the 28th consecutive day of intense bombing in Baghdad —a “bunker-busting smart bomb” crashed through the roof of the Al-Amariyah bomb shelter killing an estimated 400 women, girls and young boys. Men and older boys—fathers, grandfathers, brothers and sons—had left for the night, leaving their wives, mothers, sisters, sons and grandsons in imagined safety.

The second Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq began on March 20 , 2003 with the now infamous Shock and Awe campaign. Whatever was left of infrastructure, electric grids and water systems was further damaged or destroyed in this second assault on the country.

My own short list barely scratches the surface of infamous events and dates, but it gives you an idea. Still, despite decades of tragedies, miraculously but of necessity, life goes on. Al-Khashali rebuilt the Shabandar Cafe and reopened it for business in 2008. He told reporters, he didn’t want to “…dwell on the past.”

“Life is returning in Baghdad, but it is not the same life. It is changed beyond belief and beyond recognition…”

It’s difficult to imagine the strength needed to undertake rebuilding given the enormity of his losses that day. But time, as everyone knows doesn’t stop for these tragedies; it moves on. Evidence of death and destruction is cleaned up. Rubble is removed, people’s bodies are buried and put to rest. Buildings are rebuilt. Order is restored.

Life is returning in Baghdad, but it is not the same life. It is changed beyond belief and beyond recognition, not for young people, but for Iraqis who came of age before the 1991 war, who survive and continue to live and work in the country—by choice or by default. Education in Iraq was mandatory for both girls and boys, and free through university. Now, this country, once recognized for having one of the highest literacy rates in the world is facing significant illiteracy, especially for women and girls. A country that once had free health care and a top-notch system of hospitals and clinics, with excellent medical schools, is struggling with crumbling hospitals and outdated equipment, struggling to train doctors and nurses and to keep them working in a still- dysfunctional Iraqi medical system; struggling to meet the basic medical needs of its people. Suffering goes on and on and on, for the most-part out of sight and out of mind of the international community.

Think about Iraq and Iraqis on March 5, remember Al-Mutanabbi Street. Think again on March 20. Try to remember what has happened to Iraq and Iraqis, to Syria and Syrians—to the world—as a result of that invasion. Make a vow to work to put an end to war, an end to war-making technology and research, an end to the preparation, governmental consent and execution of war—demand an end to all wars around the globe.

(Article reprinted from www.CommonDreams.org)

Found: Another Guide to Burbank – North Hollywood – Glendale

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Fold-Out Guide Dated May 1999 Floats to Surface in My Archive of Dead Bookshops Paper Debris Pile

Paul Hunt

Original Published May 1999 by Paul Hunt

Original Published May 1999 by Paul Hunt

Reverse side

Reverse side

Where Are They Now?

Note:  If the store was listed in the previous article on the first Burbank – North Hollywood fold-out, the listings will be pretty much the same, although I might binge out a bit.  There are many changes and new shops listed on this fold-out from 1999.

1 Atlantis Book Shop  This was the old Bond Street Book Shop listed in the first flyer.  This store began the Conspiracy – UFO video rental saga and along with a great History selection, became known for extensive sections on Politics, Deep State, Conspiracy, CIA Plots, Assassinations, Secret Societies, Ancient Mysteries and such.  Redevelopment tore down the entire block, wiping out Atlantis Books just like the original Island of Atlantis of the Mediterranean, now largely known as Saudi Arabia, was destroyed.  Many celebrities hung out here, including the great Jordan Maxwell.  Filmmakers and television companies filmed here, surrounded by plans for Nazi UFO’s, photos of ETs, and stacks of books on various conspiracies.

2. Automotive Books   This is actually Automotive Book Stop.  (The Autobooks/Aerobooks shop near Hollywood Way did not want to participate in this flyer at the time, so was left out.)   Owned and operated by Fred and Chris Chapparo, they closed the shop and retired in 2016, although they may still be selling some rare items online.

3.  Bestseller Book Shop.   Store closed several years ago.  I started this store with a partner, it was all paperback books, and quite successful.  Massive rent spikes put it out.

4.  Book Castle/Movie World.  This was the Movie Store next to the Gigantic Book Castle.  The great Book Castle closed in 1994 when the rent went from $5M per month to an asking price of 30M per month, a number not possible to pay.  Shortly after, my partner Steve and I parted ways, and he operated the Movie World shop, which is still at the same location and packed with much more than just movie memorabilia.  A post on their facebook site in January said they may be closing this summer (not verified).

5.  Book City – Burbank  This store is long gone, although years after it closed a dollar book store opened for a short time.  This shop was run by Alan Siegel, who owned Hollywood Book City.  It was a huge shop, with a lot of good books although too many were behind locked cases, making it difficult to browse.   As I remember it opened around 1980, but then was closed for months after the ill-constructed back loft collapsed.  Luckily this happened in the middle of the night, because anyone underneath would have been crushed to jello.

Bookfellows

6. Bookfellows Bookshop  (Also known as Mystery and Imagination Bookshop)  This great Science Fiction and Mystery Fiction shop is owned by Malcolm and Christine Bell.  It began life in an embryo stage on Hollywood Blvd. in the 1970s when Malcolm Bell and Chuck Annegan opened a bookshop in an upstairs office at the Cowboy Young building.  Heritage Book Shop and Atlantis Book Shop both also started there.  Christine worked for the nearby Book Treasury on Hollywood Blvd., and later hooked up with Malcolm.  Their first shop was on East Broadway Blvd. near S. Verdugo, in Glendale, later moving to Brand Blvd. to be where the action was.  The shop closed last year (2016) due to impossibly high overhead.  They were noted for their great book signings and top condition of their stock.  They are now mail order only, you can find them on ebay and internet book sites.

Brand Bookshop

7.  Brand Bookshop  One of the great large used book stores in the Los Angeles area, at its peak was about 7,200 sq. ft. of nicely shelved good stock.  The store was opened and run by Jerome Joseph, a long-time area bookman, and one of the friendliest guys on earth.  Unfortunately,  Jerome took ill a few years age, and his friend and partner Noriyake ran the store until Jerome’s passing.  The shop closed around  2015, leaving a void of a large general book store in the Glendale area.

8.  CM Bookshop in Silverlake  This was a small, but nice book shop that opened next to The Silverlake Coffee House.  I’m not sure of the owner’s name, I think it was Carl,  but he was a nice chap who started as a book scout. With a partner, he opened a shop in Old Town Pasadena called Book Alley, which was later sold and is now on East Colorado with a different owner, Tom Rogers.  This shop is long gone, too bad, it was so pleasant to buy a book and then go next door to the coffee house and have some java.  On hot summer days the air conditioning in the coffee house beckoned, but when the weather permitted the outside patio was even a better place to read a book and watch the endless parade of pretty girls going into the coffee house for their blended Iced Mocha Whipped Cream Strawberry Thinga Majings

9.  Dark Delicacies  This shop specializes in Horror and Fantasy Fiction, and is a mecca known around the country.  It moved to its present location at 3512 W. Magnolia where it is going strong.  Their current location is a couple doors from what used to be Magnolia Park Bookshop.  Great displays in the front windows is a tradition, and they keep a full schedule of author signings, including stars of horror and science fiction films.

Dutton's

10.  Dutton’s Books – Burbank   Store Closed years ago, see post about it and the Dutton Book Empire elsewhere on this blog. (check the list of articles and stories).  This was the perfect neighborhood book shop, run by an intelligent staff.  They carried both new and second hand books, with lots of perennial classics.

11.  Dutton’s Books – North Hollywood  This was Dave Dutton’s flagship store.  When business took a dive in the 2008 crash he retired.  The premises was a Yoga Studio for a while, I don’t know who is in there now.  It was a great shop, and I spent many hours browsing there.  It was a large store, with an interesting mix of new and second-hand.  Books were piled everywhere.  Dave could usually be found in the parking lot area behind the shop, sorting through the never-ending avalanche that poured in.  Dave and his shop missed by everyone with an ounce of culture.

12.  Howard Lowery Gallery  Specialty here was animation art of all kinds, especially Disney art, movie memorabilia, and comic art.  Howard was a very experienced dealer in these fields, having run the monthly auctions at Collector’s Bookshop on Hollywood Blvd. for years.  He ran his own auctions, usually held at the Burbank Hilton, and made a name for himself as the go-to expert in the field of animation art.  The shop is sadly long gone and I believe Howard is retired.

IMG_5427

13. Iliad Bookshop   Owned by Dan Weinstien, he was forced to re-locate when the rent spike hit.  This shop on Vineland was famous for its great Mural that covered all three storefronts.  Dan found another spot and managed to scrape enough together to buy his building, and is now at 5400 Cahuenga Blvd., in North Hollywood.  He has a great new Mural that runs on two sides of the building, as we have written about and photographed on this site.  Treat yourself to a visit to this wonderful store, packed with good books and with really great prices.  This is the last big book shop to survive in the area, so please support it.  One of his cats is pictured on our banner.

14.  Last Grenadier – Burbank  This store had an excellent selection of Military History, books on Uniforms, Regimental Histories, related magazines, and also board games and armies of little lead soldiers, many colorfully painted by their staff.  Just before the wrecking ball took out the block they moved up north a few blocks on the same street, but the high rents eventually forced another move, this time over to the west side of Burbank on Hollywood Way, just south of Magnolia. They were there for a few years but closed when the rents went up.  The owner, Rocky, at one time had 5 game stores and with partners ran the Los Angeles area game and military conventions, always a lot of fun to  attend.

An old shot of Magnolia Park - Probably in the 1950s

An old shot of Magnolia Park – Probably in the 1950s

15. Magnolia Park Book Shop.  This shop started over 70 years ago by two guys who were remainder book salesmen.  Eventually it sold to a gentleman who bought the property.  He had a manager running the shop, but the manager  died in a tragic car crash. Also killed in the crash was his son, the product of a concurrent marriage with another woman, wife #2.  A bitter shock to wife #1.  His widow ran the shop for years. She sat by the front door, a thin, wizend old gal, smoking a cigarette and usually talking to anyone who would listen.  Her opinions about her present and former customers were classic and caustic.  I got the impression there weren’t many folks that she liked, except her friend the landlady, who was in her 90s and renting the store to her for the bargain price of $300 per month.  I leased the shop in 1993 when she retired to an old folks home, paying over 5 times the rent the previous tenant paid.  Four months later the place was almost entirely destroyed by the January 17, 1994 earthquake.  The front windows blew out, the ceiling collapsed, the shelving came down and the water lines snapped, flooding the shop and ruining thousands of books. It took us months to recover, but eventually it opened and was very successful.  The shop ran for about 10 years under the capable management of Gaye Hunnicutt.  It eventually was closed due to the building being sold to a rich landlord who wanted the location for his daughter’s mattress shop. That lasted a year, now it is a high end spa. From Books to Bedding and Beyond, to slur a current ad slogan.  But hey, in this society what’s more important?  Fancy Nails for sure.  Definitely the new standard for culture. Daaahling, with those long nails you couldn’t even turn the page of a book without tearing it.

16.  Reader’s Edge  This shop was actually in Montrose, a City that used to be part of the north end of Glendale.  It was located on a charming tree-lined street and served the local community with a selection of used paperbacks and hardcovers.  The old couple who ran it were very nice folks, I think the store closed many years ago because of their failing health and old age.

17.  Twice Told Tales  A tiny shop about a block from Magnolia Park Books on the North side of the street, run by a character who could have been out of a Jack London novel: Ty Stanley (not his real name as I found out later).  He was a Chicago guy, and palled around with Jay Robert Nash, the famous writer of true crime and mafia books, including the massive Encyclopedia of True Crime.  He looked like he was Klaus Kinski’s twin brother, just frightening enough to ward off trouble at crucial moments.  He was always scouting for books and paintings and he was a frequent “guest” at the old Bond Street store, bringing in boxes of material to flog on us. He was one of the most dedicated book scouts I ever met, and I learned a lot of advanced techniques from him.  When relaxing he always had some wild stories to tell about his Chicago days.  I got the impression that it was a good idea for him not to go back there.  One tragic incident that occurred toward the end of his career was that he was hit on the head from behind with a crow bar and robbed of a large amount of cash that he always carried.  This happened at a liquor store in the seedy area of NOHO.  The attacker stole his van, with him in it, parked it and left him pretty much for dead. He seemed to recover from that horrible incident, but he was drinking a lot of beer, which led to a drunk driving arrest.  He called my book shop from jail and wanted us to post bond for him, which we agreed to do.  Against our advice he sent one of his young friends up to the store to pick up the $1500 bail money.  The guy he sent was another book scout, generally a good guy, related to a famous book family in Los Angeles, but at the time sucking  fumes out of a crack pipe.  He picked up the cash for Ty’s bail and then disappeared, not seen again for months.  This happened on a Friday, meaning that since the bail was not paid  Mr. Stanley was still in the can on Monday, calling us as soon as he could Que up for a pay phone.  He wondered if we had had a change of heart, but blew his stack when we said we had given the dough to his pal, who had probably gone on a two-month crack binge.  My partner Steve then went downtown to L.A. County Jail and posted bond for him, another $1500, springing him Monday night.  Ty paid us back immediately.  He then went looking for his pal, but luckily (for both of them) he couldn’t find him, or there might have been some Chicago style justice.  Sometime in the 1990s he had a heart attack and died.  His son – whom Ty had never mentioned, cleaned out the shop.  Thus ended the fascinating tales that emanated from that little hole in the wall.  Too bad Jay Robert Nash didn’t write Ty Stanley’s biography, it would have been a doozy.

18.  Weinstein Fine Books  A nice shop in central Glendale run by a veteran bookman and a member of the Weinstein family, Sam Weinstein.  In his career he started, bought and sold several bookshops, I remember I first met him in Vista, CA. where he was running a shop.  This store is long gone, and Sam passed in 2017.  His son Dan owns and operates the great Iliad Book Store in NOHO.

PH and Jack Papuchuyan

PH and Jack Papuchuyan, H & H Book Services – Rare Book Binders

19.  H & H Book Services.  This shop is an old fashioned book bindery, run by two brothers, John and Jack Papuchyan, both superb artists and craftsmen.  They opened their first bindery in Burbank in the rear area of a store behind the old Bond Street Books.  Later they landed jobs at Heritage Books in West Hollywood.  They moved to this location many years ago, and if you need a rare book restored, this is where you go.  The shop is still open at this writing.

Once again, I hope you have enjoyed looking back at the golden age of book shops in the Burbank, NOHO, and Glendale area.  Out of the 19 shops listed only 4 survive, and two of those are at different locations.  Please send your comments, memories, corrections, or whines to us.